Gideon Albertyn, is one of many farmers in South Africa to benefit from smart farming, which he believes boosts his profits, despite the challenges he is met with
For Albertyn, this one of very few ways that he and others like himself in the country can achieve better yields as they do not have access to new and improved cereal cultivars.
"In this part of the country, we are farming with little rain and almost no top soil, and we must look more widely for ways to grow better crops," he said. "I think smart technology pays as we cannot change the other factors affecting our farming system."
Smart farming technologies are rolled out throughout this cropping pattern and in a number of cases have been used for as long as ten years.
"We started with auto guidance at the end of 2007 and yield mapping in 2008," says Albertyn. "Swathing operations were switched to auto guidance in 2011 and in the same in we started correcting nutrient imbalances in the soil according to grid soil analyses. We switched to the highter-accuracy RTK guidance in 2015, and this year have introduced variable-rate fertiliser application.
