Microsoft is looking to advance data-driven agriculture, releasing an open-source AI toolkit for agritech innovators. Farmvibes AI includes algorithms that can help extract intelligence from farm data and remote sensing sources. The company is now making these tools available to researchers and data scientists, who could use the AI models to estimate farming practices, boost yields, cut costs, and measure emissions or the carbon sequestered in soil.

Microsoft's AI blog outlined the case study of a US farmer and software engineer who has been using the tools to inform decisions he makes on his farm. The farmer partnered with Microsoft researchers to turn his farm into a testing ground for some of the tech giant's agri-tech research initiatives. This involves gathering data from sensors in the soil, drones in the sky and satellites in space. These sources feed continuous information about the farm, providing data on temperature variations, soil moisture, nutrient levels, plant health and more.

FarmVibes.AI is the first release as part of a wider Farmvibes project. It is a sample set of algorithms, available to download from GitHub and run on Microsoft Azure. The aim is to encourage data scientists and researchers to advance data-driven agriculture so farmers can eventually benefit.

Data science and tech skills are becoming more necessary for farmers today as the industry modernizes to cope with challenges such as the climate crisis and high costs

"That's why we're open sourcing to make this available to the community so that they can bring the best in soil science to the best in computer science to unlock the opportunity to help enable sustainable agriculture", said Ranveer Chandra, Microsoft's managing director of research for industry. The research team at Microsoft is currently working on more tools that will be made open source in the future as part of Farmvibes. These include Farmvibes. Connect, a tool designed to improve internet connectivity in rural places.

Data science and tech skills are becoming more necessary for farmers today as the industry modernises to cope with challenges such as the climate crisis and high costs. Irish education providers are stepping up to the plate to educate the next generation on all things agri-tech.

Earlier this year, Dundalk Institute of Technology introduced a new post graduate course in agri-analytics.