InteliGro officially opened its depot in Lydenburg with an event that introduced the company’s people, solutions and services to agri role players in Mpumalanga and Limpopo.
According to managing director Gideon Hefer, InteliGro is an agri business that has, for more than 30 years already, been exerting considerable influence in the agrichemicals and spesialised plant-nutrition sectors. “In our view, every major agriculture objective, especially sustainability and food security, starts on the farm. Our focus, therefore, is on producers and their needs. We want to be involved in every stage of crop production and collaborate in finding the solutions that will enable the sector to produce sustainably.”
Deeply rooted in the country’s grain- and fruit-producing regions, InteliGro decided a few years ago to establish a stronger presence in the northern provinces. The opening of the Lydenburg depot is a decisive step towards this service delivery expansion.
Johan Nienaber, regional director: North, explains that this depot serves the Polokwane, Tzaneen, Hoedspruit, Witrivier, Nelspruit and Groblersdal areas. “Transport is ‘n significant overhead in the agri sector. With this centrally located depot, InteliGro can provide products and solutions to producers at the right price and at the right time.”
In addition to a comprehensive portfolio that includes well-known multinational and generic suppliers of crop protection, plant-nutrition and biological products, InteliGro provides gives producers access to a variety of innovative solutions.
“Our biological focused approach, InteliBio Soultions, enables producers to include biological solutions in integrated pest management programs, especially where it is required by export markets,” says Janet Lawless from InteliGro. An example is CeraTrap®, a new addition to the biological-control portfolio, with which producers can manage fruit fly populations and limit damage to orchards.
Monitoring of pests is a further cornerstone of InteliGro’s integrated approach to crop solutions, with the objective to timeously identify and control pests, and simultaneously determine the efficacy of control measures. Cropwatch Africa and InteliGro’s joint platform – user-friendly technology that enables effective monitoring – is an example of how InteliGro can help producers to determine threshold values for optimal pest management. It simplifies record keeping and the graphic representations of population numbers enable producers to make faster and more accurate decisions regarding pest management.
Effective application plays a critical role in effective pest control – not only to avoid the costs of a second application, but also to limit yield losses due to poor control. “In this regard DropSight, a user friendly app that quantifies deposition efficacy, is an exceptionally useful innovation,” says Lawless.
Ground-breaking work to replace guesswork with data-driven decision-making when it comes to crop solutions, is being done with Intelekt Solutions. On many trial plots across the country, data is being gathered scientifically and independently in order to provide producers with the right technical solutions. These trails have been conducted on wheat in the Swartland for the past four years, and for three years on barley in the Southern Cape and on row crops in the summer rainfall area. Lawless notes that a next step in this project is to include crops that are grown in the Far North.
InteliGro’s commitment to stewardship in terms of the safe and responsible use of products, have prompted the development of spray clinics, training for spray operators and courses on the safe handling of pesticides. InteliGro has also launched a project that focuses on the safe disposal and recycling of empty containers. “With these initiatives we make it easier for producers to grow food safely and to minimise any potential risks to the environment, people and animals,” says Lawless.
InteliGro is, however, much more than a collection of effective, innovative and useful solutions. The company’s value trump card is a team of expert, highly trained and experienced Crop Advisors. “With our Certified Crop Advisor (CCA) programme, we strive to equip every Crop Advisor to be a trusted business partner, who is able to provide inputs at many different levels in a client’s business and to make a decisive difference on the farm,” Lawless explains.
“InteliGro looks forward with great excitement to forge successful and sustainable partnerships with producers here in the north of South Africa,” Hefer concludes.
