Agritech Software Development: Expertise Requirements

The rise of digital agriculture and related technologies has brought a multitude of new opportunities for working with data. Some of the most commonly used devices, like remote detectors, autonomous robotics, pilotless aerial systems, and remote sensing systems, gather information 24 hours a day in whatever weather conditions.

They enable controlling the state of plant and soil, temperature, humidity, the regularity of irrigation, and enforce other tasks relied on farmers. However, the idea of agriculture software is to increase the effectiveness, optimize land use, face labor shortages, and bring cost-effectiveness.

In one respect, agribusiness might be considered one of the most conservative in the means of implementation of farming technology. Conversely, the agricultural industry has been adopting modern IT solutions for a long time so far. To match the projected food demand of the world population in 2050, agricultural production is required to increase by 48,6% globally. In its turn, this information sets a challenging yet solvable task for the farm sector.

That being said, farmers and other agricultural companies look for IT providers who could help them put farming technology into use.

Qubit Labs has decided to tackle this topic to figure out what is required to implement a suitable agrotechnology software development, which will help to benefit from this sector.

Artificial Intelligence for AgriTech

AI technologies can be applied in different agricultural production areas, like for projecting the crop yield based on different factors. The main fields of application are related to the following activities:

• Detecting plant diseases.
• Classification and identification of groundskeepers
• Measurement, estimation, and harvesting of the crop
• Managing water resources and soil
• Weather forecasting
• Determining animals’ behavior

The entire arsenal of AI is applied to deliver the mentioned results, including computer vision, machine learning, and sound recognition. New technology in agriculture enables farmers to monitor the harvest conditions using helmets or glasses that support machine learning. Another significant innovation in agriculture is intellectual irrigation. Modern irrigation technologies utilize ML to distinguish groundskeepers from crops and spray down with herbicides only the first ones. Consequently, the price of cultivating crops decreases while food safety rises.

But who stands at the roots of these solutions? There are three groups of agriculture software companies that actively invest in AI-based development. The first ones are tech giants, like IBM, which owns the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture. This platform helps to process data, get information about the existing damage to crops, and analyze the probability of occurrence of the mentioned damage.

The next group that focuses on software for agriculture are pharmaceutical manufacturers. One of the examples is the Bayer concern, which has an app that provides recommendations based on the data from satellite images. With this agriculture technology, the farmer can check the state of plants and the local weather forecast at any moment. The company has also invented the service, which can detect weeds or something that happens to the plants, and send notifications about the occurring issues. Another agriculture software is presented by the platform Hummingbird Technologies. It provides information about the crops by analyzing data gathered by drones, plains, and satellites. After that, it interprets it utilizing proprietary algorithms.

The third group among agriculture software companies are startups or specialized IT companies. An Israeli startup, Taranis, provides accurate information concerning crops’ state, allowing to define negative facts and give advice on how to eliminate them. For the monitoring, it utilizes the indicators from observing sensors, meteorological data, and aerial photos. This system allows identifying areas of fields where plants are in poor conditions, potential harvesting, and the levels of nutritional elements in plants.

Using IoT in AgroTechnology

Another agricultural technology example is smart farming, a developing market, which can offer various opportunities to the companies that already have solutions. IoT can transform agriculture in different ways, including:

• Technology in agriculture allows gathering large amounts of data with smart sensors, like progress in the crops’ growth or soil quality. Further, it might be utilized to monitor your business’s state and evaluate certain aspects to see what you can do to introduce updates.
• The control of internal processes implies lower production risks. That being said, the mentioned agricultural technology enables farmers to predict the amount of production and plan the most accurate distribution. If the company knows how much harvest there will be, it can reduce waste.
• Software for agriculture enables effective cost management and waste reduction thanks to reinforced production control. By tracking any possible deviation regarding crop growth or livestock health, there is a possibility to minimize risks.
• High tech farming enhances business’ effectiveness on account of process automation in the production cycle, for example, at the stages of irrigation or fertilizer application.
• Agricultural innovations related to IoT also allow establishing better production control, supporting higher quality standards, and increasing harvest.

Alongside achieving optimal and secure food production, the agricultural IoT aims to ensure food safety at various levels, such as storage and transportation. To achieve this, it uses a monitoring system for various factors such as delivery time, storage temperature, and cloud accounting. Besides, IoT farming technology is useful in livestock management by supporting livestock health through monitoring tools such as cattle ear tags (chips) capable of detecting respiratory diseases.

Industrial IoT applications are useful for monitoring indoor agricultural facilities such as silos, dairies, and stables. Advanced technology in agriculture can bring efficiency to the agricultural space and create a virtuous cycle that makes food more accessible to consumers, saves farmers’ time and money, and reduces the environmental impact of agriculture while ensuring a sustainable process.

Big Data for AgriTech

Technology and agriculture currently complement one another because processing big data has great potential for farming. From season to season, farmers have to make many decisions to increase or prevent losing their harvest. To facilitate these processes, companies have embarked on developing services that will be useful even for the farmers who don’t have skills in working with data. New agriculture technology takes on decision-making processes, and the only thing people have to do is define tasks. Some companies provide equipment for data gathering, some – agriculture software for processing information, and others launch complete sets of programs and devices.

Technology in agriculture implies developing programs that enable users to check the data, which is presented in understandable graphs, from any device. These applications help define when it’s better to plant and harvest crops or how intensively to irrigate fields.

Besides, when combining technology and agriculture, one can reduce costs by implementing the application’s suggestions regarding the state of soil and optimizing fertilization processes. Big data replaces specialists by analyzing information in more effective ways, enabling farmers to accelerate production stages.

Thus, new technology in agriculture will bring major changes and transform the classical business systems. Modern IT solutions enable farmers to receive advice and recommendations regarding their production processes independent of the time and location.

If you want to implement advances in agriculture yet haven’t managed to find an experienced vendor, Qubit Labs will readily help you out.

Feel free to contact us to receive a qualitative consultation from our specialists, and we will build the team for developing your project.  

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