Connected Farming: IoT brings visibility to Dinamica Generale and its customers

In 1990, Andrea Ghiraldi had the idea of using sensors and electronic solutions to innovate farming.

33 years on and Dinamica Generale is now a global leader in precision agriculture and biomedical applications, offering a wide portfolio including sensors in animal feeding and agricultural applications and livestock weighing systems.

Vodafone Business is now working with the company to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to connect these products.

We caught up with Andrea to find out more.

Tell us a bit about Dinamica Generale…

Sitting in Poggio Rusco, Italy, Dinamica Generale has achieved consistent growth over the years and is now among the key players worldwide in the field of electronic solutions and sensors for the feed & food, agricultural, industrial and medical industries.

Along with our corporate headquarters in Northern Italy, we have global companies in the U.S., Ukraine, China and Brazil.

What lead you to work with Vodafone?

At Dinamica Generale, we are passionate about keeping the customer at the heart of everything we do. Providing innovative market-oriented solutions and sensors, we wanted to accelerate the ambitions of our customers, people and partners and bring an ethical approach to farming.

Working with Vodafone Business, we’re able to help our agricultural customers detect, analyse and make decisions on everything from animal nutrition and the use of machinery to crop yield measurement, delivering greater efficiency and therefore more sustainable business practices.

How does the solution work?

Using Vodafone’s fast and reliable IoT connectivity we’re able to connect our assets and devices across Europe and the Americas, bringing a wealth of data together in a single solution for customers in these markets.

In the agricultural industry, for example, farmers can track and trace products during harvest, baling, or any other stage of the process in real-time on one platform. Facilitating field operations, they can monitor harvesting and spreading machines, measure crops, analyse ingredients and optimise fertilisation to promote sustainable growth while cutting costs.

When it comes to the daily feeding process, farmers can also streamline the process. Based on insights from weight indicators and sensors placed in different machines such as feed mixers, farmers can control things like recipe preparation and distribution of the feeding rations via an app.

What does the future of farming look like?

During the past year, we have made lots of evolutions in terms of connectivity and products with Vodafone’s support. With this real-time solution, we’re minimising the gap of technology in farming applications and are able to offer direct support to our customers.

This will continue to be important as the agricultural industry faces two key challenges. Firstly, increasing demand for produce as the population grows and secondly, the need to produce without negatively impacting the environment.

As a digital farming solutions provider, we have a key role to play in giving these businesses the tools and visibility they need to be able to rise to these challenges by improving efficiency and minimising waste.