The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is well known. In their eagerness to reach the heavens, a sophisticated civilization speaking one language, have their efforts thwarted by the very deity they seek to vanquish.
Consequently, the deity makes each community speak a different language, thus creating great confusion and dispersing them across the globe.
One of the greatest challenges that crop growers face today is the fragmentation of data sources; the profusion of different file types, and the lack of tools and platforms that provide us with the ability to turn Big Data into usable insights.
This in turn has created an agricultural Tower of Babel.
Even the very best researchers and agronomists can be challenged by the sheer volume, diverse formats and difficulties interpreting, integrating, and making use of non-standardized Big Data provided by the global agricultural industry. This includes data from field trials and agronomic experimentation, weather, soil conditions, planting times, and fertilizers etc..
The rise of big data and AI in agriculture
The use of Big Data and AI in agriculture has the potential to disrupt the way farming and agronomy operate.
Current crop management systems are based on experimental data from multiple sources and standards, making it difficult to compare apples with apples and to generate insights applicable to broad production conditions. Decades-old legacy data is still stored in Excel and other tabular data formats, creating fragmented data silos. Researchers and different stakeholders need to invest significant time and resources to try and unify them. By integrating these data silos and fragmented files into a single coherent database it enables researchers to address critical research gaps, such as increasing the sustainability of production environments, reduce carbon footprints, and boost global food security. Our vision at Agmatix is to create a world where high-quality and standardized agronomic data is readily available, supporting Agro-professionals globally to address these critical research gaps.
Large volumes of data composed of different file types
The lack of uniformity and standardization has turned the available data into a veritable Tower of Babel, with unique file types, data headers and formats which when coupled together with huge data volumes makes it almost impossible to gain insights from all the available information.
The use of AI in agriculture enables agronomists and crop managers to streamline their work with greater efficiency and productivity thus leading to an improved quantity and quality of crop yields, while increasing the sustainability of production.
Enter the Agmatix 2.0 digital crop advisor era: from crop advice to crop management
This week, Version 2.0 of the Agmatix Digital Crop Advisor was launched. Our Digital Crop Advisor is a data-driven decision support system that uses and transforms available information from existing databases and live inputs from growers into actionable insights and recommendations needed to optimize day-to-day crop management.
Disruptive technology
Multiple parameters that influence agricultural growing practices, including weather and soil pH, can be measured and accounted for. A farmer who wants to make the most efficient use of water resources and fertilizers must adjust nutrient quantities based on weather dynamics and considerations of crop development stages.
Agmatix’s innovative and disruptive technology collects, defines, and categorizes data from multiple sources to standardize, harmonize, and facilitate a unified database of relevant data to assist agronomic research. Our advanced algorithms generate on-demand automated nutrition plans by leveraging multiple parameters including, among others, crop type, field location, pH, previous crops, plant uptake and laboratory analyses. By synchronizing these multiple data sources, our technology optimizes fertilizer application, and so reduces the risk of groundwater and greenhouse gas(GHG) pollution.
In addition, this innovative Agro-solution helps to maximize the utilization of agricultural practices. For example, farmers often have to deal with unexpected challenges such as sudden winds that can negate spray irrigation and fertilization. Our technology can provide timely warnings that alerts the farmer or his trusted advisor to make changes to the schedule.
Precision agricultural tools enabled
Integrating in real time all the factors that affect crop management decisions is highly challenging for farmers, agronomists and researchers.
Agmatix’s precision agriculture tool – the Digital Crop Advisor – improves the recommendations provided to the farmer for optimal crop management. Our algorithms are constantly at work, considering different dynamic parameters and accounting for the ever changing field conditions.
The Agmatix platform enables the development of statistically and scientifically relevant and valid agricultural models, which in addition to improving crop yields and profits, helps to minimize food waste and to support the pressing issues of reducing world food poverty and feeding a growing global population.
Customer / field agent interface
The customer/field agent interface allows the field agent agronomist to view all the farmer’s properties and operations as part of the customer card. This generates operational visibility and the ability to review all the recommendations created by field agents, including regional trends, and insights from the field.
Adoption of the Agmatix Digital Crop Advisor will create the opportunity to synthesize usable concrete analyses and insights out of the endless amounts and types of available data. This in turn, will lead to an improvement of the growers’ productivity, more accurate and scientific management of data inputs by agronomists, and a significant advance in crop management.
Building a global agricultural database
The company has partnered together with leading global research institutes, universities, NGOs, and agricultural companies who are now using Agmatix to standardize their data. Agmatix’s solutions enable them to perform statistical and modeling analysis of their data.
Agmatix is building a global database poised to unlock the value of big data in agriculture – shortening timelines, reducing waste, and increasing crop yields for agricultural professionals and farmers. This permits Agmatix to build the largest and highest quality database of standardized data in the world.
The database will equip these institutions and agribusinesses with the tools to develop machine-based models that can predict the environment’s impact on plant nutrition, enabling the short and long-term planning of crop production.
Open and accessible collaborative data
Addressing current global challenges in food security will require collaboration between different stakeholders. Collaboration enables us to harness the power of many to cover needed parameter space, sharing insights and results. The fragmentation of data hampers our ability to collaborate – unifying multiple files into a central coherent database is time consuming and labor intensive. Agmatix streamlines the standardization of data coming from multiple sources and stakeholders, thus eliminating the bottleneck in team collaboration.
Using the system, teams can statistically analyze the data, discuss results, and build publication-ready figures.
Revolutionizing agricultural practices
Agmatix’s revolutionary approach aims to solve the lack of data standardization, and provides farmers and researchers with a solution for the analysis of large volumes of data and varying data types. Better analysis based on more data, leads to better insights and management decisions. Better decisions in turn, lead to increased yields, better food quality, less environmental pollution and the promotion of a more sustainable food system.
