Davis to Empower Data-Driven Farming with Microsoft Azure FarmBeats

Davis Instruments is proud to have been selected to partner with Microsoft to provide weather stations and data uploads to the Microsoft Azure FarmBeats initiative. Azure FarmBeats, announced November 4 at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando, Florida, is taking on the critical challenge of feeding a hungry world.

Farmers, and the future of farming has never been more significant. World population is going up; arable land, and resources such as water, are not. Even as farmers, including those in the United States, are seeing lower net incomes, they face the challenges of feeding a hungry world nutritious food with fewer resources.

“We have the affordable, reliable hardware and data acquisition systems to feed data to Microsoft Azure,” said Chris Sullivan, Vice President of Operations at Davis Instruments. “Davis is already trusted by farmers all over the globe and are already fully integrated into FarmBeats. We are ready to roll!”

Dr. Ranveer Chandra, Chief Scientist at Microsoft, is leading the charge to make data-driven farming a reality on farms from Minnesota to Uttar Pradesh to Nairobi. Azure FarmBeats takes data from myriad sources such as weather and soil conditions monitored by Davis weather stations, visual images from drones, satellite imagery, asset tracking devices, and “smart” tractors and overlays that data to produce actionable information for farmers.

As a child, Dr. Chandra spent summers on his grandparents’ farm in India. He learned early in life that while even a slight improvement in productivity can make a huge difference, farmers like his grandparents would not benefit from the new age of precision farming. Why? Because they face two barriers: cost and lack of connection. Dr. Chandra’s visionary research has created solutions for both, and those solutions will change the face of farming for both small family farms and the large commercial ones.

“Farms are all about systems,” said Dr. Ranveer Chandra, chief scientist, Microsoft. “We’re keenly focused on answering key questions such as: how can we make technology better? More accessible? And help solve important problems like the future of food growth? Azure FarmBeats merges heterogeneous IoT sensor streams and analyzes them together with satellite data, without adding to the farmer’s workload.”

Davis Instruments was a logical choice to partner with Microsoft in Azure FarmBeats. Our agricultural-focused weather stations along with our mesh-networked sensors in EnviroMonitor are already making the endless variability of weather and soil conditions accessible to growers. Farmers who upload this data to Azure FarmBeats will see it merged with other data streams to give them detailed, customized, accurate predictions from Azure FarmBeats based on AI and machine learning.

Davis will be showcasing our weather stations and EnviroMonitor system at Agritechnica, the world’s leading global farming trade fair in Hanover, Germany, later this month. We’ll be in booth E55, Hall 15.

To learn more about Azure FarmBeats: https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/campaign/azure-farmbeats/

For more on the Davis EnviroMonitor: Click Here

Vantage Pro2 and EnviroMonitor Gateway installed at the Azure FarmBeats' test farm, the Dancing Crow, in Carnation, Washington.