Agribusiness Testing Industrial IoT to Manage Crops, Boost Production

Sakata Seed America worked with Infosys and the Industrial Internet Consortium to develop in-ground sensors and data analytics software that tracks crop growth and health to boost seed yields. The world's food producers are facing a big problem: The rising global population means the world will need to increase food production by as much as 70 percent over the next 30 years. With the acreage of farmland remaining constant, how will this goal be met? The obvious answer is to continue increasing crop yields, which is what farmers, engineers and scientists have been doing for the past two centuries to boost food production to feed a relentlessly-growing global population. To boost crop yields even more, agribusiness is putting the internet of things to work to enable precision agricultural techniques. For instance, Sakata Seed America, a company that produces a wide range of vegetable seeds for farmers, has worked with Infosys and the Industrial Internet Consortium to complete one phase of a precision crop management test bed. For its test project, Sakata used in-ground sensors, drone imagery and a data integration and a analytics platform to boost beet seed production by almost 34 percent, or from 450 grams of seeds per plant to 525 grams per plant, according to Monty McCoy, Director of IT for Sakata America.