More importantly, the quality of the information that digital platforms provide to farmers is only as good as the data collected. High-tech applications, like driverless tractors and pesticide spraying drones, are clearly not being developed for them. 6Īll of this may sound quite disconnected from the realities and needs of the 500 million or so small farm households in the world who produce much of the world's food. The logic then, which we are already starting to see play out, is towards an integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data. It thus has a huge advantage over these companies, not only in terms of the amount of data it can access, but also in terms of its capacity to analyse this data and ultimately profit from it.
Amazon, like Microsoft, is developing its own digital agriculture platform, which can potentially tap into the data collected by Bayer and numerous other companies that use its cloud services. 5 In this case, it is Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud service platform, ahead of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba. Credit: Microsoft UAE twitter accountīayer, like the other agribusiness companies, has to lease the digital infrastructure it needs to run its app from one of the Big Tech companies that control the world's cloud services. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, and ruler of the Emirate of Dubai at GITEX2020 finding out about Azure FarmBeats.