Insight
Creating a cognitive roadmap for farmers
The world’s population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, according to the UN.¹ As climate change—extreme weather, soil loss, migration pressures—continues to put pressure on the Earth’s ability to produce food, the agriculture industry is turning to technology for help.
Norway-based Yara, one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers, is on a mission to create a sustainable world without hunger.
To do this, Yara is partnering with IBM to build the world’s leading digital farming platform.
Idea
From bushels to bytes
In building the platform, Yara and IBM focused on creating and realizing a cloud-agnostic strategy that enabled consistent data governance and data security. It also focused on DataOps—automating data functions that allow its data scientists to focus on data models and innovation.
The platform provides holistic digital services and instant agronomic advice to farmers across the globe, ultimately avoiding deforestation by increasing food production on existing farmland. Together, the Yara digital platform aims to cover 7 percent of all arable land worldwide.
The cloud-agnostic platform follows a pay-as-you-go commercial model and provides Yara with two data services: weather data and crop yield as a service. These accelerators are the first of many; an open innovation layer will enable Yara to create new ground-breaking algorithms providing farmers knowledge and decision-making insights.
“ Agriculture is one of the last industries that has focused on systematic process optimization. ”
— Pål Øystein Stormorken, Yara
Impact
Transformation beyond chatbots
Farms are largely fragmented and disconnected from one another. Reaching 620 million farm families one-by-one around the world is a challenge. But through the platform, information and people are better connected.
The recommendations a big field in Australia gets, for example, are based on data from the entire region. And for farmers, accurate weather forecasting is crucial to high yields.
The platform is only the beginning.
Transparency in trade through blockchain technologies will also empower farmers.
Yara is well on its journey to be a cognitive enterprise, IBM’s vision for the next-generation business model. By leveraging its data, the company is reinventing itself around the world.
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