Technology and agriculture work in concert and can be disruptive. Farmers are great at adopting new technology, especially when it helps productivity and delivers more efficiency in farming operations. These improvements are the motivation for adopting new technologies, and the reason is quite simple: the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) predicts that there will be 9.6 billion people on the planet by 2050, and food production will have to increase by 70 percent.
Agribusiness is the business of agricultural production. It focuses on the processing, warehousing, distribution, marketing, and retailing of products that are used in farming. Agribusiness popularized IoT solutions and put this technology on a different level.
Today, there are a lot of huge companies in this segment, such as Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta; AB Agri (part of Associated British Foods); ADM; John Deere; Ocean Spray; and Purina Farms. It is getting difficult to earn market share and make good deals in today's globalized world.
Farmers experience more pressure than ever to be productive. Therefore, they need to be concerned about topics such as the following:
- Keeping track of a production lot
- Creating a strategy for production warehousing
- Getting information about a commodity's market
- Identifying certain plagues in a faster way
- Guaranteeing a good environment, routine, and slaughterhouse for their animals so that all animals are well-cared for and well-prepared
These are the main challenges that farmers face. They rely on sensors; data collectors for measuring temperature, time, and the area to harvest; faster harvesting machines; GPS; predictive models supporting decision making; and blockchains to guarantee the storage of information in a precise and transparent way.