“If you follow AgTech news, not a single day goes by without yet another announcement from a startup or large tech company highlighting their groundbreaking innovative product that targets a key piece of the agricultural supply-chain. All this investment activity and technical innovation has even attracted the eyes of the big tech firms—such as Google (Farmers Business Network) and Amazon (Plenty)—who have set up their own investment vehicles to capitalize on it. All of this technology investment going into agriculture has to be a good thing, right?”
– Stephen Berry, VP Information Technology
Six Key Components of the Ag Tech Evolution
The six key components making up this emerging platform for 2021 and beyond include:
- 1. IoT (Internet of Things) sensors to gather vast amounts of ever-increasing raw data at the source
- 2. Edge-computing to enable local processing of the data volumes, minimizing network latency
- 3. 5G networks to provide high speed, reliable, and widespread network capability, connecting the Edge to the Cloud
- 4. AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) to make sense of the massive amount of data and automatically deal with the mundane, freeing up humans to deal with the exceptions
- 5. A growing number of APIs (Application Interfaces) into ERP transactional systems closes the loop, enabling the AI and ML to automatically process transactions
- 6. Blockchain to reliably and securely store the data in a scalable way without the risk of exposing critical information via unauthorized access