pcfruit - EVA

In 2021 we started working on developing EVA with pcfruit. In our close collaboration we found each other as partners in innovation. Pcfruit’s forward-thinking perspective on the agricultural sector and Kunlabora’s ongoing curiosity for new technological challenges were a perfect match.

Pcfruit is a testing facility in the fruit farming industry. They have a mission to help navigate fruit farmers through the many challenges by offering professional advice with demonstrations, courses, publications, warnings and data. The company has an in-house research team and 58 ha of testing gardens. In addition, they have started several collaborations with universities, big companies and other research institutions in the fruit industry.

Through the years, pcfruit has built rich datasets that are maintained daily. These are uploaded by them in the application and translated behind the scenes through build-in business rules and computations to functionalities to be used by the farmer. 

 This administration environment also allows pcfruit to invite users to EVA and access specific modules inside the application. The latter provides the flexibility to adjust the functionalities to the specific software needs of the company.

 From the farmer’s perspective, the heart of the application consists of administrative functionalities providing the opportunity to centralize the many activities of an agricultural undertaking by registering them for planning and follow-up purposes.

The use of fertilizer, crop protection and chemical weed control products is subject to complicated regulations that are needed to protect our environment and public health.

 As an advisory organization, pcfruit follows up on developments in these regulations daily and converts them into data used in the application. The complex datasets and legislative logic are transformed into a control screen with warnings, indicating if the company’s activities would differ from what is legally allowed.

 EVA doesn’t just give attention to public health; it also considers the health of valuable insects. For this impact meter, we worked with the scientific data collected and researched by pcfruit. A visual indicator shows the harmful effect of a product on useful insects. We hope this information motivates the farmer to replace toxic products with less detrimental but equally effective crop protection and chemical weed control.

Farmers can visualize the position and boundaries of their plots by drawing them as polygons on a map.

Among other things, we can use these coordinates in combination with the movements of a track & trace device that can automatically register the execution of treatment. Additionally, EVA can enrich this information with the connection to a weather station to detect rainfall within a given interval after spraying. The farmer may conclude that the treatment needs to be repeated based on this information.

 The geospatial data will be extended with soil scans, soil maps, drone and satellite images in later development. With this data, we lay the foundation for precision farming that can make treatment plans more detailed on a granular level of localized needs instead of a more traditional uniform treatment of large surfaces. Quite simply, this is a win-win situation, a cost-effective adaptation for the farmer that is better for the environment.

 In providing APIs that pcfruit can provide to exchange information between EVA and external parties, we explore new business values. A first API supports this exchange with VCBT. For example, a company can request a measurement to predict the ideal harvest timing in the application. VCBT sends their results back to EVA for the farmer to consult.