At its annual Ignite event in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft today announced that AzureFarmBeats, a project that until now was mostly a research effort, will be available as a public preview and in the Azure Marketplace, starting today. FarmBeats is Microsoft’s project that combines IoT sensors, data analysis and machine learning.
“The goal of FarmBeats is to augment farmers’ knowledge and intuition about their own farm with data and data-driven insights,” Microsoft explained in today’s announcement. The idea behind FarmBeats is to take in data from a wide variety of sources, including sensors, satellites, drones and weather stations, and then turn that into actionable intelligence for farmers, using AI and machine learning.
In addition, FarmBeats also wants to be somewhat of a platform for developers who can then build their own applications on top of this data that the platform aggregates and evaluates.
As Microsoft noted during the development process, having satellite imagery is one thing, but that can’t capture all of the data on a farm. For that, you need in-field sensors and other data — yet all of this heterogeneous data then has to be merged and analyzed somehow. Farms, also often don’t have great internet connectivity. Because of this, the FarmBeats team was among the first to leverage Microsoft’s efforts in using TV white space for connectivity and, of course, Azure IoT Edge for collecting all of the data.
