America’s Farmers Are Bogged Down by Data
agricultural data that will be collected, and are working with startups and agtech providers to gain footholds in the sector. In March, Amazon Web Services partnered with the agtech startup Leaf, which provides connectors between data sources in different formats. AWS also works with John Deere, providing cloud services for the machinery manufacturer’s data services, the Amazon cloud unit said.
Last year, Google Cloud partnered with the climate-tech startup Agrology to help predict farm microclimates and process data. In January, its parent Alphabet spun off a company called Mineral from its X moonshots division; Mineral is developing a platform to aggregate agricultural data and apply AI to it. At the same time, venture capital funding for farm management software, sensing and Internet-of-Things devices increased by 35% last year to $1.7 billion globally—the largest increase of any agriculture tech category, according to investment firm AgFunder.
The next big wave in farm innovation, largely known as “precision agriculture," uses technologies like data analytics, AI, GPS and sensors to help farmers make data-informed decisions that could boost their yields with fewer resources. The stakes are high. For crops like corn, winter wheat, soybeans and cotton, farmers who adopted precision agriculture technologies achieved significantly higher yields compared with those who didn’t, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture found. For instance, in 2017, farmers using digital soil maps produced about 49% higher winter wheat yields than those who didn’t, the USDA said in a report this year. Faster adoption of such tools is also critical to meet the world’s growing demand for food and an increase in extreme weather conditions, experts
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