Precision Agriculture Is the Agtech Word of the Day

By CTech

If farmers today mention clouds, odds are they are talking about technology, not the chance for rain, writes Sophie Shulman at CTech. Amazon already has an agtech-dedicated cloud service, Agritech. Microsoft hopped on the bandwagon two months ago when it announced that it turned its FarmBeats research project commercial, offering farmers an AI platform that can gather data from sensors, satellites, drones, meteorological stations, and other tools and analyze them to produce insights and recommendations.

But it is not just the giant tech companies that go to the farmer in search of additional revenue sources. There are no less than 1,600 global startups in the domain (not including adjacent domain foodtech). All are focused on one goal — maximizing profit for the farmers by improving efficiency, boosting yield, and cutting costs. While other professions fear the day robots replace human employees, farmers, always in need of more manpower, dream of it.

According to Michal Levy, senior deputy director-general of agricultural innovation at the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, agritech today emphasizes precision agriculture — for example, the use of sensors and digital systems for monitoring crops, in order to understand individual needs and help cut water and pesticide use. Another avenue is genome editing, to develop new, improved strains. “These sectors raised billions of dollars in recent years, and in fact, there are too many companies nowadays, so we are seeing mergers and acquisitions,” Levy said.

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