Pessl Instruments has announced that its internet of things (IoT) and decision support system platform FieldClimate is now integrated with Microsoft Azure Farmbeats.
This partnership enables farmers to make more data-driven decisions, and agronomists and researchers to build analytic models on top of aggregated data sets.
Fieldclimate was one of the first online platforms for collecting and displaying agro-meteorological data from tens of thousands of weather stations under METOS brand, installed all over the world. Azure FarmBeats combines data from different sources such as weather, visual information from drones and satellites and unites them with data coming from the Metos weather stations for data-driven analytics.
The selected METOS devices immediately sync as data flows into the FieldClimate servers.
Collecting this data helps farmers to decide when to irrigate, when to spray, what disease preventive measure to take, whether conditions are suitable for particular activities in the field, and much more.
This helps to prevent unnecessary trips to the field, and saves money on fuel and other resources – from water to fertiliser.
Data collection and analysis helps to lower costs, increase yield and income, and minimise negative impacts on the environment.
With FarmBeats integration, FieldClimate can now leverage the FarmBeats soil moisture maps that are generated based on METOS device information and satellites.
“The collaboration between Pessl Instruments and Microsoft provides the opportunity to promptly identify problems, without visiting the field. It can even provide greater accuracy than physical visits. The farmer and agronomist can install weather stations which monitor and alert them in real time about the actual field weather: temperature, relative humidity, rainfall, soil moisture, head units, wind gusts, evapotranspiration, frost and heat risks, forecasted frost and rains and many more things. The analytics from Microsoft Azure Farmbeats will provide the artificial intelligence so that all required actions can be taken on time and without delay,” explains Gottfried Pessl, Pessl Instruments’ CEO and Founder.
“Knowing the climatic conditions is one of the most important aspects to consider in agriculture, climate change is a growing threat. Remote monitoring is not in the future; it is already in the present. The Covid-19 crisis has shown us how important food supply is and we cannot sacrifice any crop losses due to poor management or being unable to visit the field.
“For the past 36 years, Pessl Instruments has been investing in development of technologies for sustainable and precision agriculture. We are proud to team up with Azure so we can reach as many farmers as possible. We will help support farming processes and continue to help agriculture sector to serve us with abundant and healthy food.”
Dr. Ranveer Chandra, chief scientist, Microsoft Corp., said, “Data-driven Agriculture and predictive analytics provide granular and timely decision-making. Effective data modelling in agriculture requires the ability to combine high quality data coming from sensors with widely available data from satellites and weather sources to increase the scale and accuracy of predictions. Pessl Instruments is a well-recognised partner with a large footprint of high quality sensors in the market, and together we aim to bring the benefits of data and analytics to farming.”
