Microsoft

Many farmers are turning to Ag-Analytics, a leader in AI solutions, to help address these concerns. Sharing Microsoft’s goal to help monitor, model and manage Earth’s natural resources with cloud and AI, they bring precision agriculture to fruition in a platform that helps farmers leverage all available data to make the best decisions for their land.

Azure FarmBeats is a business-to-business offering available in Azure Marketplace. It enables aggregation of agriculture data sets across providers. Azure FarmBeats enables you to build artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) models based on fused data sets. By using Azure FarmBeats, agriculture businesses can focus on core value-adds instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of data engineering.

AI is beginning to transform agriculture in important ways. Many farmers who manage large-scale operations are taking advantage of innovative technologies like self-driving tractors that use GPS, satellite imagery, and AI to plant more efficiently; and sensors and machine learning to make smarter decisions about when to irrigate and how much fertilizer to apply.

But what about the majority of farmers who have less than one hectare of arable land (or a little less than 2.5 acres), and who produce 70 percent of the world’s food supply? Many of them live in low-resource communities with limited access to even basic digital technology. Can AI improve their ability to grow food to feed a hungry world? Yes, it can.

Chandra’s interest in agriculture wasn’t a coincidence. While growing up in Jamshedpur in eastern India, he’d spend his summer and winter vacations at his grandparents’ village in Bihar, one of India’s most impoverished states.

“Back then, I hated agriculture like anything. The farms in the village would have no electricity, not even toilets. You had to go out in the fields even in cold weather like this,” he recalls. “But as it happens, I spent a lot of time in the village in the first 18 years of my life. I have seen extreme poverty and those images have stuck to my mind.”

“What can we, as technologists, do to improve the lives of these farmers?” he asks.

Global robotics company FJ Dynamics wants to transform traditional farming with the power of data. It has developed a range of smart machines to boost production and sustainability while reducing the risk to, and the physical demands on farmers.

For years, data has helped farmers decide when to plant, when to harvest, what types of crops to grow, how much fertilizer and other chemicals to use, and how often to irrigate.

Even so, farming has remained a largely inexact pursuit. It’s also a tough physical job for most of the world’s farmers who labor in the fields with tools and machinery.

As one of the nation’s largest farmer-owned cooperatives with 150 million acres of productive cropland in its network, Land O’Lakes is deeply connected to rural America and has a unique understanding of farmers’ needs and the communities where they and their families live and work. Combined with Microsoft’s trusted cloud technologies and AI capabilities, the companies will deliver solutions that help farmers’ profit potential and adoption of sustainable agricultural practices.