NEWS ROUNDUP ▶▶▶
ICL and Amazon to develop open digital ag platform
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NORTH AMERICA / EUROPE BY HUGO CLAVER
CL and Amazon Web Services will to- gether develop an open digital services platform. It is designed to enhance the capabilities of agronomists and other
agriculture professionals, driving farming improvement. ICL, a global speciality minerals and speciality chemicals company based in Tel Aviv, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a US-based daughter of the well known internet company. The platform is to harness in-field, crowd- sourced and academic data, as well as data contributed from leading global partners. This will create new capabilities for agro-profes- sionals, and the ability to quickly create ac- tionable insights, empowered by data analyt- ics. The platform is taking advantage of AWS advanced analytics and machine learning tools to unlock these agronomic insights.
‘Uber app’ to rent farm equipment
ASIA
The Indian government has launched an Uber- like app for renting farm equipment, the Cus- tom Hiring Centers (CHC) Farm Machinery app. For many Indian farmers most agriculture equipment is too expensive to buy. The new app allows farmers to rent high-end agricultur- al equipment. Farmers can select and order the required machinery ‘at rates feasible for them’ from a Custom Hiring Center within 50km. There are now more than 38,000 of these across the India, all connected with the app. So far, al- most 26,800 CHCs have registered to offer more than 100,000 pieces of equipment for hire. Af- ter registration, farmers can order what they need. For example, if a farmer needs a rotovator with tractor for one acre of land, the app will show all the CHCs which have the equipment available within 5, 20 and 50 km of the farmer’s set location, including their rates. The farmer
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Field trials “Currently, there is a wealth of valuable agro- nomic data which is not gathered, not widely accessible or structured, and therefore not practical for agronomists to leverage. One ex- ample is field trials. These are carried out by businesses, academic institutions and agro-professionals around the world, but only a tiny amount of this agronomic knowledge is actually accessible to all agro-professionals. With the help of AWS, our platform will pro- vide unmatched access to these untapped sources of knowledge. And it will promote col- laboration between agro-professionals to al- low improved farming, towards meeting glob- al food and sustainability demands,” said Raviv Zoller, ICL President & CEO. Mr Zoller added, “Unlike other digital solutions currently being developed in the market, our approach is to enhance the capabilities of agronomists and other agro-professionals, thereby creating significant additional value
for meeting current challenges of farming, by providing insights and tools to increase crop yields. We focus on enhancing data for the ex- perts driving the professional farming decision making. By choosing this path, we believe digi- tal solutions will be adopted faster and more efficiently by the agricultural community.”
Machine learning solutions AWS will extract data from internal ICL sources and external sources by using AWS machine learning solutions. Agro professionals will be able to analyse and query the data using ad- vanced AI analytics tools, including AWS-pow- ered data lakes which can handle the scale, agility, and flexibility required to combine dif- ferent types of data and analytics approaches. For example, this should allow agro-profes- sionals to gain deeper insights to predict the effect of inputs on crops, while weighting dif- ferent scenarios of humidity, temperatures and type of soil.
can use the app or call the CHC to book the equipment for a specific time and location.
FarmWise raises $ 14.5m for weeding robots
NORTH AMERICA
The San Francisco-based start-up FarmWise has raised $ 14.5 million for the development of weeding robots, writes the Robot Report. FarmWise plans to use the funding to grow its robotic engineering and operation teams, as well as boost research and development ef- forts on plant-level detection and actuation
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 1 november 2019
capabilities. FarmWise said its autonomous, AI-enabled robots are designed to solve farm- ers’ most pressing challenges by performing a variety of farming functions, starting with weeding. “Developing our weeding robots has been an interesting and exciting challenge combining multiple domains of expertise such as machine learning, robotics, and me- chanical engineering,” says FarmWise founder Thomas Palomares. According to FarmWise, their robots can cleanly pick weeds from fields, reducing or eliminating the need for chemical pesticides. In the future, the robots will increasingly act as specialised ‘doctors’ for
PHOTO: DEEPSHIKHA
PHOTO: FRMWISE PHOTO: AFP
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