FarmGO, utilizing Quectel antennas, GNSS and cellular modules, was selected as winner of the Smart Agriculture Solution of the Year award in the 7^th annual IoT Breakthrough Awards program

IoT modules and antennas from Quectel Wireless Solutions were selected to support the FarmGO smart agriculture platform which helps farmers in Brazil optimize their activities. Developed with agronomists, researchers and rural producers, FarmGO acts as a decision-making support tool drawing on data from monitoring a wide range of agricultural sensors and indicators. The FarmGO platform currently is used to monitor two million hectares with 82,000 areas managed.

FarmGO includes crop health monitoring, pest and disease monitoring, identification of anomalies, field inspection records, importation of planting and harvesting maps and importation of soil fertility data – all on a single platform. In addition, analysis of historical behavior of specific areas can be added so automatic identification of productive spots can be undertaken. Climate monitoring enables weather history, individualized by field to be correlated with weather alerts and a manual rainfall recording option.

The smart agriculture company turned to Quectel to ensure GPRS, GNSS and Wi-Fi communications for its weather stations, utilizing the Quectel L76-L and EC21 modules as well as the Quectel YEMN001AA antenna. FarmGO was particularly keen to unify the number of communication antennas it deployed on its devices and, prior to selecting Quectel, the hardware operated with three antennas. Now, the weather stations operate using a single antenna.

Quectel’s modules for smart agriculture

The Quectel L76-L supports concurrent reception of GPS, GLONASS (or BeiDou), Galileo and QZSS. The integrated LNA provides high sensitivity, high position accuracy, fast tracking and acquisition of signals, and can keep better performance even in challenging environments such as agri weather station locations. Compared with single GPS systems, enabling multiple GNSS systems increases the number of visible satellites, reduces the time to first fix and improves positioning accuracy.

The Quectel EC21 Mini PCIe is part of a series of LTE Cat 1 modules in a standard PCI Express Mini Card form factor measuring 51.0mm × 30.0mm × 4.9mm, which meets the 3GPP Release 11 standard. The EC21 Mini PCIe provides cost-effective, low-power LTE connectivity, delivering maximum downlink rates of 10Mbps and uplink rates of 5Mbps under LTE, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology meets demands for data rate and link reliability. This makes the series ideal for IoT applications which are not reliant on high-speed connectivity but do require the longevity and reliability of LTE networks. It is also backwards-compatible with existing 3G networks, ensuring that it can be connected even in remote areas without 4G network coverage, ensuring reliability for smart agriculture applications.

FarmGO’s Saraccure agri weather stations are intelligent, fully autonomous and designed to operate in rural areas, offering producers greater precision and efficiency for irrigation and climatic conditions on their properties.