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ZIHA fleets will be formed to save water and pesticides and increase productivity in agriculture

The General Directorate of Agricultural Credit Cooperatives will create fleets of ZIHA (agricultural unmanned aerial vehicles) in order to spread the drones, which save water and pesticides in agriculture and increase productivity, in every province.

General Manager of Agricultural Credit Cooperatives, Fahrettin Poyraz, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that with the use of ZIHAs, significant savings will be achieved in both water and medicine. Stating that with the use of ZIHA, there will be serious gains in terms of efficiency both for the country and for the farmer partners, Poyraz said, “Trials are being carried out with ZIHAs on 20 different products in 15 provinces. As a result of the product-based results, we will hopefully create ZIHA fleets in our provinces.”

Pointing out that they received reports from trial studies on a product basis, Poyraz continued his words as follows:

“These products are expensive in terms of cost. Our farmer’s purchase of this product alone will create an economic cost for the farmer. We, as Agricultural Credit Cooperatives, will undertake this ourselves. We will report on the products we have given to our Ministry and tested. With the support from our Ministry, we will create ZIHA fleets in cooperatives. Our citizens will come and make an appointment with us at the time of applying pesticides. Our teams will go, they will start applying pesticides in a very short time.”

Efforts are underway to provide interest-free financing support to farmers

Poyraz pointed out that the Agricultural Credit Cooperatives are an important organization that supports agriculture in Turkey, especially in terms of financing. Underlining that there is a serious increase in interest rates from time to time depending on the changing economic conditions, Poyraz said:

“We have recently started working to transform the Agricultural Credit structure into an interest-free system. Instead of making more loans available, we have switched to the method of providing agricultural inputs to our farmers through deferred sales. We continue this. The next stage of this is, as Agricultural Credit Cooperatives, we want to create and maintain the financial support of agriculture with an interest-free model by changing our own structure, transforming it or turning into a bank in the form of a participation banking. At this stage, our work continues within ourselves. After providing the technical infrastructures, I hope we will meet with the officials of our Ministry and our state and present our projects to them. So after this stage, we have two ways. We will either transform our structure into this, which requires legal regulation, or we want to transform it into financing agriculture in the form of a participation bank. I hope we will present our project to our authorities after we have it in flesh and bone. This will happen in not too long time. Our next goal will be to transform the Agricultural Credit Cooperatives into an interest-free system and thus serve Turkish agriculture and farmers.”

Source: AA / Translated by Irem Yildiz

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