Ag Tech To Modernize the Conventions of Tea Plantations.
The agriculture industry of Sri Lanka, has being the chief economic sustainer support to the nation, encapsulating the tea industry as it’s mainstay of foreign exchange and the nation’s prime employer, for more than a century. Despite the fact that the industry does encompass a great deal of competitors in the global market, the Sri Lanka tea and it’s industry has always maintained and has marked it’s unique terrains in the global market demands. However, this corner stone tea industry of the nation, has been statistically proved that it’s nation wide contribution in the recent past years, had gradually undergone diminution and a decrement could be encountered.
Scrutinizing the barriers responsible for the downfall of the industry, is where the introduction of the host of issue and challenges faced by the industry comes into the scene. The predominant causes for this tangled situation is the reduction in the productivity of the industry and above all is the lack of labor force that hindrances the industry’s competitiveness in the global market.
With subsequent threats examination, the SenzAgro solutions, took its agri tech approach to revolutionize the traditions and inertia of conventional tea industrial methodologies, in a conference with more than fifteen tea plantation executives gathered under one roof, where the opportunity was harnessed to demonstrate the transformational impact of climate smart agriculture in the betterment of the future of tea industry in it’s continuity of serving the nation as a backbone to the economy, through sustainability achievements.
As inhabitants in this digitized world, where ubiquitous technology is surpassing in popularity each and every day, SenzAgro believes that it’s high time to let technology take agriculture by it’s hand into the 21st century to reach victor in regards to sustainability. Taking into consideration of a 360 degree view of the complete tea industry of it’s traditions and inertia in the conventional mechanisms, SenzAgro Solutions, the pioneers of the advanced agriculture and precision technology, proposed myriads of solution in accordance to rule out the predicaments of the tea industry and to revive and incentifying it’s competitiveness in the world market.
The solutions comprises the following:
Real — Time Monitoring of Tea estates Environment
The SenzAgro solutions real time data driven approach of the proactive digiplant sensor technology (that mimics itself as plant in the field) collecting the real time data parameters such as:
Air Temperature
Humidity
Atmospheric Pressure
Rain fall
The monitorization of these factors that serve as a cruciality to the quality of the tea, bring forth the advancements and advantages of the agri tech to generate alerts in times of criticality circumstances, whilst encouraging the prospects of field scouting.
Real — Time Machine Harvest Monitoring
This solution delivers as an alternative to counter labor shortage meanwhile building up the the efficiency of the process when compared to the manual mechanism, amidst augmenting the productivity in the tea industry. The tech based process encloses the harnessment of the GPS paired along on the harvesting machines that bestows the following advancements:
- The précised estimation of the area enclosed in the harvest.
- Exact durations that the harvesting process had occurred.
- The estimation of amount of tea leaves harvested with the geographic and the span.
This process facilitates to an amassed track of records accompanied with schedule based reports generations to foster the prospects of the harvesting judgements to the nourishment of the tea industry.
Traceability in weighing Tea leaves up to Tea factory
The compensation of the tea pluckers have been completely depended on the weight of the tea plucked, taken over by the manual mechanism in weighing scrutiny. This ultimate downside of this conventional methodology is that, the proneness of the data entry manipulation, hence the wage distribution to the pluckers can be inequitable, comparably the lack of preciseness of the exact quantity of the teas been plucked, can hinder the small holders in calculating the yield produced, and the worse case criterion is the tendency of the third party to exploit the tea quantity through stealing in durations of transportation establishing disparity in the tea quantity.
The tech based measure to conquer this problematic situation, bestows the introduction of traceable weighing machines, where each pluckers cart will be incorporated with QR/NFC code stickers, this code is scanned on a handheld device each time a bag is grasped by the pluckers, once the pluckers returns from the estate, the code is scanned one more time as a process of plucker’s identification and thus takes place the weighing process, where, the bluetooth integrated weighing machine encapsulates the tendency to stream the real and live data of the plucked tea weigh to the cloud and thus this data in transmitted to the handheld device under the relevant plucker’s name. With reference to the previous context, these traceable weighing mechanism delivers a sophistical determination of solutions, to all the problems discussed above, through accuracy and precision technology.
Bird view intelligence in Tea estates
This system inaugurates the three fold mechanism that comprises, drones technology, cloud and user interface applications. The trio technology is utilized to provide real-time insights and acknowledgements of the estate in precised time spans.
Bush counts
Plucked and unplucked areas
Crop healthiness through pest monitorization.
With the acknowledgements and awareness, of what technology can bestows to tea industry are listed below:
Increased productivity
Low cost consumption in the production activities
Reduced energy consumptions
Combating the negative prospects of labor force shortages.
and many more!
It’s now time to uplift and encourage the harnessment of technology into the tea industry to maintain the uniqueness and to remain competitive in the international market while meeting the demand supply chain, of the nation’s forex.
