Experts believe that open-sourcing technologies for agriculture can help address the urgent global food crisis and climate change. By 2050, we need to roughly double global food production to feed the planet. But with accelerating climate change, declining water tables and dwindling arable land, achieving this in a sustainable way will be a major challenge.
The tool’s algorithms, which run on Microsoft Azure, predict the ideal amount of fertilizer and herbicides and where to apply them; predict temperatures and wind speeds in fields and inform when and where farmers should plant and spray; determine the ideal depth for seeding based on soil moisture; and tell farmers how different crops and practices can sequester carbon in the soil.
One of the most promising approaches to solving this problem is data-driven agriculture, according to Ranveer Chandra, executive director of Research for Industry (RFI). Microsoft’s RFI initiative aims to identify advances in technologies such as connectivity, robotics and AI and leverage them across a range of industries, including retail, agri-food and others.