Artificial intelligence and machine learning enabling FarmByte to make data-driven decisions, and help farmers increase crop yields.
With agriculture such a data-rich industry with a wealth of information that can provide actionable insights for optimizing operations throughout the food system, having a system that can respond in real-time to meet changing demands and conditions along the entire agriculture supply chain is critical.
Johor Corporation’s (JCorp) digital-first agrofood company, FarmByte Sdn Bhd, is harnessing advanced cloud, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, to revolutionize the agrofood sector in Malaysia and uplift the livelihoods of farmers.
By building on AWS Cloud, FarmByte aims to further augment its digital infrastructure and data-driven approach to farming by offering farmers comprehensive crop monitoring solutions and insights, including weather information and fertilizer and pesticide application rates. These insights, provided through the innovative FarmByte app, allow farmers to plan and optimize their resources better for improved yield outcomes.
FarmByte is leveraging AWS’s cloud infrastructure for scalable and reliable hosting of data sources and applications, AWS Data Exchangefor secure data sharing with partners, and Amazon S3and AWS Glue Data Catalogfor secure storage and management of a scalable data lake. By building and deploying a data lake on AWS, FarmByte can now conduct comprehensive analyses and generate actionable insights for Crop Pricing Analytics, Demand Forecasting, and Supply Chain scheduling.
Through AWS’s pioneering data aggregation and management services, FarmByte is also able to aggregate data from various sources within its ecosystem and externally to provide key insights to the farming community.
To enhance its demand forecasts, FarmByte is also leveraging Amazon Forecast’sML capabilities to help farmers better estimate supply chain lead times, which will improve delivery schedules and optimise crop prices for efficient cost management. FarmByte is also employing vision analytics to grade crops such as pineapples using AI/ML capabilities running on Amazon SageMaker.
Going the app way
In line with its advanced and industry-first thinking, FarmByte is exploring the development of an application that uses machine learning to provide FarmByte’s network of farmers with insights into optimal pricing strategies and demand forecasting. By analyzing market trends, supply and demand fluctuations, and historical pricing data, the application aims to help farmers make informed decisions on what crops to plant and when, as well as how to price their produce to maximize profitability and reduce risks associated with price volatility.
FarmByte’s Head of Digital, Mohd Fakhri Mohd Noor, said: “Our vision at FarmByte is to revolutionize Malaysia’s agrofood sector and expand further into the Internet of Things (IoT) to enhance the nation’s food security and empower farmers with knowledge, tools, and near real-time insights to produce higher quality and value crops to uplift their livelihoods.”
He added: “By utilizing AWS’s world-class solutions, FarmByte can enhance our data aggregation, AI and ML capabilities to provide even more advanced predictive analytics and personalized insights to our farmers through our app, as well as innovative solutions that can transform farming practices to ensure a stronger, more sustainable agrofood value chain. With this, we are proud to be among the first in the industry in Malaysia to employ a digital-first approach to provide the farmers we onboard through our FarmByte app with comprehensive insights on crop demand, supply trends, and even future crop prices.”
In addition to providing farmers with comprehensive farming and pricing insights, the FarmByte app digitalizes and accelerates the finance payment process for farmers, and allows them to go through the entire process of off taking – from scheduling to communications with retailers and wholesalers – digitally.
Complementing the FarmByte app is a FarmByte B2B online marketplace that showcases our farmers’ product catalog and allows buyers to see and buy the available product range. This B2B marketplace will be fully launched by the third quarter this year.
