"precision farming" entries

Big data’s impact on global agriculture

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Stewart Collis talks about making precision farming accessible and affordable for all farmers.

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Stewart Collis, CTO and co-founder of AWhere, recently tweeted a link to a video by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, Big Question: Feast or Famine? The video highlights the increasing complexity of feeding our rapidly growing population, and Collis noted its relation to his work at AWhere. I recently caught up with Collis to talk about our current global agriculture situation, the impact of big data on agriculture, and the work his company is doing to help address global agriculture problems.

The challenge, explained Collis, is two-fold: our growing population — expected to increase by another 2.4 billion people by 2050, and the increasing weather variability affecting our growing seasons and farmers’ abilities to produce and scale to accommodate that population. “In the face of weather variability, climate change, and increasing temperatures … farmers no longer know when it’s going to rain,” he said, and then noted: “There’s only 34 growing seasons between now and [2050], so this is a problem we need to solve now.”

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