Category: Climate Smart Agriculture

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Agriculture Artificial Intelligence Climate Smart Agriculture Farming Innovation

Harnessing Innovation: AirSmat’s Impact on Climate-Smart Agriculture in Africa

Soji Sanyaolu, CEO & Co-founder AirSmat Inc
Soji Sanyaolu, CEO & Co-founder AirSmat Inc

With 1.4 billion people in Africa and the global population set to double by 2050, there is an opportunity to tackle food insecurity sustainably with a global focus on greenhouse gas emissions. According to world bank article (last updated in April 2021) – https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/climate-smart-agriculture, the agricultural sector is a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for an estimated 19-29% of these emissions when factoring in the emissions produced across the entire agricultural value chain, which includes activities like transportation, storage, and processing. This percentage rises to as high as 40%.

As the global population is set to double by 2050, the demand for food will rise, potentially leading to increased emissions from agriculture unless proactive measures are taken to protect the environment. The solution lies in embracing advanced technology to revolutionize agricultural practices, enhance yields, boost farmer incomes, and promote sustainable practices. Innovative technologies, including climate-smart agriculture, precision farming, soil carbon sequestration, and digital tools for optimizing the value chain, all aim to increase agricultural productivity for farmers across Africa while minimizing environmental impacts. By adopting these technology capabilities, we can ensure food security, prosperity for farmers, and environmental sustainability for future generations.

AirSmat, an AgTech startup in Africa, stands at the forefront, providing cutting-edge AI-backed application capabilities and innovative techniques for sustainable crop management. With a strong focus on Farm Data, AirSmat empowers farmers to achieve higher yields while minimizing land, water, and chemical inputs. By leveraging these advancements, AirSmat plays a pivotal role in increasing land productivity, protecting natural ecosystems, and preventing irregular use of farmland for unsustainable agricultural practises. As a result, AirSmat contributes significantly to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and promoting a more environmentally sustainable approach to farming. Through our state-of-the-art technologies and solutions, AirSmat helps farmers optimize their operations, enhance crop yields, and protect the environment for future generations. With a commitment to innovation and sustainability, AirSmat continues to lead the way in revolutionizing the agricultural landscape in Africa.

The AirSmat Farm Manager mobile application is a comprehensive tool designed to empower farmers with efficient farm management capabilities. This app enables farmers to maintain detailed farm logs, track farm assets, manage expenses and sales, and monitor farm warehouses seamlessly. The application aggregates and processes various crucial Farm Data, including soil level information and data from field IoT sensors, drones, and satellites. Leveraging AirSmat’s AI-backed platform, farmers gain access to valuable insights and personalized recommendations for implementing best agricultural practices. By harnessing the power of soil mapping and monitoring, farmers can accurately apply the right nutrients in precise quantities, leading to enhanced crop productivity and increased carbon sequestration capacity from the atmosphere. With AirSmat Farm Manager, farmers can optimize their farm operations, improve food production, achieve traceability, contribute to soil health and environmental sustainability.

AirSmat’s Farm Manager app is a robust tool empowering farmers by optimizing resource utilization and mitigating climate-related risks. We firmly believe that Farm Data holds transformative potential, driving its collection, aggregation, processing, and intelligent sharing through our platform to effectively reduce climate-related risks for African farmers. To ensure timely access to vital agricultural information, our app features an integrated notification engine delivering updates, recommendations, and insights via SMS and popular social media platforms like WhatsApp. Moreover, we have nurtured a digital community exclusively for farmers, fostering knowledge exchange and support. With AirSmat’s Farm Manager app, we are resolute in equipping farmers with essential tools and intelligence to adapt to evolving climatic conditions and advance sustainable agriculture across Africa. This is precision farming at its best.

According to the World Economic Forum, implementing precision agriculture on 15-25% of farms has the potential to increase global yields by 10-15% by 2030. By streamlining and improving various stages of the value chain, from production and processing to distribution and consumption, we can maximize the efficiency and productivity of agricultural systems. This approach enables us to meet the growing demand for food while minimizing the environmental impact and preserving natural ecosystems. Through advanced technologies and data-driven insights, AirSmat is committed to contributing to the optimization of agricultural value chains, fostering sustainable practices, and ensuring a secure and prosperous future for farming communities in Africa.

It is widely recognized that the transformative technology capabilities, like those offered by AirSmat, often remain inaccessible to most smallholder farmers in Africa due to high acquisition costs and limited education on implementing such solutions. However, at AirSmat, we are committed to driving the adoption of these tools by partnering with government institutions and private enterprises focused on agriculture.

One recent example of our efforts is the partnership with Sterling Bank PLC, where AirSmat enables farmers to harness quality farm data and AI-generated recommendations. This collaboration empowers Sterling Bank to monitor farm activities throughout the planting season and enables farmers to enhance productivity and secure the supply chain of the future.

The changing demography, particularly the increasing number of young individuals with knowledge of software capabilities, embracing farming as a business presents a promising growth opportunity for AirSmat. As these tech-savvy individuals enter the agricultural sector, there is a greater openness to adopting advanced technologies and solutions like ours. AirSmat recognizes the potential in catering to this emerging generation of farmers, empowering them with our AI-driven tools and providing the necessary support to optimize their farming operations. By tapping into this growing market of tech-savvy farmers, AirSmat aims to not only contribute to their success but also to the overall transformation and sustainability of agriculture in Africa.

About AirSmat

AirSmat is an AgTech (Agriculture Technology) company based in Africa that aims to revolutionize the agriculture sector through data-driven solutions. The company’s primary focus is on harnessing the power of technology, data analytics, and artificial intelligence to help farmers optimize their agricultural practices, increase productivity, and promote sustainability.

AirSmat’s flagship product, the Farm Manager app, is a powerful tool designed to empower farmers by optimizing resource utilization and minimizing climate-related risks. The app allows farmers to keep a comprehensive farm log, manage farm assets, track expenses and sales, and monitor farm warehouse stock. It also integrates data from field IoT sensors, drones, soil level data and satellites to provide farmers with real-time insights and AI-generated recommendations for best farm practices.

By leveraging advanced data analytics and machine learning algorithms, AirSmat’s Farm Manager app enables farmers to make informed decisions, improve crop yields, reduce water and chemical inputs, and mitigate environmental impacts. The company also offers a notification engine that delivers valuable agricultural information to farmers through SMS and popular social media platforms like WhatsApp.

AirSmat is committed to driving the adoption of data-driven agriculture in Africa, empowering farmers, and contributing to sustainable food production while addressing the challenges posed by climate change. Through strategic partnerships with government institutions and private enterprises, AirSmat seeks to make its technology accessible to a wider audience and create a positive impact on agriculture and food security across the continent. For more details, visit https://www.airsmat.com/

Soji Sanyaolu, CEO & Co-founder, AirSmat Inc.

Categories
Agriculture Artificial Intelligence Climate Smart Agriculture Farming Innovation Technology

AIRSMAT FARMSENSE – ELIMINATING FOOD INSECURITY IN NIGERIA

The recent statistics by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said the inflation rate rose to 15.92 percent in March 2022, representing a 0.22 percent point rise when compared to 15.7 per cent recorded in February 2022.

The Bureau also said that the composite food index rose year-on-year (YoY) by 0.09 percent points to 17.20 percent in March 2022 from 17.11 per cent in February 2022.
In its Consumer Price index (CPI), the bureau said the rise in the food index was due to increases in prices of bread and cereals, food product, potatoes, yam and other tubers, fish, meat, oils, and fats.

The above statistics are manifest with a panoramic view of the present state of livelihood in Nigeria, which gives a glimpse into the level of poverty ravaging the nation with respect to food security. Staple foods such as garri, corn, rice, yam, beans, millet, potatoes, and others have all jerked up with prices above the common man’s pocket. With the rising food inflation, it is not uncommon that some households could have been forced to the ratio of 0.0.1 or 0.1.0 for their daily meals. This is chiefly associated with shrinking income or stagnated income that is no longer sufficient to meet the rising cost of food products.

Also in recent times, a report processed by the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of
Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) disclosed that about 18 million people will face food insecurity across Nigeria between June and August 2022.
The stakeholders’ report laid emphasis on acute food and nutrition insecurity in the Sahel and West African region.
The report said the food crisis will affect Nigerians in 21 states and FCT including, 416,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). It noted that about 14.4 million people including 385,000 IDPs in 21 States and FCT of Nigeria are already in the food crisis till May 2022.

The analysis for the month of March covered states such as Abia, Adamawa,
Benue, Borno, Cross-River, Edo, Enugu, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Lagos, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe, Zamfara, and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). Not forgetting that in the 2021 Global Hunger Index, Nigeria ranks 103rd out of the 116 countries with sufficient data to calculate 2021 GHI scores. With a score of 28.3, Nigeria has a level of hunger that is serious. This narrative is obvious and needs to be changed with all hands-on deck to bring about actions that will take Nigerians out of hunger.
These various reports are very timely warnings to save the nation and the West African region from impending famine. Whilst this is frightening, it does not call for quivering but swift action to avert the danger of a famine outbreak.
The call and clamor by the Federal Government in recent times for individuals and corporate to invest in agriculture and drive towards attaining food sufficiency and reducing imports have become a public outcry. The time is now for us as a nation to take the bull by its horns to employ all necessary tools and technology to maximize food production.

With modern technologies and the deployment of the right tools in place,
farmers can boost productivity and achieve greater crop yield through the
practice of Precision Agriculture (PA) according to the National Research Council, 1997, Precision Agriculture is “the application of modern information technologies to provide, process and analyse multi-source data of high spatial and temporal resolution for decision making and operations in the management of crop production.”

With the adoption of the science and art of precision agriculture through
innovative technology such as FarmSense, a technology developed by AirSmat to address the need to increase efficiency and sustainability of the farming business by offering extraordinary access to real-time information that can help guide in-season decision making.
FarmSense is a device that will be placed on the farmland to help in the
gathering of useful information from the farm, stores and transmits the data to the farmers in real-time on their smartphones so they can improve their crop productivity and secure the supply chain of the future in Nigeria and across Africa.

AirSmat FarmSense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhEBG5iuZKc&t=5s

With FarmSense, farmers will be able to maximize yields, conserve resources such as water and fertilizer application, reduce waste, and enhance productivity. FarmSense is an IoT (Internet of Things) device. The functionality of the product is powered by GSM and Satellite which enables instant connections to the internet anytime and everywhere FarmSense is deployed providing 99.9% data updates.
Through the data collected, farmers can work smarter with decision-taking as regards areas that need attention to boost soil nutrients with the application of fertilizer and water. This further save time and cost from guess works which is the application of these soil enhancements at random times instead of precisely to specific areas of the farm.

The quest to combat food insecurity in Africa is a dare passion for AirSmat to ensure that in the near and long term, with the technological application, the continent would attain food security to feed its population. AirSmat offers holistic technology solutions for intelligent and precision agriculture. The primary goal of the agri-tech start-up is to assist farmers and farm owners in making informed decisions to maximize yields and ensure food security while increasing the bottom lines of agricultural businesses and balancing the demand-supply and price ratios in the market.

With modern technologies and the deployment of the right tools in place,
farmers can boost productivity and achieve greater crop yield through the
practice of Precision Agriculture (PA). according to the National Research Council,
1997, Precision Agriculture is “the application of modern information
technologies to provide, process and analyse multi-source data of high spatial
and temporal resolution for decision making and operations in the management
of crop production.”
With the adoption of the science and art of precision agriculture through
innovative technology such as FarmSense, a technology developed by AirSmat to
address the need to increase efficiency and sustainability of the farming
business by offering extraordinary access to real-time information that can help
guide in-season decision making.
FarmSense is a device that will be placed on the farmland to help in the
gathering of useful information from the farm, stores and transmits the data to
the farmers in real-time on their smartphones so they can improve their crop
productivity and secure the supply chain of the future in Nigeria and across
Africa.
With FarmSense, farmers will be able to maximise yields, conserve resources
such as water and fertiliser application, reduce waste, and enhance productivity.
FarmSense is an IoT (Internet of Things) device. The functionality of the product
is powered by GSM and Satellite which enables instant connections to the
internet anytime and everywhere FarmSense is deployed providing 99.9% data
updates.
There is an agronomic requirement for three sensors per acre providing accurate
data on the farmland. Through the data collected, farmers can work smarter with
decision-taking as regards areas that need attention to boost soil nutrients with
the application of fertiliser and water. This further save time and cost from guess
works which is the application of these soil enhancements at random times
instead of precisely to specific areas of the farm.
The quest to combat food insecurity in Africa is a dare passion for AirSmat to
ensure that in the near and long term, with the technological application, the
continent would attain food security to feed its population. AirSmat offers holistic
services and solutions for intelligent and precision agriculture using artificial
intelligence. The primary goal of the agri-tech start-up is to assist farmers and
farm owners in making informed decisions to maximize yields and ensure food
security while increasing the bottom lines of agricultural businesses and
balancing the demand-supply and price ratios in the market.

Categories
Agriculture Artificial Intelligence Climate Smart Agriculture Farming Technology

AirSmat – Climate Smart Agriculture.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an approach that helps guide actions to transform agri-food systems towards green and climate resilient practices.

  • Growing young maize seedling in cultivated agricultural farm field with modern technology concepts
Climate Smart Agriculture (C.S.A)

Climate-smart agriculture as a bridge towards development and food security built on three pillars:

Increasing productivity and incomes
Enhancing resilience of livelihoods and ecosystems
Reducing and removing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere.

Examples of ways that CSA plan on solving climate issues include soil management, drought-tolerant maize, dairy development, farming catfish intensively, carbon finance to restore crop fields, waste-reducing rice thresher, rainfall forecasts and incentive system for low-carbon agriculture.

Countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) need to increase food production to meet demand and predicted dietary changes under an increasingly harsh and difficult climate. This change will have to be achieved alongside reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Current agricultural management practices and the associated land use changes account for one-third of total GHG emissions in Africa.

For example, the United Republic of Tanzania is creating an enabling environment for agricultural transformation, setting policies, creating learning alliances, and specifically prioritizing climate smart agriculture for the country.

AirSmat climate information capabilities empower rural farming communities and agri-businesses to become more resilient and adaptive to effects of climate change as well as make more informed decisions regarding farming. We also believe with the right information and data, farmers can soon get with the program to help preserve the climate.

We at the AirSmat are at the forefront of practicing climate smart agriculture and excited about saving the climate and also solve the challenges of food security across Africa.