Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct.4
By Rashid Shirinov – Trend:
The digitization of agriculture is gaining momentum around the world, and Kazakhstan is among the countries that are interested in this technology.
Creation of electronic maps of fields is ongoing in plant growing in the North Kazakhstan region for the introduction of precision agriculture. As many as 4.5 million hectares, which is more than 92 percent of the arable land, have already been digitized, according to Kazinform.
Deputy governor of the region Madiyar Kozhakhmet noted that smart technologies are introduced and used at 50 farms on the area of more than 700,000 hectares.
"We see the effects of digitization of agriculture in increasing profitability by 2.5 times, the yield – by an average of 5 centners per hectare, and increasing labor productivity up to 2.4 million tenge per person," he noted.
Local enterprises Shagala agro LLP and Peterfeld-Agro LLP have already signed memorandum with the S.Seifullin Kazakh Agro Technical University, under which they allocated 500 hectares of land for implementing precision agriculture in the pilot mode. Technical support is carried out on the recommendations of the university.
The authorities of the North Kazakhstan region pay great attention to digitization of industries and plan to create a new management, which will deal exclusively with the development and introduction of new technologies. Moreover, it is planned to start building seven dairy complexes in the region this year, which will be equipped with smart technologies.
It is expected that all farms in the region will use smart technologies in the future. Presently, a number of them use systems for tracking the individual milk yield.
At the beginning of this year, the Agriculture Ministry of Kazakhstan set a task for Kazakh Agro Technical University to become a scientific and methodological center of digitization in agriculture. The university helps to introduce precision agriculture technologies in pilot mode in the farms of Akmola, Karaganda, Kostanay and North Kazakhstan regions.
There are still some problems to be solved for digitization of Kazakhstan’s agriculture. They include the need to create a unified infrastructure of spatial data of agro-industry, provision of the stability and sustainability of Internet traffic in rural areas, expansion of the network of agrochemical laboratories, and improvement of the technical equipment of agricultural producers.