The Ghost Farm: the future of farming from the vision of a Product Manager

Rogerio Martins
yaradigitallabs
Published in
4 min readNov 1, 2018

10 years from now, maybe is that way, how farming will look like

Six months ago, I started my new journey as a Product Manager at Digital Farm from Yara International — a secular chemical company that figures out as one of the greatest players in the world of agribusiness. At Yara, our mission is to feed the world and protect the planet. We talking about the world that increases their population every minute, while the natural resources are getting exhausted maybe in the same fastness. The climate changes, the water shortage, and the scarcity of land for farming are some of the challenges to face at this field.

But, looking to another side, the agribusiness, especially the agriculture, a good exercise is to think about the farm of the future, and how we can change the way to grow food without waste natural resources and taking full advantage from applied inputs. Far from pretending to be an expert, I’m trying to shape a vision of the future of farming from the point of view of a tech professional, and this future maybe is something like a Ghost Farm — a farming process entirely automatized, from seeding to harvest, from soil preparation to fertilizing.

The Ghost Farm is a concept where the intelligence to control the growth process resides inside of each plant. To do this, we need creating a special seed that contains seem-like a sensor capable to analyze the soil and understand how nutrients and water this seed needs, sending this data to an automated system that supplies all need of each plant has, individually. Connected to resellers and dealers of agricultural inputs, the system can manage the needs of the crop and forecasting the next inputs to buy. A group of drones can apply the input on the soil or leaf, close or on each plant supplying only the necessary for all stages of the growing process. The weather forecast, the estimation of the quantity of water on the soil, and the measure of evapotranspiration can provide an entire diagnosis of the soil condition and nutrition, its stress and the crop evolution.

The individual management of each plant on the field can optimize the using of all resources on the farm. The integration between all of the process of farming can help to predict the production and increase the profits saving money and natural resources (like preserving the soil and water), applying only the necessary for each situation what the plants can face, reducing yield loss and providing the best scenario to increase the production.

Asking each plant on the field to send its data for an integrated system can create the entire human-free process to provide the right resource to the right need. This integration can support, as well, to grow different crops in the same field, once the treatment is individual to each one. At the Ghost Farm, the same field could be produced soybean, corn, wheat, and rice, or even combine orchards with seasonal crops.

The machine learning can provide intelligence to the system, bringing the capability to predict the production of each crop and recommend the better crop to grow focused on optimize market and trade. The entire ecosystem can work together to analyze each aspect of agriculture, since the choice of which crop should be to grow, til the right price to sell the products, since the right time to seeding til the best opportunity to harvest. Self-driving machinery can make the hard work, as the soil preparation or make the harvest.

The crops of several farms can be controlled from a single room. Agronomist can operate the system “from home” to adjust the program when it’s needed. The machine learning can consider these changes and their results as a “truly learning” and apply these changes thereto. The artificial intelligence can understand when or where the flow of information fails and can use the data from a neighbor plant to handle and avoid yield loss even when the lack of information can happen.

Solar and wind energy can provide sustainable electric capacity, to move the machinery, including tractors and drones or whatever another machine, as to the system devices as well. Self-driving trucks can deliver the products to an online trade buyer. Blockchain can be used to ensure the transparency of all food chain.

Again, far far away from pretending to be an expert, I think it’s a good exercise from the point of view of a Product Manager about what is the farm of the future. For me, the Ghost Farm will be among us in the next 10 years.

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