Forum “2gether 4 Strong Digital Agriculture” - about the future of digital agriculture

This week it was held High Level Forum on Digital Agriculture “2gether 4 Strong Digital Agriculture”, which included participants from Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Germany and other countries.The first day of the forum was set aside for visits to the farms of innovative Bulgarian farmerswho successfully apply digital technologies in their work.

The first place I visited was the farm of “Elite 95"who raise 7,000 cattle in the largest cow farm on the Balkan PeninsulaEquipped with modern andbiogas installationthrough the processing of residual materials, which generates electricity. Farmers also cultivate 70,000 acres of land, for which they rely on precision machining technologiesand systems for efficient irrigated agriculture. The participants then visited the farm of“Dimitrovy 2002” near Ihtiman, where it is implemented the first land alignment project in Bulgaria near a potato field, in cooperation with the company NIK. After the implementation of the project, the risk of flooding the field during watering and rotting of potatoes is minimized. The guests of the forum had the opportunity to observe the sowing of potatoes on the leveled ground. The last visit of the day was to the farm of “Varietal seeds and plant protection”, located only 5 km from the center of Sofia. It consists of more than 20,000 acres with corn, wheat, sunflower, beans and oats, sown using navigation display Trimble TMX-2050, automatic control system Trimble Autopilotwith 2 cm accuracy.Farmers use and Vehicle Sync technology, through which machines exchange information about their location in real time and thus two machines can work in the same field at the same time.

During spraying, farmers rely on self-propelled sprayer BerthoudRAPTOR 4240 with EC Tronic control system, Norac UC4+ system and Trimble Field IQ technologyto control the height of the bars, automatic stop and start of the sections and the application of materials with a variable rate. The next two days of the forum were set aside for discussions and lectures on various topics related to digital agriculture, good practicesto refine the work and achieve greater efficiency in any substitute activity and others.

During the seminar part, the NIC team He told me more aboutlatest news in the GeoScan field satellite scanning programand combining it with the services of soil sampling and analysis AgroBalance.

The forum “2gether 4 Strong Digital Agriculture” is a step forward in the implementation of digital technologies in agriculture, in the name of its modernization and development.