Annually, the agricultural industry is faced with recurring abiotic problems such as drought, salinity, and extreme temperature, leading to crop destruction and substantial revenue losses. Without proper and adequate technologies, these factors will continue to prevail and lead to even more significant challenges, affecting farm managers for years.

How can we improve crop yield?

Global warming has presented unprecedented challenges to the agricultural sector in South Africa, leading to significant demand for affordable, effective and sustainable solutions to prevent further crop destruction and potential revenue losses.  With effective Internet of things (IoT) solutions, farmers are given a notable advantage to combat these external challenges. IoT devices can gather essential data on soil moisture, dam and water trough levels, allowing them to make more efficient decisions, reduce waste, save costs, automate certain processes and increase profitability.

MiRO sprang into action and introduced Milesight IoT solutions to South Africa with this knowledge in mind.

Milesight manufactures the best-in-class Internet of things (IoT) products with a specialised focus on agriculture and intelligent building environments. It brings together the complexity of security, connectivity and communication and magically interweaves these components to deliver an integrated and formidable IoT solution.

The benefits of IoT in agriculture

With Milesight’s IoT solutions comprising sensors, controllers and Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) gateways, the agricultural sector can save costs, time, effort and maximise crop yield. 

The main benefits  of agricultural IoT include:

• Data collection: With intuitive sensors, data is collected and stored in a secure cloud environment. The user can simply access this data, analyse conditions and make informed decisions from any computer, cell phone or tablet. 

• Remote Monitoring and instant alerts: Remote monitoring of farm conditions and infrastructure saves time and labour on routine farm checks communicating the data to the farm manager in real-time.

• Automated irrigation systems: The user can trigger irrigation systems remotely from almost anywhere. The sensors can automatically activate irrigation systems when soil conditions indicate water requirement in the user's      absence. 

• Security: Milesight’s contact sensors alert users to objects' open/close status (such as doors and windows) and communicate live alerts to the user via the mobile app.

• Risk assessment: With the collected data, users can analyse the information and plan for future harvests.

• Field productivity: Milesight’s products increase the efficiency of producing our crops to ensure less wastage, expediency to market, and enhanced uniformity in best practise across the process.

Milesight products use a long-range wireless technology called LoRaWAN. With this low power consumption technology, sensors can last up to 5 years on the same battery and transmit distances up to 10km. Combining the Milesight sensors with its IoT cloud solution gives users the ability to manage all sensors remotely and receive alerts and updates via the intelligent mobile app.

MiRO distributes a comprehensive range of sensors and controllers from Milesight, designed for any agricultural environment. 

MiRO offers pre-configuration, training, pre-sales and after-sales services to ensure that all customers feel confident to begin their IoT journey. Contact their sales team at sales@miro.co.za or visit their website at www.miro.co.za for more information.