The desperate shortage of agricultural labour threatens this year's plant and animal production. The closure of borders due to the coronavirus epidemic has caused, among other things, that temporary workers from abroad will not be able to help Czech farmers with manual work in the fields or in the forest. The limited movement of the domestic population and the fear of being infected with an insidious disease have also paralyzed domestic workers, who often use complex machines. But it is technology that farmers have to help. Digitizing your own field may be the key to minimizing damage.

Plant production is already under threat. The absence of labour can have d unfortunate consequences, for example, in the harvest of asparagust, which is approaching, or when establishing a vegetable crop. Farmers are also grappling with ubiquitous administration and changing climatic conditions. Animal production has been negatively affected by the restriction of so-called sales from the yard or the closure of restaurants, which are frequent customers of raw materials from local farms and slaughterhouses. It is thus crucial for farmers to find a suitable system that would make their work and planning as much as possible easier, so that they can throw the remaining forces at the field work itself.

Digitization may be the solution. It helps farmers to record field work, to intuitive crop planning, to monitor the movement of livestock or to monitor the condition of warehouses. These are just a few of the tasks that a digitized farm can do to make it easier for farmers to work. There are currently several thousand farmers who use smart systems and more and more are being added, although there is still a lack of a single government policy to promote digitalisation more.

"We are feeling growing concern among farmers. Unlike industrial enterprises, however, they cannot dampen production, they have to sede at the right time. They, too, are forced to improvise in the absence of manpower in order to do everything. We are addressed by a large number of farmers who are looking at what products we could use to make their work more efficient and make up for the shortage of people. We try to explain to them that it is high time to digitize in order to make office work easier and have more time in the field and to have at hand the most accurate data on climatic conditions or mechanics travels," says Lukáš Musil, Sales Director of Agdata and accredited consultant to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Czech agriculture has good conditions for digitization. The whole country is covered with high-quality IoT signal networks and system suppliers have many years of know-how, which ranks the Czech Republic at the top within the European Union. Agdata currently operates on around 20% of Czech land and its instruments are used by more than 1700 active farmers, which is roughly 10% of all those who have agriculture as their livelihood. "We hope that as many farmers as possible will be able to minimise their losses and this year's crop will end up doing well despite catastrophic scenarios. We are ready to help them as much as possible," concludes Musil.