Agricover - Crop360
Agricover is a high-performing group of companies in European agribusiness, a generator of innovative solutions that transform farmers' businesses and lives in the long term, as well as a driver of change, and creator of progress and prosperity at a social scale. During its more than 20 years of existence, Agricover has developed an innovative and high-performing business model.
Through its visionary approach to agribusiness, Agricover determines the evolution of the entire field and generates social prosperity at the level of the Romanian farming community. Agricover develops modern digital ecosystems that boost the progress of Romanian agriculture, by adopting the latest digital technologies available worldwide.
The challenge
Agriculture is constantly evolving and technological changes in recent decades have radically transformed the industry and pushed farmers to adopt modern solutions that give them the support they need to perform.
The main need of the modern farmer is to have access to accurate, relevant, and predictable information, followed by the convenience of a common space for administrative and financial solutions and, last but not least, an intuitive experience that minimizes the effort of adaptation.
Solution offered
The CROP360 application is a complex project implemented by our technology team using advanced digital solutions designed together with the most important developers worldwide, such as Microsoft, ESRI, and the All-in-One Dynamicweb platform.
The application aims at making it easier for farmers to purchase subscriptions or products that are closely related to the services offered by the CROP360 portal. It is connected to both the CROP360 portal and the Agricover ERP solution to which it sends details about products or subscriptions purchased by farmers.
Crop360 is built to give farmers quick access to services and information specific to day-to-day farm activities so they can make real-time decisions. For example, the My Farm Module allows farmers to remotely monitor crop developments by processing satellite imagery and determining a set of vegetation indices. The platform also has weather alerts, disease and pest alerts, and information on access to the field. For the construction of the platform, we chose Microsoft as a technological partner, combining their technological expertise with that of our group’s agriculture, the result is a product we are proud of “, said Liviu Dobre, General Manager of Agricover Holding.
By accessing the Crop360 platform, the farmer can use many digital tools to optimally manage his farm activities. Once it has imported the plots from APIA (Payments And Intervention Agency For Agriculture), it can monitor the growth and health of the crop directly from the platform using satellite imagery. He can thus plan his work in the field and assign tasks to the employees of the farm, he is alerted when there is a probability of the appearance of diseases in the crop or when there is a risk of extreme weather.
Farmer authentication is Single-Sign-On and is based on integration with a Microsoft Azure ActiveDirectory. In this way, switching farmers between the portal and the eCommerce application does not require reintroducing authentication credentials.
Inside the application, farmers can choose, before the purchase, the legal entity they will use for the purchase. These legal entities are automatically taken from the CROP360 portal. For payment, you can choose either to pay by bank transfer or payment by bank card or Agricover card.
Results
Only 6 months after the launch of the platform, over 1000 farmers use the Crop360 solution. This represents the fastest rate of adoption of digital technology in Romanian farms. The area exploited by user farmers exceeds 250,000 hectares.