Despite grain production hitting record after record, storage capacity in Brazil does not match this increase. And within what exists to store, many units are old, over 20 years old, with equipment outdated by time and technology. While investments in tractors, harvesters, and other implements that already come with very modern sensors receive good attention from producers, the storage area, where they will store their harvested assets, has not received the same attention.
“It is curious to observe the order of priority of the Brazilian rural producer when it comes to investments made by his company. The first thing he thinks of when he has extra resources is buying land, the second agricultural machinery and in the last items are either buying a storage system or renewing and improving what they already have,” says Everton Rorato, commercial director of PCE Engenharia a company with 19 years of experience that has been dedicated to the automation sector in post-harvest equipment in recent years. In his view, this is one of the factors that contribute to the technological gap that currently occurs in the Brazilian storage park. “Just to give you an idea, in the last five years, there has been a great evolution in research and development of sensors, systems that capture information about what happens in the environment of a silo or a warehouse, in digital thermometry, connectivity, among others, but this has not been adopted by a large part of those involved in storage, creating a significant lag in the management of this process,” says Rorato.
The executive mentions that this lack of technological update ends up bringing losses to the storer. According to him, the grain storage management requires the person in charge of this function to be very attentive to the various factors that occur in the internal and external environment of a silo. ‘Temperature inside and outside the silo, relative air humidity, atmospheric pressure, all of this, surprisingly, need to be measured to know whether it is time to activate aeration, for example. And technologically outdated equipment can provide incorrect readings of all these items, provide wrong information, and cause a loss of the grains or their quality ultimately resulting in losses,’ notes the commercial director.
Rorato says that it was looking at this situation that PCE developed automation solutions for controlling the grain storage conditions. The company has digital thermometry as one of the highlights of its portfolio. Through this system, it is possible to monitor the temperature of the stored grains using an application developed by PCE, and based on this information, make the most accurate decision for the moment. Another technology developed by the company is a portal, available in the cloud, that the storage manager can access from anywhere, presenting the conditions in which the grain is located inside the silo/warehouse. The system provides various information very clearly, generating a data history to consult at any time. ‘It is a technology that allows tracking the storage conditions of the grains, assisting in decision-making in this process,’ Rorato concludes.
