Quectel recognised for IoT Innovation

  • January 25, 2023
  • William Payne

Brazilian smart agriculture platform FarmGO, which employs Quectel antennas, GNSS and cellular modules, has been selected as winner of the “Smart Agriculture Solution of the Year” award in the 7th annual IoT Breakthrough Awards programme conducted by IoT Breakthrough, a market intelligence organisation focused on the global IoT market.

FarmGO is a smart agriculture platform of agricultural weather stations which helps farmers in Brazil optimise their activities. Developed with agronomists, researchers and rural producers, FarmGO acts as a decision-making support tool drawing on data from monitoring a wide range of agricultural sensors and indicators. The FarmGO platform currently is used to monitor two million hectares with 82,000 areas managed.

The FarmGO solution features several Quectel solutions for implementation, including the Quectel L76-L and EC21 modules as well as the Quectel YEMN001AA antenna. With FarmGO, climate monitoring enables weather history, individualised by field, to be correlated with weather alerts and a manual rainfall recording option. The position accuracy the system delivers provides highly granular data on the most fertile areas for farmers to cultivate. The solution brings together multiple data points to ensure optimised crop yield and it combines GPS with cellular connectivity options at low-cost – enabling large numbers of weather stations to be deployed.

FarmGO’s weather stations are intelligent, fully autonomous and designed to operate in rural areas, offering producers greater precision and efficiency for irrigation and climatic conditions on their properties. The system enables analysis of historical behaviour of specific areas to be added so automatic identification of productive spots can be undertaken.

“The agriculture industry has always looked to technology to aid efficiency, improve yields and ensure it can feed the world. Crop health monitoring, pest and disease monitoring, identification of anomalies, field inspection records, importation of planting and harvesting maps and importation of soil fertility data are all data points IoT can help with,“ said James Johnson, managing director of IoT Breakthrough. “Deployments of the scale and scope of FarmGO are transforming attitudes to IoT as farmers reap the benefits in their day-to-day operations and at harvest time. FarmGO provides a clear, measurable example of how IoT has broken through into the mainstream of agribusiness and is driving positive outcomes across the industry. Congratulations to Quectel and their technology with FarmGo for being our choice for ‘Smart Agriculture Solution of the Year!’”

The mission of the IoT Breakthrough Awards programme is to recognise the innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the globe in a range of IoT categories, including industrial and enterprise IoT, smart city technology, connected home and home automation, and connected car. This year’s programme received more than 4,000 nominations from companies all over the world.

“It’s an honour to receive this award from IoT Breakthrough. Trusting future crops to technology demands that farmers have high confidence in the systems they deploy. FarmGO has worked hard to ensure its offering is resilient and reliable so users can be assured of timely, accurate insights to drive their decision making,” said Norbert Muhrer, President and CSO, Quectel Wireless Solutions. “We’re thrilled that our technology was chosen for this leading-edge solution. With more farmers deploying systems, farmers are seeing improved yields, less wastage and more efficient utilisation of time and resources. That means finding more sustainable ways of feeding the world.”