SaraniaSat’s™ Data-Driven Solutions for Precision Agriculture
Technology is constantly transforming the way the agricultural sector does business. Digital agriculture, and specifically precision agriculture, are democratizing data – empowering farmers with access to reliable data to make informed, effective decisions. Data-driven decisions have the potential to make farm management more productive, more consistent, and to use time and resources more efficiently. “Big Data” brings critical advantages for farmers and wider social benefits around the world.
SaraniaSat’s™ combined hardware and software remote-sensing solution for precision agriculture promises to significantly increase the rate of adoption of Big Data into daily farm management. For example, the “early warning” aspect of SaraniaSat’s™ agricultural prescriptions allows each farmer to conserve resources via the targeted application of agricultural inputs such as irrigation, fertilizer, and crop-protection products in order to detect onset early and mitigate crop stress due to drought, nitrogen-deficiency, disease, or pest infestation.
Without access to digital agriculture, farmers are making these key decisions based on a combination of manual measurements, experience and corporate recommendations which often tend to be conservative in nature. A digital agriculture system works by gathering data more frequently and accurately, often combined with external sources such as weather information, subject to analysis and interpretation by expert agronomists. The resulting actionable, farm management information enables farmers to make more informed and appropriate decisions, quickly and accurately, saving time and precious resources such as labor, fertilizer, irrigation and crop protection costs.
Precision agriculture helps farmers do more, with less. In the next 40 years, the world population is expected to explode from 7 billion to more than 9 billion people and already hundreds of millions of people worldwide go hungry every day. In fact, the United Nations is calling for a 70 percent increase in food production by 2050. Precision agriculture seeks to use new technologies to increase crop yields and profitability while lowering the levels of traditional inputs needed to grow crops (land, water, fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides). SaraniaSat’s™ data-driven, variable-rate strategy helps farmers reduce costs during the crop cycle while maximizing harvest yield. [TG1]
One developing area of precision agriculture involves monitoring and analyzing data specifically targeted to the weather, soil, pest or hydration conditions experienced by a particular farm, field or even crop type in order to make more precise and predictive farming decisions. Collecting and transmitting this data in a timely manner in order to impact daily farm management decisions has, thus far, been a significant barrier, but SaraniaSat™ is changing that.
SaraniaSat’s™ non-linear, weak-signal detection and sensor fusion algorithms operate efficiently on the “edge,” in other words, at the point at which the digital data is acquired and therefore reduces the time delay or latency of providing our customers with actionable information to within hours of acquisition of raw data. Having such unprecedented access to farm management data and information has the potential to increase yield, improve land management, improve supply chains, and improve overall integration – all of which happen to be sustainable development goals as well.
In addition to daily farm management, SaraniaSat’s™ technology can also help with increasing the efficiency of crop field trials of new agricultural products, setting premiums and accurately estimating payouts for crop insurance, and providing early predictive capability for agricultural financial markets. SaraniaSat’s™ remote-sensing data acquisition and analysis solutions provide an efficient and cost-effective way to gather data not only at the individual farm or field scale, but also enabling accurate aggregation of data over regional and national scales. Measurements made at several time points during the crop cycle help significantly in evaluating the efficacy of application of new agricultural products. Remote-sensing data and information products can be used for assessing risk of crop loss and damage to crops for both indemnity insurance as well as index-based insurance. Finally, continuous daily monitoring at a global scale with field- level resolution can generate overall market predictions with the spatial- resolution granularity necessary for these predictions to be robust and reliable. SaraniaSat’s™ technology benefits not only farmers at all scales, but also the entire agricultural ecosystem from production to planning and insurance to crop yield and market awareness.
Digital farming is poised to bring about an unprecedented revolution in agriculture by illuminating, predicting, and significantly influencing the continuum of cultivation issues across the modern farm. Agriculture remains one of the most complex business sectors that can be impacted by Big Data, and SaraniaSat™ is here to help. For more information, contact SaraniaSat™ here.
