Gumi sits in Gyeongsangbuk-do, North Gyeongsang Province, and is better known nationally as an electronics manufacturing city than as farming country, but like almost every Korean local authority it runs a machinery rental service for the farms in its district. The scheme is formally the Agricultural Machinery Rental Efficiency System Construction Project, and it was selected under the Ministry of Science and ICT’s 2026 Smart Village Distribution and Expansion Project, the national funding line that pays for digital infrastructure in rural districts. The Information and Communications Division is building the system and the Agricultural Technology Center will operate it.

There are three parts to it: unmanned kiosks handling booking confirmation and payment, so a farmer collecting a machine does not need a member of staff present; RFID recording when a machine leaves the yard and when it comes back; and IoT rollover detection on the rental machines themselves, to raise the alarm faster when one overturns. The build is due to be complete by the end of 2026, followed by trial operation, with full service from 2027.

Why a municipal rental depot needs asset control

Municipal machinery rental is a bigger business in Korea than the phrase suggests: local governments buy tractors, power tillers, transplanters and harvesters and hire them out by the day to smallholders who could never justify owning them. The national standard dataset for agricultural machinery rental information, published on the Korean public data portal under the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and last merged on 22 June 2026, is compiled from 147 local authority providers, many of which run several branch depots apiece. Depot records list holdings by machine type, from tractors and cultivators to threshers, seeders and transplanters, in the dozens to low hundreds per site.

That is a great deal of expensive, mobile, outdoor plant to keep track of on a paper ledger and a telephone. Asset tracking at the point of issue and return answers automatically the question a depot officer otherwise answers by walking the yard: which machine is out, who has it, and when it is due back. It also gives the Agricultural Technology Center usable utilisation figures, the sort of evidence a city needs when deciding what to buy next.

The rollover sensors are the interesting half

Farm machinery is the biggest single cause of death in Korean agriculture. In 2024, 297 farmers died in farm work accidents in South Korea, and 174 of those deaths, roughly six in ten, involved farm machinery. Analysis of 2014 to 2018 data by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and the Rural Development Administration found 67 per cent of casualties were aged 60 or over. In Gyeongsangbuk-do itself there were 606 farm machinery accidents in 2025, with 30 deaths and 548 injuries. The national target is to bring annual farm work deaths down from 297 to 220 by 2030.

Rollover detection linked to the emergency services is not new in Korea. The Rural Development Administration has already deployed 1,297 accident detection terminals that send an automatic alert to a 119 emergency control room when a tractor or power tiller tips or overturns. What is different in Gumi is where the devices are going: onto a municipal rental fleet, on the same machines that are getting RFID asset control. A rented machine is the hardest case for this kind of safety kit: the depot does not know the operator, cannot rely on them fitting anything themselves, and will not know they are in trouble until the machine is overdue. Putting the detector on the asset rather than the person, and knowing from the RFID record exactly who signed that asset out, closes the loop.

What nobody has said

No source states the frequency band the system will use, or whether the tag sits on the machine, on the operator’s card, or both. Neither the Gumi City press release nor the syndicated write-ups give a budget figure, a contractor name or the number of machines involved, which are real gaps in an announcement about a publicly funded build.

The obvious engineering reading, and it is inference rather than anything stated, is that farm machinery is large, metal, muddy and parked outdoors, which points towards on-metal tags read as a machine passes the yard gate rather than anything a farmer has to present by hand. Whether the credential that matters is attached to the machine, the hirer, or both is a design decision, and it changes how much the check-in record is worth as evidence. Gumi City’s agriculture department should be able to answer both questions, and given the project is publicly funded, it ought to.

Vice Mayor Jung Sung-hyun told the kickoff meeting that farmers should end up with a more convenient and safer rental service, and that the city would keep pursuing improvements farmers can actually feel. His remarks are given here in translation from the Korean rather than as a verbatim English quote. The Smart Village programme funds several municipalities a year, so Gumi is unlikely to be the only Korean city putting RFID on a rental yard, and the first useful numbers should come out of the trial period before full service starts in 2027.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

An elevator in this sense is not a lift. It is a grain intake, storage and handling complex: discharge pits, drying and cleaning plant, silos and a laboratory. Kernel runs around 30 of them with 2.2 million tonnes of combined storage capacity, which makes harvest intake a queueing problem before it is anything else.

Ten years ago it ran on paper coupons

Kernel describes the mid-2010s procedure as linear and analogue. A guard registered the vehicle and handed the driver a paper coupon to carry on foot to the weighbridge operator. A laboratory technician walked out to the lorry, took a grain sample by hand and carried it back to the lab, where quality was written down. The driver left the cab several times per visit and, in the company’s phrase, walked in circles.

Why a card rather than a mobile app

The first fix was an NFC card issued against the trip. NFC is a short-range contactless technology working at 13.56 MHz in the HF band, and cards of this type are ISO/IEC 14443 contactless smart cards, the same family as a travel ticket or an access badge. The driver taps the card at the gate and the system creates the record.

The reason for choosing a card is the interesting part for anyone who designs field credentials. Kernel says that when it decided, there was no way to send information from the fields over mobile internet, and that constraint settles the architecture. With no connectivity where the trip starts, the credential cannot be a pointer to a cloud record, so it has to be the record: the card carries the driver, the vehicle and the crop being hauled. The reader reads data rather than looking it up.

The company says it now uses QR codes and barcodes alongside the cards rather than instead of them. Once there is connectivity at the gate, a printed code is cheaper per movement and identifies a booked trip just as well. The card keeps its edge where the credential has to be issued with no signal, or survive a harvest season in a lorry cab. Mixed estates of this sort are normal in logistics, and usually a sign that someone matched the carrier to the conditions.

Cameras, automatic weighbridges and a sampling arm

The second stage closed off the steps that were left. Cameras read number plates on entry and exit. Automatic weighbridges weigh the vehicle and push the figures straight into Kernel’s accounting systems, with no weighbridge operator in the loop and, the company says, no scope for misreading or manipulating them. Display boards at the intake pits show the driver his instructions from the cab.

The step Kernel calls the most telling of the lot is unmanned weighing. A mechanical arm enters the lorry bed, takes the grain sample and passes it to the laboratory with no human contact, and the analysis syncs into the same systems automatically. The queue that formed while a technician walked from vehicle to vehicle has gone, and with it the ceiling that put on the weighing complex’s throughput.

The electronic queue, and the wartime case for it

Vehicles bunching up was the real constraint, so drivers register in advance and the system allocates an arrival slot and prioritises traffic. The same data tells Kernel how heavily loaded each site is, which turns a queue manager into a planning tool. In wartime it does something else as well: a cluster of stationary lorries is a target, and booked slots break up the cluster. The last piece, added in 2025, was the eTTN, the electronic consignment note, signed digitally.

What it cost, and what Kernel says it got

One automated platform, meaning the weighbridge plus the registration system, costs roughly 10,000 US dollars, installed and configured by Kernel’s own teams, and across around 30 sites the company says each one pays back quickly. It reports shorter idle time, faster turnaround and less room for fraud, with the throughput of the intake pit now the only bottleneck left. Drivers were suspicious at first, Kernel says, but the questions stopped after a few trips: “Previously they stood at the checkpoint for hours. Now they wait in a cafe outside the town, drive in and go through the whole process without queues.”

Kernel also cites TransitHUB for transport flows at production sites and field monitoring across 7,000 units of machinery. The elevator work has the clearest read-across for anyone running NFC credentials where the signal runs out.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Agromanager, Munckhof Fruit Tech Innovators, and five Dutch fruit growers have joined forces to trial permanent UHF RFID tags on harvesting crates. The goal is straightforward: do away with the repetitive, error-prone process of printing, applying, and replacing adhesive labels that are central to food safety and traceability compliance.

Anyone who has spent time around a packhouse will recognise the problem. Paper stickers peel off in wet conditions, get caked in soil, or simply fall apart after a few uses. Each time a label fails, someone has to print and apply a replacement, and that is time and money lost during the busiest weeks of the year.

The RFID labels being tested cost roughly €0.75 each and carry a ten-year warranty, though their actual service life could stretch well beyond that. Each tag combines a passive UHF RFID inlay with a printed QR code, giving growers two identification methods on a single label. Automated UHF readers can interrogate the tags wirelessly at speed, while workers in the field can fall back on a smartphone and the QR code for quick manual checks.

Integration with existing harvesting machinery is a key part of the trial. Munckhof’s Pluk-O-Trak harvesting platform already collects GPS coordinates, camera imagery, and fruit count data through its M-Connect communication system. By fitting an RFID reader to the platform, each crate is automatically identified the moment it passes through the machine. That read event is linked to the plot location, harvest date, time, and fruit variety without a single sticker being applied by hand.

The benefits extend beyond convenience. Automating crate identification at the point of harvest reduces the risk of data entry errors that can compromise traceability records. For growers supplying supermarkets and exporters with strict documentation requirements, reliable traceability data is not optional. A misread or missing label can trigger costly rejections and recalls.

From a broader perspective, the pilot fits into a growing trend toward precision fruit growing, where sensors, machinery, and farm management software are expected to work together as a single integrated system rather than as disconnected tools. RFID-tagged crates become another data point in that ecosystem, feeding information back to platforms like Agromanager for analysis and reporting.

While the trial is still in its early stages, the economics look promising. A durable RFID tag at €0.75 that lasts a decade compares favourably against the cumulative cost of printing and applying disposable labels season after season. If the pilot delivers on its promise, it could set a template for fruit growers across Europe looking to modernise their harvest logistics.

Read more at https://www.munckhof.org/en/news/rfid-pilot-scheme-aims-to-eliminate-the-need-for-manual-labelling-of-picking-crates/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.