A new partner joins Smartcherry, specifically in the irrigation and precision agriculture categories; this is Kilimo, an irrigation management and monitoring platform to achieve better yield and quality results using fewer resources. This platform is simple, does not require installation or maintenance and allows crops to be monitored from anywhere and at any time.
“Kilimo is a platform that monitors and manages irrigation in agriculture, optimizing up to 30 percent of irrigation in the field, with presence in Chile since 2018; We monitor irrigation through customized water balance models, we deliver adjusted Kc curves, we calculate real evapotranspirations and we generate recommendations so that the farmer can decide with information when and how much to irrigate." explained Roberto Labra, Key Account Manager Latam at Kilimo.
Kilimo offers solutions that adapt to the problems of each company; using meteorological, satellite and field information, it calculates the amount of water consumed by a crop per day, which allows for an adjusted and updated water balance for each irrigation sector.
“Our comparative advantages are supporting the producer by making better irrigation decisions through agronomic equipment, providing an overview of the field on our platform and with real-time data. The relevance of irrigation today in the crop consists of the contribution to supply water demands, supporting the growth of the fruit and obtaining very good quality productions, where the contribution of these technologies is to be able to use this water resource in a more adjusted way than what happens in the fields,” explained the Key Account Manager Latam at Kilimo.
The mega-drought affecting Chile and the world makes this type of tool even more necessary for agriculture. In the case of Kilimo, the platform uses meteorological data from weather stations, determines the potential evapotranspiration (ETo) of each sector to be irrigated, information that is cross-referenced with images of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from the 5 satellites it works with. This allows establishing a specific crop coefficient (Kc) for each irrigation sector, determining the actual evapotranspiration (ETc) of said sectors, which combined with soil characteristics, generate precise recommendations on when and how much to irrigate.
“In cherries and crops in general, we seek to make better decisions in critical times. Using contributions from NDVI images, real Kc, with balances under adverse soil conditions, we can generate irrigation strategies with producers according to phenology,” added Roberto Labra on the use of the platform in the specific cultivation of cherries. He also invited people to learn about Kilimo through the various instances that the company generates: “By visiting us through our website (www.kilimoagtech.com), participating in the Irrigation Academy, trying out our demo or interacting with our sales team that is present in Chile or Latin America.”
In summary, the Kilimo platform allows you to: View the water status of crops from anywhere and at any time; make the best irrigation decisions safely and tailored to each of the irrigation sectors; achieve greater efficiency in the use of resources, optimizing the use of water and energy; report and achieve sustainability goals; this information and more is already available on the Kilimo minisite at Smartcherry.cl.
“It is important for Kilimo to be in Smartcherry since it is one of the platforms that provides producers with quality information, seeking to support and deliver knowledge to the world of cherries,” concluded Roberto Labra, Key Account Manager Latam at Kilimo, regarding the company's entry as a partner to our platform.
