Challenge
Agriculture uses 70% of all freshwater. Globally, fertilizers worth $10 billion USD are annually wasted due to a lack of precision farming. The lack of sustainable farming will not meet the growing global population’s increasing food demands. While precision irrigation and digital agriculture is gradually becoming more common in Western countries, it is not in the Middle East and North Africa. Additionally, farmers in the region do not have a data driven platform that can be used to optimize water and fertilizer usage.
Solution
THE PLATFORM built a precision farming platform that utilizes data of Internet of Things (IoT) ground sensors, weather satellite imagery, and daily farm activity records to enable variable rate irrigation and fertilization. The platform benefits from the help of crops and soil scientific modeling to simulate the plant requirements and behavior, then, throughout the season, the platform sends actionable insights to the farmers.
The PlatformX product has mobile and web apps to manage farm daily activities.It offers two integrations, one with IoT sensors monitoring soil moisture, environmental parameters, pest’s infestation and another integration with satellite imagery to monitor crop growth and health.
The second product is CognitiveX, an AI platform that uses soil crop, weather, and farm data to act as agronomist. The platform closely and continuously monitors the farm performance to wisely tune the irrigation and fertilization for specific spots within the farm, maximizing yield profitability with optimized resources.
THE PLATFORM brings technology to the farmers level and it can easily be accessed through their cellphone. THE PLATFORM also believes women can play a major role helping with irrigation decision-making. Reduction of irrigation volumes can reduce efforts to collect water from certain offtake points, especially when women need to travel to collect water.