African Blue is one of the largest producers of blueberries in Morocco. Its majority owner is Costa Group, Australian grower and marketer of fresh fruits and vegetables. African Blue is a supplier of premium blueberries for European markets, with farms in the Moulay Bousselham, Larache and Agadir regions of Morocco. Nine farms are spread across the country with 350 hectares in the north, and around 120 hectares in the south, including third party farms. The fruits are grown in poly tunnel houses, both in soil and substrate, and are equipped with basic climate control measures for heating and venting.
Aziz Elkahlaoui is African Blue’s Horticultural Manager and has worked at the company since 2007. One of his major challenges was the accessibility of climate and plant health data across all nine farms to inform farm management decisions. In October 2022, African Blue turned to WayBeyond’s FarmRoad digital agronomy solution as the single platform to continuously monitor and visualise their farms' climate and plant health data. Now, Aziz can make timely decisions without having to travel to every farm.
The Problem: Managing a large, distributed blueberry farm
With a high number of farm sites over such a large area, African Blue’s main issue was the lack of visibility of farm climates as a whole. Key information was captured or retrieved manually, siloed and not easily available in a timely fashion. Farms had an existing approach which wasn’t very easy to use and didn’t scale well.
“We needed a crop monitoring and management solution that could bring all the data types from our farms together in one place to be visualised in real time. With this, we could get a better understanding of what was going on, and it would provide me with insights into crop development across all our farms without needing to be at the farms
themselves,” says African Blue’s Horticultural Manager, Aziz Elkahlaoui.
Another need was accurate and remote measurement of climate to anticipate risk of frost and disease.
“In winter time in Morocco there is the risk of frost. Previously, if the weather forecast indicated a potential frost, members of my team would have to travel to the farms and manually check the temperature with thermometers, then decide on a course of action. They knew that if the temperature was 5°C at a certain point in the day, a frost
was imminent. But they couldn’t find out if it was actually 5°C until they travelled out to the farm and accessed the data logger.“
There are large distances between some of African Blue’s farms – sometimes as much as 45 minutes drive on poor roads – so this practice was both time and labour intensive.
To combat frost, African Blue use heaters but with this comes increased risk of disease from the high humidity generated, so knowing when to ventilate was also vital to mitigate this risk.
“One of our challenges is that in the north, one of our farms is so large that some compartments are at different altitudes and one part is very close to the ocean and the other is not. The tunnels at this farm have such variation in climate that we were inspecting every single tunnel to understand the individual microclimates.”
The Solution: Partnering with a digital agronomy industry leader
WayBeyond’s FarmRoad digital agronomy solution was deployed at African Blue sites. It comprises of sensors, a mobile data capture app and a data visualization and analytics platform. The sensor network automatically captures temperature, humidity, PAR, RAD, barometric pressure and CO2 levels. African Blue’s staff use the mobile app to digitally collect crop measurements and scouting observations. Data from the sensors and the app is fed into the visualization and analytics platform to enable continuous measurement of climate and plant health data.
WayBeyond’s commitment to deep partnering and customer success meant the rollout of an ongoing schedule of continued interactions with African Blue. The WayBeyond team conducted regular Zoom calls with the African Blue team to assist them with onboarding, best practice and getting the most value from the solution.
Additionally, WayBeyond sent a team of four to Morocco to train staff in person. This team provided both classroom-based data reading tutorials and practical on-site guidance, as well as technical and product expertise.
The Outcomes: Improving farm operational efficiency
“Now we have WayBeyond’s FarmRoad digital agronomy solution we are able to continuously monitor our farms and visualize this data. We started using FarmRoad in October 2022 to focus on the climate data, mainly temperature and humidity. It was useful for us to see these measurements from our farms.”
“With the alert features, we can more successfully manage our response to potential frosts and disease-risk. For me, and also for other senior managers it's a help to have to have an alert on my phone so I can check with the farm manager that they are making the right decisions for the situation.”
In the future African Blue hopes to reduce the need for pre-emptive chemical spraying as they have a better understanding of humidity and the related disease risk.
“Today I can see an overview of the farms for myself, instead of making multiple phone calls to multiple farm managers to ask for updates. I’m getting faster, more accurate information and that is saving me time. From the dashboard I can see what time they start heating because when they do the temperature curves goes up.”
As the monitoring is remote, far fewer physical journeys need to be made by farm managers. The sensor network is wireless and well-designed to use at scale on farms where internet connectivity isn’t always 100%.
“We decided to roll this out when we saw the sensor network data showing the differences in climate from farm to farm. Now we have been using FarmRoad for a while and have seen the benefits, we are now progressively deploying FarmRoad to all our farms.”
www.waybeyond.io/african-blue-case-study
For more information:
Phil Roberts
Way Beyond
Tel: +64 21 070 5338
[email protected]
www.waybeyond.io