How Project FarmVibes will disrupt this trillion dollar industry?

A quest to feed billions

The development and prosperity of the agriculture industry is extremely important to reduce world hunger and poverty. Any development in the agriculture sector is about two to four times more effective in raising the standard of living amongst the poorest of the population as compared to any other industrial sectors. The World Bank has estimated that the agriculture industry has to feed about 9.7 billion people by 2050. On average, the agriculture sector accounts for about 4% of the total gross domestic product (GDP) of nations and up to about 25% of GDP for the underdeveloped and developing countries.

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Advances in technology are already providing a boost to this trillion dollar industry. In 2023 we will see how digital innovations and collaborations will disrupt the agriculture sector and provide a much needed impetus to new ways of food production, animal husbandry, and resilient supply chains. Project FarmVibes by Microsoft is already taking large strides in the field of sustainable and intelligent agriculture to empower the farmers to do more with technology. The main aim of FarmVibes is to empower researchers, engineers, scientists and all other tech enthusiasts to design and develop digital solutions for the farmers. Such solutions will enable the farmers to anticipate their farm emissions, to use precision agriculture to improve farm health, and to anticipate weather changes and plan ahead. The project FarmVibes is currently composed of four key technologies that can form the basis of various innovative solutions in agriculture.

1. Data Capturing : FarmVibes.Connect focuses on the data capturing capabilities of the project. A key issue with data-driven agriculture is the difficulty to establish good connectivity for data capturing in the middle of a huge farm. FarmVibes.Connect proposes an innovative solution to this issue by enabling the use of unused TV channels in broadband connectivity, by enabling narrowband IoT connectivity that will work in the midst of heavy canopy or crops and by leveraging space communications.
2. Data Processing: The next step after capturing data is to facilitate the processing of that data collected via drones, sensors or any other methods. It is known that connectivity from a farm to cloud is limited and therefore, sending and processing large amounts of data in the cloud is difficult. FarmVibes.Edge has taken a different approach to this conflict. This key technology of project FarmVibes will enable the processing of huge data locally on the farm itself. This can be either in the farmer’s house, local office, or a small station.
3. Data Insights: After the data is collected and processed, the next step is to extract intelligent and actionable insights from the processed data. FarmVibes.AI enables the merging of data from different data sources to arrive at a single actionable truth about the farm. This will provide clarity to the farmers in terms of actions to be taken. This will also save a huge amount of time required to individually analyze the processed data from each of the separate sources. Through the fusion of technologies facilitated by FarmVibes.AI, one can estimate the nutritional value of food in the farms, obtain insights into the carbon footprint of the farm, and insights into soil health, water usage, and other relevant factors.
4. User Communication: Not every end user that would benefit from FarmVibes will be easily able to comprehend the actionable insights derived from FarmVibes.AI. It is very important to break down and deliver those insights to the end users in a language that is easy to read and comprehend. For this, we have FarmVibes.Bot that facilitates easy communication with the farmers to provide them with actionable insights or to request additional data from them. Any user with a smartphone can access FarmVibes.The bot is a huge step in disseminating information and enabling the democratization of technology.

Project FarmVibes is a huge step in the democratization of digital tools and empowering every individual to harness the full benefits of digital technology for achieving the goal of sustainable agriculture. It is a great leap forward to bring the goals of circular farming, and of feeding billions and reducing world hunger to fruition.