Its main competitor is the experience of its customers. This is how José Luis Bustos closely monitors its business model, which is focused by and for farmers. They are aware they have a very tough customer, the farmer, and their strategy is to keep experimenting to solve all their needs.
Although BrioAgro was born in February 2015, the initial idea that Bustos and his team were working on, was the detection of a plague of red palm weevil (an insect). They developed a device that listened to the noise larvae made inside the Palm trees. And from there, they developed a technology that can detect things through sensors. It was a very good device detecting weevil, but then the insect had to be killed, and that was neither efficient nor profitable.
As he already had the technology, Bustos perceived with some agricultural engineers, the possibility to use such sensors to get information and know what was happening in greenhouses. In October 2014, they already had a prototype. And from there until May 2015, they were doing tests. Given that it should be low-cost and highly optimized, their device collects all sensitive information and sends it to the cloud, and the farmer can check it out through his mobile phone, that will give him access to all the information from his greenhouse. That information, is collected in real time, allowing the farmer to control any changes and its variables, also it will give them historical tracking for a deeper analysis.
It works for small and medium farmers through any device, the monitoring system works for 24 and it is always recollecting information to improve the crops. BrioaAgro’s main market is the Spanish one, which is the third country in the world working on superficial greenhouses, after China and the US.