Cropped shot of a handsome young male farmer using a tablet while checking on crops on the farm with his wife in the background
In our interactions with farmers, we see common problems being experienced by farmers across Africa. To help farmers support each other, we thought of creating a digital community where farmers across Africa can share ideas of solutions to these common problems and support each other throughout each planting season. It makes business sense for farmers and farm owners to compare notes with other farmers across the continent.
We’ve created an app called SmatCrow where farmers can come together and talk about the problems being faced in several sector of agriculture, a community where they share their victories too and encourage each other.
We’ve also provided access to information in abundance that will help farmers make better decisions going forward. It will also help with problems that’s peculiar to their location, scale of farm and different crops planted.
SmatCrow will also help inform farmers about new innovation happening in the industry and how to properly utilize time for their benefits. Don’t we all love a community that enable us to be better?
Some of SmatCrow’s features include:
Farm Manager, Farm Tools, Real-time weather, Real-time Agri News, Disease Detection, Farm Management, Map Export, Field Measure, Plant Disease AI service, Farm Journal, Drone flight plan automation and much more.
AirSmat, a Pan-African Software company, has received a boost of $100,000 from Zetogon, a UK-based company, as pre-seeding investment to help the organization on the journey to deliver world-class service in the African continent.
The Nigerian-based firm will use the funds to get the flagship product, SmatCrows, to customers in Nigeria and support the product launch.
Speaking on the investment, the Chief Technology Officer, Adeoluwa Ibikunle, said:
“The new investment will enable AirSmat to further build on its position as a startup that helps customers to proactively take business decisions backed by intelligence obtained from AirSmat AI-based platform. We are starting out with food security for the continent; our solution allows smart farmers to gain control of their crop yield and general farming activities. Our innovative and creative approach will use world-class AI-powered software aimed at improving the efficiency of African farmers in terms of yields and productivity using the power of AirSmat Artificial Intelligent (AAI) driven software. The software will provide timely information about the state of their crops and general operations on their farmlands.”
On new markets, “Nigeria comes first with an official launch of our flagship product called Smatcrows in October and a similar launch would be carried out in other African countries by Q2 2021,” Ibikunle said.
In a statement issued by the management of Zetogon, it was said that, “The funds will be used to support the launch of the software services designed to change the agricultural landscape by providing AI driven data that will add value to farming and all agro-allied businesses.”
The new product innovation is a crucial area of focus for AirSmat, which will enable farmers to get more information about their farmlands, thus ensuring timely decision making and, ultimately, increase crop yield.
AirSmat is a software company founded on the belief that drones will shape the future. The company aims to provide cutting edge software solutions to many rapidly growing industries adopting drones into daily operations by helping to transform the way businesses collect, manage, and interpret drone data. AirSmat desires to help businesses unlock the power of drone data.
Since farmers are usually affected by unpredictable changes in weather and market, it is important that every purchased seed turns out to be a healthy yield. One way that farmers seek to optimize yield capacity is through early-season stand counts and looking for opportunities for replanting. Yet conventional approaches for evaluating stands take time and are vulnerable to human error.
In the field, counting crops to high precision standards is extremely time-consuming. It takes a very long time even to manually count even from images and does not provide a reliable result. To solve this issue, Artificial Intelligence powered customer portal provides the capability for AirSmat provide report of crop counts to our customers. We simply execute drone mission, funnel the data through our platform and the report is generated for our customers.
Farmers are obtaining highly precise stand counts with the aid of drones, and are taking measures to increase yield capacity. In a couple of minutes, a farmer can fly a drone over their fields, collecting images on every single hectare of crop. The data is then almost immediately converted into analytics of plant counts. Farmers can display their entire field or select zones, using the AirSmat AI powered platform, then calculate automatically, the number of plants per acre, row, or field, and get a highly accurate count of the number of plants that have emerged. As a result, farmers can optimize the planting input and increase their crop yield at the end of the planting season.
In comparison to traditional stand count methods, AI-powered drone-based plant count is designed to provide reliable results that are quickly converted into a plan of action with the farmer needing to spend less time on the field. And what’s even more important: with geo referencing capability, you will know where the areas with low germination levels are, allowing you to fix the problem at the very root of the issue. Although these traditional techniques have helped farmers determine the emergence of plants and yield potential for decades, they are only pure estimates. Most importantly, the sample counts do not provide the full picture of how many and where seeds did not grow. There may be a pattern suggesting a soil or fertilizer issue in a given area, causing long-term harm, but this could be overlooked by farmers just taking a sample count. But with the use of a drone and the AirSmat software platform, we can catch the pattern and provide more information for the farmers to work with.
With the AirSmat technology, a farmer can use high-resolution, visual sensors flown with a drone over their fields and capture images of their crops. The software detects plants automatically, from seedlings to full canopies, and places a marker over the canopy to count it. The software platform shows the gaps within each row where plants may be slow to emerge, or are missing, to help with replant decisions. Missing plants may mean a malfunction of the planting equipment, or that the soil was too damp for the seeds to germinate. Farmers can begin to understand what their yield will be, by seeing how many plants have emerged successfully, and how many gaps remain. As a result, further replanting opportunities can be exploited to improve their field ‘s yield efficiency. We offer a range of ready-to-fly drones at AirSmat. Our farming experts work with farmers to determine what they are trying to achieve with drone-based data and analytics, and to suggest a solution tailored to their needs.
Caucasian Male and Black Female Engineers Working on a Drone Project with Help of Laptop and Taking Notes. He Works in a Bright Modern High-Tech Laboratory.
Agriculture is a vital part of the economic sector. Agricultural automation is the latest subject worldwide. The population is rising enormously, and food demand is also increasing. Traditional methods used by farmers are inadequate to meet these requirements. New automated methods are currently being introduced. These new methods will meet food requirements, reduce cost of labour and provide jobs for people with relevant skills. Artificial Intelligence has created an agricultural revolution.
It has provided a mean for farmers to be more efficient and productive with less, by reducing the inefficiency that comes with manpower. This article addresses the use of artificial intelligence and drone technology in the agricultural sector. How AI can change the narrative of the agricultural sector.
SCOPE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN AGRICULTURE
With Africa continent in mind, the agricultural sector had to adapt the breakthroughs and inventions in the field of automation. Artificial Intelligence in agriculture entails: smart planting, smart field management, smart irrigation and greenhouses. In order to grow, a nation needs to include these growing technologies in agriculture as many sectors depend on agriculture.
The technologies which are AI-based help to increase performance in all fields and handle challenges faced by various industries, including the various fields of agriculture, such as crop yield, irrigation, soil content sensing, crop monitoring, weeding, crop production. Together with global population rising, the agricultural sector is in crisis. But AI can deliver the much-needed solution. AI-based solutions allow farmers to obtain better yield and even improve the quality of produce.
The different ways AI contribute to the agricultural sector are:
Precision farming is one of the most disserted areas in today’s world situation. Drone imaging can support rigorous field analysis, crop monitoring, and field scanning. By combining computer vision technology, drone data, and IoT that farmers are taking rapid action will be ensured. Data fed from drone images could deliver real-time alerts to accelerate precision farming. Commercial drone manufacturers have enforced IoT Platforms and Visual Recognition APIs for analyzing real-time images.
Some fields of computer vision technology are as follows:
Disease detection: The image sensing and analysis ensures that images of plant leaves taken are divided into surface areas such as background, diseased area, and non-diseased area of the leaves. The contaminated area is then cropped and sent to the laboratory for further evaluation. This also helps to identify pest and in sensing nutrient deficiencies. A process sequence is shown below.
Identification of crop readiness: Images of various crops captured under white light show how ripe the green fruits are. The images are run through the algorithm to determine how ripe they are. From this analysis, farmers can create different levels of fruit or crop readiness, add them to assorted stacks before sending them to market. Or based on this analysis, farmers can determine if the crops are ready to be harvested.
Data-Driven Farm Management: Raw measurements of key crop parameters must be processed efficiently so that numbers or images unambiguously become valuable information. Field-based crop management evolved when Precision Agriculture came to light thirty years ago, but it was certainly transformed by the current digital information era.
Crop Health and Soil Monitoring: Using AI is an effective way to perform or track potential soil defects and nutrient deficiencies. With the approach to image recognition, AI identifies possible defects through camera-captured images. Deep learning application helps to analyze flora patterns in agriculture. Such AI-enabled applications support understanding soil, plant pests, and diseases.
PRECISION FARMING
Precision Agriculture, which consists of applying what is needed when and where needed, has further enhanced farm management efficiency by adding data-based digital systems that increase producers’ knowledge of their fields. As a farmer, you need to make smart, accurate data-based decisions. No estimates, no hunches. Using precise farming techniques, you can really improve your farm and solve decade-old problems. It doesn’t really matter what kind of farm you run, whether you have livestock or corn crops. Be precise in farming.
With AirSmat mobile command and control (C&C) app, drone covers pre-defined sectors in a mission automatically without any manual control and captured data get downloaded from the drone automatically via AirSmat app which then uploads the captured data to the cloud for processing on our AI-powered platform. With drone capability coupled with AirSmat platform, we save farmers the repetitive and cumbersome tasks of examining each plant individually and using the same techniques to optimize growth; a farmer can sit back and research the means of optimizing agriculture, while the drones do the heavy lifting.
SUMMARY
We know now, that precision agriculture, applied with drones, is an efficient agriculture management methodology. But just like every modern technology, it needs sophistication and advancement in terms of its practical application in order to be feasible for commercial use. This is where AirSmat software platforms are applicable. With AirSmat flagship software product, we revolutionize how drone fleets running our AirSmat Artificial Intelligence (AAI) enabled software to operate, gather data, and collaborate in the era of connectivity to helping farmers to see growth trends, count and size plants, generate prescription maps, identify early indicators of plant stress, and measure the zonal efficiency of farmers plantation.
Introducing drones’ capabilities, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics into traditional farming is a turning point in the way traditional agriculture is done. At the center of this growing productivity-enhancing capabilities are farmers with multiple years of farming knowledge. These farmers find themselves at the intersection of relying on ancient proven agricultural practices that leave sizeable potential profits in the field and embracing new technology that promises greater yields and efficiency but might seem unnecessary, time-consuming to learn, and daunting to adopt.
SmatCrowsTM
With AirSmat SmatCrows drone-based artificial intelligence, farmers can collect and analyze data from their crops that, until now, have been inaccurate and incomplete. On AirSmat software platform, a farmer can monitor crop health and yields and run a myriad of other analytic reports, all at the click of a button. Farmers can harness the same data to identify and correct areas of concern before a planting season, during the growing season, or before harvest. SmatCrows solution goes beyond simple data collection, providing powerful processing and reporting tools in a streamlined platform, we leverage on the intelligence obtained from our AI engine to provide insightful information to our customers.
Smart farming is becoming a fast-growing global market. In fact, it’s expected to reach at least $1 3.5 billion by 2023. As this market grows, farmers are turning to drone-based data-driven intelligence to strengthen their day-to-day operations and ensure optimal crop and livestock performance. With AirSmat software product offering we aim to achieve and provide deep intelligence to our customers.
