Chinese precision agriculture solutions provider XAG is working farmers in Brazil to spearhead the adoption of drone and related robotic technology in the industry. In the below article, the company followed the exploits of one farmer who is using the XAG’s agricultural drones to improve farm yields.

As the breadbasket of the world, Brazil is the major global supplier of soybeans, corn, cotton, and sugar. Over 28 percent of its land area was used for agriculture, accounting for nine percent of the total domestic employment.

However, the increasing costs of crop protection pose a challenge to farmers who struggle to reap profits from their land.

In a densely planted orchard of Brazil, an XAG agricultural drone was flying and spraying on top of the citrus trees. Regina Hakvoort was the team lead of this operation and sending a drone to control pest was her most familiar routine.

This time, her mission was to cut down the cost by halving chemical use and stop the pest from recurring.

Brought up in a farmer’s family, Regina is the founder of an agricultural service company Anáhata, which includes XAG’s agricultural drone as the innovative solution on crop protection.

After graduating from the University of Sao Paulo, she started her career as an agronomist and helped run her family farm. According to Regina, chances of successfully managing the scourge of pests on farms are closely associated with the financial position of the farm owners.

Aside from that, when expanding the plantation scale to reap more harvest, they must also pay a high price for spraying pesticides and hiring manual labour.

Since the national ban on toxic pesticides, Brazilian farmers turn to use eco-friendly pesticides to spray crops, but the outcome falls short of expectation.

“Many farmers still use the traditional way of blanket spray by tractors, and they have increased the use of pesticides to ensure that pests could be eliminated,” Regina said. “For example, the corn fields were sprayed eighteen times while that frequency can surprisingly reach 30 times for cotton.”

Moreover, no matter how much has been invested, a single bout of heavy rains during the harvest season could easily foul the crops, turning the families’ year-long effort to ruin. Farmers are more exposed to the high risk of investing in agriculture, but with less earnings.

During college, Regina had learned about the “low volume spraying” and “ultra-low volume spraying” technology, which allows chemicals to be sprayed in high concentration and achieve better application rate. It means that chemical dosage can be significantly reduced.

It surprised her to learn that this technology has been around for over 50 years, yet few farmers knew about it.

“If I just lectured and taught people about low volume spraying without proving it to them, it was like to run with only one leg. Therefore, I actually show them by practising this approach with XAG’s drone to address overdose and help more farmers get rid of the cost burden.”

Whereas in the past, low-volume spraying was achieved primarily through large, expensive fixed-wing plant protection aircraft, the introduction of XAG’s agricultural drone has offered farmers a reasonable hire price, and its operation is fully automated.

This persuaded Regina to invest in drones and collaborate with XAG’s local partner Megadrone Brazil.

The drones offered Regina diverse options as she dealt with the cotton weevil, a destructive pest that has wreaked havoc on crops in Brazil. Farmers would spray more than 30 litres of pesticide for every hectare, but still had difficulty controlling the spread of cotton boll weevils.

However, with drone spraying, the cotton weevil can now be controlled with only one litre for the same size of land, significantly reducing the costs for farmers and also guaranteeing high yields. Due to its precision spraying technology, the XAG drone can navigate and adjust the fine droplet size to precisely cover each plant.

Regina has also helped a vineyard farm treat fungal disease with 40 percent less chemicals. The XAG agricultural drone was used to target on the infected spots and spray at centimetre-level accuracy.

“In the old-fashioned way, farmers of this vineyard sprayed with tractor five times a week, but the mildew just kept recurring. After scouting the fields, I found out that the disease only occurred on young grape leaves, which happened to be the areas that were missed during boom spray.”