The most intelligent way to monitor the silos of your farms.
Smart Agrifood
THE CHALLENGE
The animal feed is produced by the feed suppliers in the feed mills. Then it is distributed in bulk to different animal farms, where it is stored in silos. Each farmer requires a different composition of feed, which means that the feed supplier must prepare the feed ad-hoc for each specific farm and deliver it in a short period of 24-48 h. Considering that each feed supplier is the provider for several silos from several farms (the top 50 EU feed suppliers manage on average 7,500 silos each), there is no doubt that the manufacturing and delivering process of animal feed is a key activity to be optimized. However, this feed supply chain is currently very traditional and inefficient: farmers have to manually check their silos every week to assess the stocks and phone the feed supplier to restock. Consequently, feed suppliers receive daily hundreds of refilling calls. Usually, they have only 24-48h to produce the feed, organize the delivery routes and hand it, which hinders completely the optimization of the whole process.
THE SOLUTION
With INSYLO, feed suppliers have remote access to farms’ silos and automatically generate the refilling orders based on cost criteria. Our solution benefits both: feed suppliers save 500 € x silo x year in labour and transport costs, while farmers save 22 days of work x year avoiding the silo inspections. The global impact of our technology is enormous: 2.5 B € x year.
INSYLO has introduced a novel concept: the smart volumetric sensor. It consists of a 3D sensor with embedded computer vision algorithms that measures the volume of the silo’s content. Furthermore, it is powered by solar energy and is equipped with rural Internet connectivity, being fully independent on the farms’ resources. Price is 6.5 times more economic than alternatives and it can be installed in only 5 minutes.
WHY FIWARE
FIWARE architecture was been demonstrated as a powerful and reliable solution for the implementation of IoT based applications. INSYLO backend has been developed using the FIWARE platform. We will continue improving the platform to guarantee a scalable, reliable and secure service to be able to deal with more than 500K sensor points and a large number of international customers. FIWARE Stack has allowed us to deploy a nearly full IoT stack. FIWARE is correctly documented and FIWARE community is growing. Generic Enablers’ responsible team is easy to reach and to communicate with. NGSI adoption has help us a lot to standardise the context and organise the information of the productive environment with which we operate. Being open source, it has allowed us to develop our customisations on top of their proposals, and sometimes learn a lot. It also gives us the chance of selling our SaaS under the umbrella of the UE funded project FIWARE, and in a way, to extend to INSYLO, the reputation of FIWARE Foundation and growing adoption of its standards.
USE CASE
INSYLO has introduced a novel concept: the smart volumetric sensor. It consists of a 3D sensor with embedded computer vision algorithms that measures the volume of the silo’s content. Furthermore, it is powered by solar energy and is equipped with rural Internet connectivity, being fully independent on the farms’ resources. Price is 6.5 times cheaper than alternatives and it can be installed in only 5 minutes.
Furthermore, we leverage the power of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence to collect information from hundreds of thousands of silos and solve the million-dollar question: the right moment and the right quantity to restock each silo, in order to optimise: 1) inventories, 2) production batches, 3) delivery routes and 4) raw material purchases.
Our business model is based on long-term contracts with global top feed suppliers, obtaining revenues from the selling of devices and a monthly service fee x silo. For the livestock farmers the solution will be free.
We are fully confident that our technology is going to have a great impact in the next years contributing to the sustainability and efficiency of agriculture.
BENEFITS
INSYLO allows to remotely manage the stock of the silos of the livestock farms and optimize the cycles of production and distribution of feed:
- Save more than € 500 per year x silo by reducing labor and transportation costs.
- Eliminate the risks of silos inspection.
- Contribute to the environment by reducing CO2 emissions from transport by up to 25%.