KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 20 — Ancom Crop Care Sdn Bhd (ACC) hopes to play a significant role in local agriculture by providing Malaysian farmers with tools to perform precision farming.

Precision farming has many benefits such as allowing farmers to use the correct dosage of fertiliser at the right time for plants, control wastage and help the environment, ACC chief operations officer (COO) Anthony Tan told Malay Mail.

"Agriculture is not as simple as it was in the past. There are lots of factors to take into account for the yield,” he said.

Because of that, ACC will be offering two types of software made in partnership with German crop protection and fertiliser group HELM AG to local farmers to simplify their farming processes: SKYFLD and Plantix.

SKYFLD allows ACC to scan the coordinates of local farmers’ paddy fields using the Sentinel satellites. Through these scans, ACC can determine the health of the paddy using a formula to calculate light wavelengths.

"Healthier leaves on paddy plants reflect more near infrared (NIR) light,” he explained.

As for Plantix, it is a mobile application that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and image recognition technology to identify plant diseases, pests, and nutrient deficiencies, said ACC head of sales Hii Yii Seng.

"This will ensure that the farmers will use the right pesticides and fertilisers and there will be savings and no wastages,” he said.

Precision farming promotes a key concept of moving away from experience and towards measurable facts through technology which will raise standards, he explained.

Those such as young farmers often lack the experience to identify issues and solutions when it comes to something as complex as agriculture, he said.

"With precision farming, we believe we can help the farmers to improve their yield and profitability, minimise waste and help the environment to be greener,” he said.

Earlier this month, Mimos, the national information and communications technology (ICT) research and development agency, announced that it is teaming up with HELM AG and its local partner, chemical manufacturing group Ancom Nylex Berhad, to apply digital agriculture solutions through a powerful digital agriculture platform called SKYFLD.

Mimos, HELM AG and Ancom Nylex will share their expertise and roll out a local pilot phase to ensure quality assurance across crops, regions, among other criteria across the country.