ISSUE #3 
July 2021
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and CGIAR have established a collaboration to increase interoperability between food and agricultural information systems through the further use and enhancement of the AGROVOC Thesaurus, a multilingual controlled vocabulary that covers terminology related to FAO’s areas of interest [read more].
The continued increase in demand for food products across the globe due to the rising population, coupled with growing technological awareness among farmers, has created a positive growth environment for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the agriculture market, according to an expansive study by Grand View Research [read more].
Original research prepared by Trust In Food, a Farm Journal Initiative in collaboration with The Sustainability Consortium produced the annual “Farmer Perspectives on Data 2021” report. This report analyzes farmers’ perspectives on data collection and sharing and emerging trends around digital agriculture. The increased use of FMIS and related digital technologies within agriculture is expected to have a large impact on farm productivity, economic performance, adoption of conservation practices and the broader agri-food sector. However, the challenges associated with cost, trust, access, support, privacy and the equitable distribution of the benefits of on-farm data collection along the supply chain need to be addressed first before we can achieve the on-farm digital transition and scale conservation agriculture to achieve a resilient U.S. agriculture supply chain [read more].
The Industrial Internet Consortium has published a White Paper on the Characteristics of IIoT Information Models. This white paper surveys a subset of information models that are relevant to IIoT and characterizes those information models using a meta-model developed for this purpose. With this White Paper commonalities are captured and the challenge of integrating subsystems that use different information models begins to be addressed [read more].
MDPI is publishing a Special Issue on Sensors, “Sensors in Agriculture 2021”. This Special Issue aims to bring together recent research and developments concerning novel sensors and their applications in agriculture. Sensors in agriculture are based on the requirements of farmers, according to the farming operations that need to be addressed. The Editor of this publication is Prof. Dimitrios Moshou, CERTH (ATLAS partner) and the deadline for subscriptions is 31 December 2021 [read more].
According to the “Agriculture Analytics Market – Growth, Trends, and Forecasts (2020 – 2025)” report the agriculture analytics market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.4% during a forecast period of 2021 through 2026. Agriculture analytics is the application of cutting-edge technologies like Big Data, IoT, and other analytics tools in agricultural farming. The primary growth factor for the agriculture analytics market is increasing government initiatives for deploying improved agricultural techniques. Data volumes in the agriculture sector are growing exponentially. The increasing adoption of IoT devices that collect data from connected farm equipment such as smart tractors and drones is also driving the growth of agriculture analytics. Crop growers and agribusiness players are recognizing the potential for uncovering breakthroughs in plant genomics, livestock management, soil health, and the faster development of new technologies in big data and other analytics methods [read more].
The global AI size in the agricultural market is anticipated to reach USD 186 billion by 2025. The extended usage of big data, and machine learning technology, along with artificial intelligence and probabilistic logic has paved the way for greater development of AI in the agricultural industry over the past few years. Furthermore, the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) has also fueled the growth momentum of the industry with its various applications in the advancements of interactive software platforms. The industry players operating within the AI in the agricultural market are investing significant resources to continuous product development to keep up with the market dynamics [read more].
SupPlant, a leading precision agriculture hardware-software solution, has announced its recent funding round, raising $10M to accelerate its industry defining and disrupting sensor-less irrigation API product. The round is co-led by Boresight Capital, Menomadin Foundation, Smart-Agro Fund and Mivtah Shamir. The raise brings SupPlants’s total funding to more than $19M. The round comes amidst global warming world-wide impacting smallholder farmers who are dealing daily with the unpredicted climate that is changing rapidly and the constant lack of irrigation water. SupPlant is making its technology available to these vulnerable populations by changing the basic concept of irrigation method [read more].
