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Microsoft is showing how data-driven farming platform can benefit ag

Farmers continue to face the challenge of feeding more people while preserving resources and minimizing their environmental impact.

Microsoft is showing that technology can be part of the solution with it’s FarmBeats program.

Mike Egan is the senior director of TechSpark with Microsoft.

“We have a program we call FarmBeats in which we’re actually doing soil erosion, pesticide, aerial data imaging,” he says.  “Data is all about what’s going to drive the future, so if you can quickly aggregate that data and put it in the hand of a farmer through a phone and they now know when to plant, when to water and when to seed – that’s pretty remarkable.”

FarmBeats, a multi-year effort to bring data analytics to the ag sector, kicked off in 2015 with a prototype for an Internet of things (IoT) platform for agriculture.

The goal of the program is to enable data-driven farming.

“We’re just trying to make the farmer more efficient by adding more tools to their toolbox,” he says.

The USDA recently announced that it would partner with Microsoft to pilot FarmBeats at a 7,000-acre research farm in Maryland. And earlier this year 50 FFA chapters received Microsoft FarmBeats Student Kits as part of a collaboration between the National FFA Organization and Microsoft.