Technology plus agriculture is a thrilling opportunity, particularly so for the developing world.
We’ve always hear about how technology can be applied to traditional industries to improve them. Frequently though, technology is applied to apparently less important opportunities and those said industries remain in their existing swamp.
It is therefore always exciting to hear of a project which takes some cutting edge technology approaches and re-uses them for more egalitarian uses. An example is aWhere, an agricultural technology company. aWhere gathers and analyzes over a billion points of data from all over the world every day to make intricate insights and visibility, agricultural intelligence, to improve agricultural decision making from farm level to national policymaking. aWhere works with organizations such as the Gates Foundation, as well as with farms in the US to assist in bringing weather analytics and modern agronomics to farmers in Africa.
aWhere has been running for about 16 years, and during that time has seen technology come together to make work easier. Recently, it chose Apigee’s API management platform as the technology on top of which it builds its solutions. Having readily consumed APIs means that along with third-party developers, aWhere can easily and quickly build applications that use aWhere’s core data. aWhere gathers agronomic, weather and other data from both proprietary and public sources in an attempt to assist farmers in optimizing crop performance.
aWhere’s customer applications have been implemented in Uganda where farmers are able to determine the best time to plant seed with the goal of maximizing their yield. Although agriculturalists in the West have achieved peak performance and have yields that cannot be optimized any further, this is not so in developing countries where agriculture is much more manual, without the advantages of mechanization and automation in many cases.
But this is only the production part of the story – aWhere also includes insights into demand-side metrics to assist farmers in optimizing not just supply-side yield, but demand-side price.
All of these insights take a lot of various data sources to create – aWhere examines data from a variety of difference sources and then has to expose its analyzed data from which third parties create solutions from; therefore, API management in necessary both on outbound and inbound data.
APIs are permitted agricultural intelligence on a scale never before thought possible. The API management system gives aWhere the ability to provide the analytics and visibility that are changing how optimization of yield works and assisting their customers in feeding the world.
