Perhaps the most important role new technologies are playing right now is helping to improve people’s quality of life and driving sustainability.

Agriculture is one of the largest contributors to carbon dioxide emissions. Cultivated soils have the potential to capture and store billions of tons of atmospheric carbon. With the right incentives and through regenerative agriculture, the owners of these fields can contribute to reversing the effects of climate change and, at the same time, increase their revenues from carbon offsets.

One Agtech company saw this opportunity and decided to build a verification platform to remove carbon from the soil and enable agribusinesses to be part of “cleaner” food supply chains. The proposal is even open to all industrial sectors that want to meet zero emissions commitments.

Manual hurdles, digital acceleration

But on the way to its goal, this Agtech identified a series of obstacles that slowed down its achievements: measurements were manually performed. This time-consuming task resulted in bottlenecks. It is necessary to decide the strategic points where the samples will be taken and, on the other hand, errors and data transmission problems built up, going against accuracy targets.

When this Agtech talked about their need to Making Sense, our first proposal was to develop a mobile application for field workers. Among other benefits, they could do their work offline, which is a must when working under adverse weather conditions or when the samples must be taken in a remote location, without connectivity, the collected data sent to the different laboratories, and the compensation order for the field worker processed when the task is completed.

A bond of partnership and trust

Thus, what started as a two-month contract to make progress on a specific tool became a long-term partnership and a bond of trust. The results led to progress on an end-to-end digital transformation process, including the frontend (which improves user experience and accessibility), the backend (which optimizes management processes) and the website. Throughout this journey, Making Sense capitalized on its expertise in React Native, iOS Native, Python, project management and QA development to deliver an effective solution to this Agtech.

In total alignment with the client’s needs, during seasons more friendly for soil sampling (such as spring), all efforts are focused. And when conditions become more hostile, such as autumn or winter, work is done on new developments and improvements.

Among the benefits obtained by this Agtech we can mention a 100% transformation of the measurement procedures, including a greater ability to verify that samples were taken at the right places, dates and times, thanks to the geolocation of the devices used. This makes it possible, for example, to optimize tasks by preventing two people in the same field from taking samples from the same place at different times.

In addition, generic cell phones are used today, whereas in the past specific GPS with satellite connections had to be used. This implies a considerable cost reduction for the organization of between 50% and 60%, both at the time of acquisition and maintenance of the equipment.

For this Agtech, however, its digital transformation process went far beyond an increase in profitability and efficiency or more productive workers. It also represented an opportunity to further its mission of helping to make the planet a little better every day.