Joint venture & collaboration activities to unlock potential of smart agriculture

It’s turning out to be smart, automated, and efficient. Yes, the agricultural activities will no longer be tedious and traditional processes as technology advances and market players have been joining hands with other players. Combining expertise to develop solutions that would make agricultural activities less costly and more efficient is an aim of market players. Leading players have adopted strategies such as joint ventures and collaborations to utilize each other’s technologies to develop better products and widen their reach. Internet of things (IoT) is one of the leading technologies that have been used by market players to develop solutions. Other technologies such as machine learning, robotics, and others will soon be utilized. Smart agriculture era has arrived and novel solutions will be developed in the coming years to automate many manual processes through development of novel technologies. According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the smart agriculture market is expected to reach $29.23 billion by 2027. Following are some of the activities taking place across the globe.

Among the various strategies adopted by market players to widen their customer base, joint venture is one of the recent strategies. This strategy has been implemented by leading players such as Bosch and BASF Digital Farming to enable their smart agriculture solutions reach customers worldwide. Both companies signed a joint venture agreement to market and sell smart agriculture solutions across the globe. Bosch would bring its software and hardware capabilities and digital services; however, BASF would bring its digital farming solutions that offer real-time, autonomous, and field specific decision-making engine for weed management. BASF’s solution is powered by digital xarvio platform, designed for crop optimization.

The combination of the expertise of both companies would help farmers in smart management by reaping benefits of digital solutions. They would launch a couple of products, one of which would be the Intelligent Planting Solution (IPS). It would provide improved digital intelligence for carrying out smart spraying and seeding & fertilizer prescriptions. Through this joint venture, both companies aim to make the future of agriculture more efficient and environmental friendly through the connection of agricultural machinery with intelligent software, high-tech sensors, and digital products.

Riding on the wave of joining hands to offer better solutions to farmers, two more companies combined their expertise to offer IoT solutions. ORBCOMM Inc., an IoT solutions provider, collaborated with Ponce, an IoT company specializing in agricultural efficiency, to provide irrigations solutions to Latin American farmers to save costs and preserve water. ORBCOMM’s satellite IoT technology powered Ponce’s solution for enabling real-time monitoring and management of irrigation equipment that are placed at remote regions.

This advanced system eliminates the need of manual tracking by automating processes such as equipment inspection, faulty machinery detection, and maintenance through detection of machine failure and sending crop irrigation data. In addition, it offers information regarding water pressure, machine position, abnormalities, and other parameters including water usage, hours of use, water flow, and rainfall measurement. Using IoT satellite technology of ORBCOMM, the data is sent over to data cloud of Ponce. Through this cloud, farmers can avail alerts and reports in real-time manner to make business decisions regarding irrigation schedules, maintenance activities, and positioning of irrigation equipment. 

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