Member's Areas of Interest: Data Management

Weatherquest is a weather forecasting, weather consulting and weather analytics SME, based on the Norwich Research Park. In addition to providing 7-day a week support to all in agriculture and horticulture, across multiple channels, we undertake collaborative underpinning R&D, forge partnerships and help deliver integrated solutions to support day-to-day and strategic decision-making. Our work also extends into the overlapping water and energy sectors.

The Weatherquest team is a combination of greatly experienced weather people who have, throughout their careers, helped clients to remain resilient to weather and climate and young talented graduates offering new ideas and new technologies. Our attention stretches from the local weather measurements and forecasts for an individual farm to the impact of weather and climate variability on global commodity markets. Our continuing aim is to be an umbrella for our clients’ business and to help our community to stay ahead and grasp opportunities.

Rezare Systems is a bespoke agri software developer and consultancy with a strong applied agri science background. We work in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.

Our mission is to help the primary sector become more productive, sustainable, and profitable. We’re passionate about making software that is both useful and usable for the primary sector.

Our team helps agricultural companies and organisations create new software tools and products to collect and manage agricultural data, and to use that data in ways that provide insights for farmers and their advisors.

We specialise in applying lean, design-led software processes to agricultural technologies and needs. Our customers include product and service vendors, animal health, genetics, farming and processing organisations.

Take a look at their webpage, or read their latest blog: https://rezare.com/blog/

Grounddata specialises in delivering environmental metrics to agriculture from sensors above and below ground. Our approach focuses on producing actionable data tailored to individual crops.

We provide arrays of sensors connected which transmit data to our cloud-based storage. Users can then view the data either via our portal or transfer the data to farm management and agronomist’s systems.

Grounddata was founded in 2017 with the support of the European Space Agency under their business incubation programme. We are always seeking to broaden our relationships with businesses in the food supply chain and leading research organisations.

More details at www.GroundData.co.uk or contact marketing@grounddata.co.uk

fieldmargin allows farmers around the world to save time and make smarter decisions by bringing their farm’s information and communications into one place. Their ethos is that in the future farmers won’t be using 20 apps to manage their farm but a single place that provides a holistic view of all of their data.

fieldmargin’s apps for web, iOS and Android allow farmers to create digital farm maps with geo-located notes that can be shared with all the people working on the farm including advisers and contractors. Photos, comments and tagging allow up-to-the-minute collaboration on all aspects of work on the farm.

Integrations with external data sources allow farmers to monitor what happens on their farm and be alerted to changes from one place. This allows better informed decision-making by enabling the analysis of data from different sources side by side, and saves the farmer time and effort. These integrations include aerial imagery from drones and satellites, IoT sensor outputs, price feeds, yield maps and machinery telematics.

fieldmargin have already launched a connection with the John Deere Operations Center which allows users to import their field boundaries and soon to see the location of their machinery in real time, Natural England public data sets and weather data. Integrations that are in the pipeline include more major machinery manufacturers, a drone imagery processing and flight plan company, satellite imagery analysis, internet of things (IoT) sensor manufacturers.

Find them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter @fieldmargin

 Read fieldmargin’s latest news at blog.fieldmargin.com

A large proportion of the population in developing countries are smallholder farmers. Selling excess produce accounts for at least 50% of their family income. They are unfairly disadvantaged and face exploitation as they sell comparatively small volumes and are geographically isolated. The vast majority of smallholders, globally, have access to 2G ‘brick’ phones and local buyers have access to smartphones.

We have developed a digital farmer-to-buyer transaction platform as a scalable solution to the market access, data generation, and data delivery problem in smallholder agriculture. The platform is user-centric, built for the technology available to smallholders and local buyers. We are currently undertaking our proof-of-concept pilot in Colombia for 12-18 months from 2019-20. We have secured collaboration agreements with three major agricultural organisations and a telecoms company in Colombia to pilot with ~1000 farmers. In addition, our team has extensive experience in sub-Saharan African agriculture, and we are actively exploring pilot projects in East Africa. Our six team members met as PhD students at the University of Cambridge. We cover a broad range of skills, from predictive modelling and data analytics within agricultural systems, project implementation in developing countries, machine learning, and agricultural policy.

Currently, the majority of smallholder agricultural activity is informal, which means there is no centralised, transparent record. Digital platforms bring informal activity ‘online’. Providing a farmer-to-buyer digital transaction tool simultaneously generates large amounts of agro-economic data, and has the highest probability of adoption, as it is connected to the most direct incentive in the system: increasing household income. Moreover, whilst farmers are not paid a fair price for growing additional produce, there is no incentive to increase farm productivity. Therefore, we view market access as the first order problem that must be solved as productivity boosting tools, such as fertilizer or improved cultivars, depend on it making financial sense for farmers to grow more.

We believe this problem is unsolved because you cannot efficiently communicate adequate spatial information with ‘brick’ phones alone. However, uniquely, we hypothesise that this problem can be solved without both sides needing smartphones. We have designed an end-to-end tool that manages the entire transaction from the point of connecting farmers and buyers to facilitating payments, where the buyer is a smartphone user and the farmer can use a ‘brick’ or smartphone. We take advantage of phone calling where possible to minimise barriers to entry due to illiteracy. Importantly, by facilitating payment, this allows a small transaction fee to be applied, which provides the mechanism for the platform to be sustainable and drives expansion to new users.

Twitter: @farming_data |  Instagram: farmingdata  |  Facebook: farmingdata.io  |  YouTube: http://bit.ly/farmingdataYT

Knowledge for Free – Decisions for a Fee

Global agriculture faces massive challenges as a consequence of a growing conflict between economic and technical interests on the one hand and environmental and social on the other. Currently there exists no system approach that allows to combine competing interests; making sustainable food production nearly impossible.

Agricompas digitises entire crop value chains to create and provide valuable information as never done before so that all involved stakeholders can improve the efficiency of their processes. In this holistic approach we execute three major steps:

1. Collect with partners detailed data per crop, per grower, per field in near real-time. We use weather stations, greenhouse gas sensors, satellite and drone Earth Observation, biodiversity camera straps, third party and grower records
2. Apply crop modelling, machine learning and A.I. to process comprehensive data sets in economic, social, technical and environmental process knowledge (to analyse and understand the gap between actual and potential performance)
3. Create commercially viable business models per crop and per country, based on a digital platform called EcoProMIS that provides “Knowledge for Free” to our partners and “Decisions for a Fee” to a wide range of customers

From 2018 till 2021 Agricompas is executing two Proof of Concept projects in Colombia to digitise rice, cacao and oil palm with strategic partners in Colombia (Solidaridad, IWCO, CIAT, Fedecacao, Fedearroz and Cenipalma) and the UK (Pixalytics and the Universities of Lincoln and Reading). The projects have a budget of £5m and are grant funded by Innovate UK, the Prosperity Fund and the UK Space Agency (dept. BEIS).

We are interested to meet new partners and customers to develop knowledge services and decision support in new crops and geographies. Investors please request a pitch deck from Roelof Kramer the CEO and founder; roelof.kramer@agricompas.com

Map of Ag is a leading provider of insight and knowledge to Farmers, AgProfessionals and AgBusiness, delivering pioneering analytics, modelling and research.

Our innovative technology enables any business within the food supply chain – from farmer to retailer – to make sound decisions based on accurate, real time information. Our approach is built on expertise and integrity which contributes to the long-established farming culture of shared information and best practice.

Our mission is to provide the industry with better information, better communication and better farms as a result. Informing farmers & the industry: Our research arm, the National Farm Research Unit, has conversed with tens of thousands of farmers for over 20 years about topics that matter. We listen, we analyse and share the results with both farmers and the industry.

Across our data models we not only employ cutting edge analytics but build bespoke algorithms to maximise the insight we can offer the farmer and industry. We provide market insight on over 74,000 farms, with more than 4 million observations going back to harvest 1994 and up to 150 layers of insight against each farm.

Our comprehensive research services can improve a company’s performance, customer relationships and profitability through better informed decisions. We provide services on a global basis from offices in the UK, Argentina and New Zealand.

The Institute for Environmental Analytics (IEA) is a leading centre of excellence supporting the development of the environmental data analytics market.

Established in mid-2015, they work closely with customers in different sectors to develop proof of concept demonstrators, pre-commercial R&D and bespoke training courses aimed at increasing the uptake, usage and commercial exploitation of environmental data.

Drawing on a team of highly qualified specialists with in-depth experience of application development, computing and data science, the IEA helps organisations tap into cutting edge research to tackle environmental challenges. Typical projects range from a few weeks to several months. All are focused on quickly but effectively trialling new ideas and de-risking a client’s investment in future products, applications and services. Clients benefit from the deep resources of the partnership in areas including data capture, climate modelling, cloud computing, scientific research and operational service provision.

IEA Partners include the University of Reading, Airbus Defence & Space, Deimos Space UK, Lighthill Risk Network, Met Office, Microsoft UK & Microsoft Research, National Centre for Earth Observation, University of Oxford, Sainsbury’s, Satellite Applications Catapult, STFC, University of Surrey, Telespazio Vega, BMT Group, ERM, Agrimetrics, CGI, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and Buro Happold Engineering.

Follow the IEA on Twitter at @env_analytics and on LinkedIn.

Open data is a powerful tool being used to solve problems around the world in agriculture and nutrition: from drought, pests and diseases, to food security and food safety. Farmers need to know the weather forecast to plant and prepare their crops, food merchants need market information to trade and make a profit, aid groups need to know where malnutrition is most prevalent to target their programmes, and consumers want to know the risks and nutritional value of the food they eat.

The Open Data Institute (ODI) www.theodi.org is working to highlight how to improve agriculture and nutrition with open data. This includes highlighting examples of how open data in different contexts can enable more effective decision making, create innovation and promote transparency that transforms the way organisations work for the better. By helping others to do the same it will alleviate today’s pressures on a strained food ecosystem and build necessary mechanisms to support a food-secure future.

Through applied research, open discussion and sector-focused events, they are exploring what works, what the challenges are and what their global priorities should be. They are seeking input from experts in the field, engaging them to join the discussion as ODI Members, bloggers and advisors. They want to harness the value of open data to inform decision making, boost innovation and promote transparency in agriculture and nutrition, from farm to fork.

Follow them on Twitter: @ODIHQ.

Agrimetrics is a big data centre of excellence for the whole agri-food value chain, from farm through to consumer.

It is creating a secure data hub for the agri-food community that adds value and improves access to publicly funded data sources. It can advise, develop and implement knowledge-based services that build resilience and sustainability in the agri-food industry.

Agrimetrics builds on the expertise of its founding organisations – Rothamsted Research, the University of Reading, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) – together with input from over 50 companies and environmental and academic organisations.

Agrimetrics is creating novel informatics capabilities including a data platform and associated ecosystem to support data integration, modelling and analysis as well as access to data from a wide range of areas relevant to the sector. A Network of Excellence, bringing together world-leading expertise from research organisations across the UK, will add further capability to Agrimetrics for the benefit of industry. A key aim is to ensure that companies can recognise the impact that data can have on their organisation, and are well placed to access the outputs of Agrimetrics.

KisanHub is a Crop Intelligence Platform and was born out of a desire to give farmers everywhere a sophisticated, meaningful yet, simple decision-support.
The platform connects enterprises with their growers to provide crop intelligence through crop specific apps and is focussed on in-season agronomy advice on pest/diseases, fertiliser application, irrigation management and yield prediction to reduce the input costs and improve profit margins. These insights are provided to farmers and their enterprises by assimilating and aggregating disparate datasets. The suite of applications fit around the enterprise’s needs, with the key operational and agronomic data being seamlessly shared throughout the platform. The aim of KisanHub is to connect agriculture for the benefit of farmers globally to help them grow more and use less.

KisanHub’s core technology brings together public and private data and the platform is built to connect farmers with the rest of the supply chain. This connectivity is achieved through the collaboration tools provided on the platform. This in turn empowers all the market participants to communicate with farmers for in-season operational, agronomic or business advisory services. The aggregated data on crops provide supply chain visibility to enterprises where such contractual relations with farmers exist. The platform provides advisory on pest/diseases, fertiliser application, irrigation management and yield prediction so farmers can apply right input of a right product at the right time and in the right quantity.

Follow them on Twitter: @KisanHub

Read their blogs: kisanhub.com/blog/ and career openings: kisanhub.com/careers/

Top news: kisanhub.com/blog/new-investment-and-new-hires-for-kisanhub/