Interview with Jorge Blanco, R&D Director of Greenfield Technologies
What does your company do?
Greenfield Technologies is an Extremaduran company in full expansion created in 2014 and specialised in agricultural advisory services based on precision agriculture through the application of new technologies, such as high-resolution satellites, drones and sensors in the field.
This basis allows farms to be more competitive and sustainable, offering a new perspective on decision-making in the field, zoning soil and crops according to homogeneous soil and crop properties and applying different management to those areas that are agronomically different.
We do not just give information on the current situation of what is seen in the field, but we report on problems that have not yet been detected, as well as possible situations that will occur in the future using predictive modelling, analysing crops with satellite images, drones, soil sensors, active ground and remote sensors, physical samples, advice and recommendations.
To achieve our objective, we carry out geostatistical treatments and apply artificial intelligence to the data obtained in the field and interpret them to offer practical and simple recommendations adapted to each crop.
Technology is not an end, it is the means that allows us to have a better understanding of what is happening in the fields and how to act, make decisions and make crops more profitable. That is why our slogan is: “Farmers using technology”.
What is your role in the Life Innocereal project? Why?
Greenfield will bring the vision of agriculture 4.0 to cereal crop management, thanks to its ability to apply technology to production processes and to the management of other agricultural crops. With this objective, he will contribute to creating a certification model that connects all the links in the value chain from crop management through the use of new technologies that increase the added value of production, encouraging the use of environmentally sustainable practices and adapted to the guidelines and strategies against climate change, both at European and global level, as set out in the Green Pact and its strategy “From Farm to Fork” and the 2030 Agenda with the Sustainable Development Goals.
As a partner, what are your objectives within the project?
Greenfield Technologies has the main role of coordinating, developing and implementing an alert system based on the identification of anomalies in the behaviour of the project’s target crops, based on the comparison of vegetative development against a theoretical and ideal behaviour pattern throughout the growing season.
The aim of the warning system is the early identification of deviations in crop behaviour and to increase the capacity for faster, more concise and efficient decision making by the farmer, allowing for savings in inputs, energy and time, but at the same time increasing grain production and quality.
On the other hand, Greenfield will collaborate in the execution of the rest of the tasks of the project, among which are the creation of a Good Agricultural Practices manual or the development and testing of a prototype herbicide treatment bar capable of applying a variable distribution of phytosanitary products using NIR technology.
In addition, to fill the gap between technology and the farmer, together with the rest of the project partners, it will provide training to farmers through technical conferences and training courses and meetings to promote policies to support this form of agricultural crop management.
What methods/tools will you make available to Life Innocereal?
To carry out the different tasks within the LIFE INNOCEREAL project, Greenfield Technologies will provide, apart from the company’s own human resources, different devices and its know-how on artificial intelligence, remote sensing and process automation applied to agriculture. To this end, it will have at its disposal its own precision agriculture resources, such as satellite images from the European Commission managed by the European Space Agency, state-of-the-art drones with multispectral cameras that allow a detailed study of the situation of the crop, apparent electrical conductivity sensors that allow a zoning study of agricultural soils, climatic APIs with a presence all over the planet and advanced computing devices.
Finally, why did you decide to join Life Innocereal?
Greenfield Technologies, from its mission as a company focused on the union of agronomic knowledge and innovative technology to facilitate decision-making in the agricultural sector, is aware of the need to promote research, development and innovation in the fields of agronomic knowledge and applicable technology.
Seeing the need for cereal producers to use and rely on technology to adapt to climate change, market needs and European agricultural guidelines, he was interested from the outset in the University of Cordoba’s proposal to take a step forward in the management systems and value chain of cereal cultivation.
Furthermore, with this project, Greenfield Technologies aims to learn and improve the application of technology to a crop that is going through difficult times so that farmers are able to improve the economic, social and environmental margins of the farms they manage.