For a week each year, Nampo becomes the meeting place for agritech innovators and superusers. It’s why the GoMetro team journeyed to Bothaville, for Nampo Harvest Day 2024.
The diversity of Nampo visitors is inspiring. Whether attendees fly to Bothaville with their own aircraft or drive to the event in high-mileage diesel bakkies, everyone is welcome and open to ideas about farming smarter.
South African farmers know risk. With unpredictably powerful weather systems, potholed rural roads, water supply and electricity issues, farmers need proven solutions, not promises. It’s why they journey to Bothaville each year to experience the latest agricultural technology at Nampo.
At this year’s Harvest Day event, the theme was digitisation. Farm life and most agribusiness might be rural, but it’s not slow or overwhelmingly analogue. Farmers are some of the smartest early adopters of digital technology for business, from using the latest drone and infrared mapping technology for soil preparation to securing global contracts for their commodities.
Data matters everywhere
Farmers have a deep intuition about their environment. Knowledge earned by decades of risk and reward. But being in sync with nature and knowing the land you farm, isn’t enough to manage a successful farming or agribusiness anymore.
Data is the difference between guessing and knowing what’s happening in your business. Farmers don’t guess what’s happening with their soil quality or water supply, and they should be wondering what is happening with their logistics because a great harvest doesn’t become profitable until it leaves the farm.
GoMetro reduces your risk and anxiety around logistics. We know that data visibility, shareability and usability are what farmers need. Our advanced fleet management software takes all the telematics data a modern logistics supply chain generates and makes it usable. Powerful data management in a simple dashboard on your device.
Derisking the rural supply chain
You can’t manage farm-to-market logistics with spreadsheets, paper lists, and phone calls. Farms don’t keep business hours. If you need to know the status of your crop or livestock logistics, there’s no time to waste with layers of digital permissions and delayed phone calls from transport sub-contractors.
The reality of geography is that few farms are close to market. After managing all the weather, soil, water, and growth risks, farmers shouldn’t suffer from the anxiety of more risks beyond their control, such as getting goods to market.
Failed farm-to-market logistics can degrade an excellent harvest to failure. Refrigerated agriproducts can’t suffer a break in the cold chain, and animals need to be transported with the least possible stress. Regardless of your crop or livestock, most farmers remain price takers, meaning that on-time logistics and delivery commitments are non-negotiable.
Our technology gives you powerful logistics oversight, with data and tracking on your devices in an uncluttered and user-friendly interface. Knowing what’s happening with your logistics should be simpler, smarter and more secure. That’s exactly what GoMetro’s Bridge does.
Making deep logistics data usable
The best agricultural technology solves a problem, but is easy to use. Drip irrigation radically reduces water use without increasing irrigation complexity. Live-feed drones allow farm surveying and damage assessments without wasting fuel or labour by dispatching staff in vehicles.
Farmers are deep data users from farm security to soil management and don’t want to struggle through layers and menus of poorly presented data. Farmers have weather, electricity, water and labour risks to think about every moment of the day. They shouldn’t be worrying about how to interpret and understand logistics data.
Poor road conditions and more traffic increase the delay and damage-in-transit risks of farm-to-market logistics. That’s why GoMetro created Bridge: powerful fleet management and software that makes logistics data usable and actionable. With Bridge, you have visibility of every moment in the logistics journey.
No more unanswered voicemails or ghosted messages. With GoMetro’s Bridge, you can manage your transport sub-contractors with greater confidence and less anxiety.
Rural roads and tyre risk
The road to Bothaville reminded us of why South Africa is Big Sky country, but also of the increasing risk of rural logistics.
We steered around huge potholes and saw many bits of shredded tyre journeying to Nampo. Getting harvests and animals from farm to market becomes more challenging as rural roads worsen.
Beyond Bridge, we’ve also developed ConnecTyre, an innovative tyre pressure monitoring system. Farmers are familiar with the importance of tyre pressure. When large tractors and trailers roll across your land, appropriate tyre inflation pressures protect soil from point load damage.
But what about the importance of tyre pressures when transport leaves the farm and travels on those severely potholed secondary roads? Underinflated tyres and slow pressure loss can easily become a total tyre failure, creating a stranded cargo issue.
Harvested crops, livestock and cold chain sensitive cargo are vulnerable to unplanned delays. A livestock delivery, stranded in midday summer heat without shade, creates animal stress and possible heat exhaustion losses. Stranded trucks and trailers are defenceless, becoming targets for theft.
More uptime and on-time
Farm-to-market routes aren’t going to become smoother or less risky. GoMetro’s ConnecTyre helps reduce the risk of low-pressure tyre blowouts by giving drivers and maintainers all the tyre pressure data they need to keep tyres rolling at ideal pressures.
ConnecTyre technology creates in-cabin and homebase oversight of a truck and trailer’s tyre health at all times. It’s an integrated hardware and software solution, with sensors at each wheel creating proactive underinflation alerts, empowering drivers and fleet managers can take action instead of becoming tyre failure victims.
Walking the Nampo displays at Bothaville, it’s impossible not to be awed by agriculture. Farmers are the truest entrepreneurs, taking the biggest risks to create the most noble product: food for the nation. GoMetro’s Bridge and ConnecTyre can help farmers master logistics data and reduce the risk of operating on rural roads, getting harvests to the market safer and on-schedule.
