Recent developments in agriculture, innovations and latest agricultural techniques are decided to transform a traditional industry in a highly technologized one. New concepts like precision farming, smart farming, vertical farming, biogenomics, crop efficiency, are arising and promising to bring the agriculture in a new era.
Among the most innovative areas that will decide the future of agriculture, we count:
Precision Farming
Precision farming aims to provide superior control and accuracy to growing crops activities and those of raising livestock. Information technology agriculture is a key element together with sensors, drones, control systems, GPS enabled soil sampling, software and hardware automatizations, telematics. All these technologies are used in the purpose of mitigating risks and reinforce sustainability.
AGERpoint is such a startup activating in the precision farming area. Based on satellite data their orchard management application provides granular data like individual tree information, canopy dimensions or diameter of a certain trunk.
Agrobot is another relevant precision startup that offers manipulation robotic systems for selecting strawberries. It can analyze individual fruits, sort them upon their size and ripeness degree, guaranteeing accuracy and sensitivity in their treatment.
Smart Farming
Smart Farming is a crop management system based on observations and measures, big data analytics, process automation and optimization devices that allows better decisions, using less resources and obtaining superior results. Its essence is to target an increased efficiency. Smart farming and its tools enable precise and detailed decisions in every phase of the crop cycle, identify in due time negative factors that impact yields, take immediate action, reduce inputs, costs and maximize crops and profits.
Spensa Technologies is a solution offering farmers the possibility to closely observe their fields, track disease or pests in crops.
CropX provides cloud enabled applications integrated with sensors that function wireless, boosting crops and preserving energy and water resources. The software generates irrigation maps and automatically directs the needed water quantity in various parts of a field.
Robotic Farming Equipment and Machinery
Various monitoring solutions and sensor technologies are creating an automation process on the traditional farming. Together with other creative alternatives like vertical farming, the purpose is to replicate the land environment through irrigation systems, lighting conditions and gases supplements to generate output in spaces inaccessible till now to agriculture.
An example is NeoFarms, a German startup which grows crop automatically through aeroponics in vertical building farms. It drastically increases the efficiency of a small area and diminish logistics costs.
Another example is the Irish startup MicroGen Biotech who deals with soil remediation, ameliorating soil quality and fertility, maximizing yields in stressful conditions. They use innovative biotechnologies like “high throughput screening” and “functional microbiomes” to ameliorate oil impacted soils and other type of damaged fields.
Maximize Crop Efficiency
Today farmers are able to use satellite images and integrated drones to gather granular information about their fields and crops in real time. They are able to track a large number of metrics from number of seeds on square meter to weather conditions, soil parameters and take the according decisions based on real data. Applications are also ready to provide analytics and make automated recommendations to streamline business operations.
Granular is a software application that based on data tracks all the activities of a farm allowing farmers to prioritize resources, monitor revenues and make forecasts.
These are just some areas where major improvements are already visible, many more are under the siege of innovations and will bring sooner or later ameliorations that farmers and growers will benefit of.
Silicon Valley Innovation Center 