Capgemini announces development of Project FARM platform

Capgemini has announced its development of an intelligent data platform – Project FARM (financial and agricultural recommendation models).

The platform was designed using artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data to determine farming patterns generating insights for optimisation of the agricultural value chain in East Africa to strengthen global food supply. In addition to AI, the platform will use machine learning to make it applicable on a wider scale.

With a larger percentage of the world being fed by small famers primarily in developing countries, the complexity of the value chain, the lack of resources and the anticipation of a 60% increase in global food demand by 2050, Capgemini aims to tackle these issues with its Project FARM platform built in collaboration with Agrics.

The data and analytics generated by Project FARM will provide farmers with useful insights for tailor-made optimised crop production, potential business risks and commercial decision making, all of which can be distributed to value chain partners to eliminate inefficiencies.

“By connecting farming communities with data science, and big data with traditional farming methods, the FARM platform is built to optimize the value chain and bring parties together as an ecosystem around one data-driven platform. The platform can pave the way for bringing automated farming to small-scale farmers. With the increasing availability of open data and decreasing prices of sensors and satellite imagery, the future of farming is bright,” commented Julian van Velzen, Data Analyst at Capgemini, leading Project FARM.

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Providers of data for Project FARM to run cloud based analytical models include:

• Agrics, providing crop production data, potential and realised yield, field parameters, credit and repayments.

• Copernicus, providing weather data via its satellites.

“Project FARM provides Agrics with an excellent opportunity to maximize value for its clients – the smallholder farmers – and to other actors in the value chain like processors and financial service providers. Through our interactions with the farmers we are on top of a huge reservoir of data. We can now turn this data into meaningful insights, which allows us to provide time and location specific products and services to increase yield and lower risk at farm and value chain level. Increased value chain effectiveness will help to directly improve income and food security of rural populations,” added Violanda de Man, Innovation Manager at Agrics East Africa.

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