Agricompas

Agricultural Data Analytics: Knowledge and decision support

Blogs

Automatic satellite image processing for farm intelligence

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By Simon Dzurjak, Data Analyst

Satellites orbiting the Earth allow us to gather insights about farms and the crops they are producing at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions. This is one of the key features of Agricompas’ approach to digitising agricultural value chains and providing value to the sector.

Remote Sensing and Big Data

Remote sensing and Earth observation have not been left behind in the current big data revolution, with a large and ever-growing number of both open and commercial datasets providing years, sometimes decades, of historical data, ready to explore using big data techniques.

At Agricompas, we are using imagery from satellites such as Sentinel-2 to monitor farms and develop models to predict the crop phenology, health and yields. This is in combination with ground-sourced data such as weather stations and soil tests as part of our EcoProMIS platform.

Processing Satellite Images

Whilst satellite imagery in its raw form is intriguing to look at, it does not tell us enough to be immediately helpful, therefore it must be refined further into various indices and biophysical parameters.

Crops are complex, living, plant organisms which interact with various wavelengths of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum in a variety of ways. When monitoring crops using satellite imagery, we can use the various reflectance and absorption characteristics of plants in the visible and infra-red portion of the EM spectrum to our advantage and use mathematical methods to derive vegetation indices, each of which highlights a certain property of the crop.

Satellite image and analysis layer for palm farm in Colombia

The vegetation index data derived from satellite images can then be correlated with various biophysical parameters of the crops and insights about crop health and potential yields can then be modelled and monitored, giving farmers the insights they need.

Real-time Data for Farmers

Over the last few weeks, a large pipeline to mine valuable data from satellite images has been under development at Agricompas. The products derived by this pipeline will soon be used in machine learning models and crop modelling to develop accurate predictive models.

We are now in the final stages of putting finishing touches on the pipeline and testing it, ensuring that everything runs smoothly. Soon, the pipeline will be deployed to our cloud environment, where it will run automatically, and continually process the satellite images.

This will allow us to process an image as soon as it becomes available to us, letting us always have up to date and quick results about the farms we are monitoring.

Additionally, we are making sure that the latest imagery of the farms we are monitoring is available to the farmers via our knowledge services application.

We are extracting individual farm data from the large satellite images, so that the farmers can visualise the farms they are interested in, and do not have to manually locate their farm in the satellite image scene.

Practical Application

Farmers and other users will be able to visualise both true-colour imagery, as well as derived indices such as NDVI, giving a bird’s eye view of farms, highlighting issues such as unhealthy crops and allowing for quick responses before these issues turn into problems.

Automating the mining of the satellite imagery for valuable data has been a very exciting project to work on and brings a lot of additional value to the EcoProMIS platform. We are continuing to make sure that all of the data we work with is accurate, with advanced models producing reliable results, and supporting our users in undertaking the best decisions.

Cacao project in Colombia: final farmer workshops

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By Carlos Perez, Solidaridad, and Annie Zamora, Fedecacao

The “Digitising of cocoa production in Colombia” project, funded by the UK Prosperity Fund, has been implemented since 2019 by Agricompas and a team of partners with the aim of generating a digital platform to support increased yields and environmental sustainability.

During February 2021 a select sample of cocoa farmers from Ríos de Chocolate association in Rionegro (part of the Santander region) and Producacao association in Andalucía (Valle del Cauca region) met as part of two final farmer workshops.

Results of our two-year project were shared and farmers were introduced to information about the market and value chain in Colombia and Europe.

Our sessions with the farmers started with an inspiring presentation by Galia Orme, owner of Choc Chick, an English chocolate company.

Listening to Galia Orme of ChocChick at one of the cocoa grower workshops

Galia shared with the farmers information about opportunities to access the UK chocolate market, the standards that are required for the UK market, and the most demanded products. In addition, she shared some of the technical qualities that are most prioritized, with special mention of the low-cadmium cocao produced in Colombia and valued by the European market. This was of encouragement to the Colombian farmers.

During these interactive sessions, Fedecacao and Agricompas also launched the value chain report that they had co-produced over the last year. An analysis of the sector, the report is an insightful and beautiful document, available in Spanish here.

The workshop included discussion around the value chain report and growers each received a copy of this publication. The report covers the dynamics of national and international cacao prices, characterisation of the production and consumption of Colombian cocoa, and statistics about the main destinations of the Colombian cacao exports.

Finally, the workshops included an update about the data collection technology and remote sensors used on the farms during during this innovative project and managed by project partner, the University of Lincoln.

A preliminary analysis was presented to growers including farm weather (temperature, rainfall) and production variables, designed to support growers to better understand their farms.

In addition to this information, Solidaridad shared with the farmers a plan to involve them with future data collection: Solidaridad will provide the selected cacao growers with a digital tool to continue collecting basic data on crops and weather conditions.

The “Digitisation of cocoa production in Colombia” project will conclude at the end of March 2021. It has been a successful project and contributed to identifying opportunities for the cacao sector in Colombia based on data collection and analysis.

Growers together after one of the workshops

The rice value chain: better knowledge, best decisions

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By Nicolás Gonzalez, Business Development Manager at Agricompas

The last few months have been challenging, but also revealing for EcoProMIS and our approach to entering the market. While working hard to develop a comprehensive platform for data analytics, we are doing extensive market research with each of the stakeholders involved in the value chain for rice and agriculture in general.

EcoProMIS is a platform that collects and processes data into analytics from many different sources, providing a complete overview of the production chain. Establishing a link with each of the actors involved in the chain is fundamental. For this reason, our business and product development team work side by side with these stakeholders with the purpose of creating services that generate value and become the source of the company’s revenue.

For the market analysis, which is comprised of the study of both its size and the possible services to offer, a series of interviews and validations have been conducted with each of the stakeholders.

The main stakeholders we are engaging are drawn from the rice milling sector, agri-insurance, credit, seed, machinery, fertilizer and agrochemical suppliers. All of these have a key role in rice production and for which intelligent information is relevant in the decision-making of their business, improving competitiveness and optimising their processes.

Access to information is the critical factor

One of the common factors that the Agricompas team found in the interviews conducted with each of the key actors mentioned above, is that information for them is considered as their guide in daily operations, in the prediction of supply and demand, and in the management of decision making with respect to their business strategy.

EcoProMIS provides real-time data analysis tools for the agri-finance sector

Today there is no platform like EcoProMIS and the different actors mentioned above could see clearly the business advantage it would lend them: the possibility of knowing and predicting the yield of farmers’ production, seeing and mitigating risks for the credits that most of them offer, and the management of inventories and supply and demand.

Thanks to this market feedback, we have been able to generate valuable information products, taking our access to satellite images, artificial intelligence, climate information and data provided by farmers themselves, to generate differentiation in the market and value for platform users, making agriculture in Colombia more competitive through better decisions in crop management.

Best services, better conditions for farmers

With the development of the EcoProMIS platform, after market validation and the approval of rice farmers, we are creating a conducive environment for the innovation and growth in the agricultural ecosystem in Colombia.

The information for each of the actors in the chain translates into better products and services for farmers, because with this understanding of production, they are able to better identify their needs and their ability to pay and manage risks, all of which in turn translates into a considerable improvement in the structuring and costing of products.

Technology and access to information are part of the new generation of agriculture that is evolving worldwide. We believe that EcoProMIS is the platform responsible for bringing it to the life of each of the farmers who are part of the project and to the door of each of the companies that are part of the production chain.

EcoProMIS provides users not only with information, but with a valuable tool for daily operations, decision-making, and the way in which users innovate new products and services.

Innovation, growth and data analytics

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By Nicolás González, Business Development Manager

The world is changing. Every day we see how new technologies are being developed and many of us may have come to dread the idea of being displaced by a machine. But that is not the way of things. Technology is meant to make our lives easier, and we believe that the coexistence between traditional methods and newly developed ones is possible, if not meant to be.

In recent years, agricultural data analytics has become one of the top edge tendencies in terms of sustainable development globally. This means that there is a lot of research and a lot of projects currently trying to understand agricultural dynamics and how to use information in order to optimize processes and achieve sustainable objectives.

Although this is a very beautiful statement, the reality growers are facing on a daily basis, and how this information is to be gathered, processed and used, represents a huge challenge not only for farmers but for the whole agricultural value-chain.

Agricompas drones collect images of farms for innovative data analysis

Agriculture in LMIC countries still relies on manual labor. The culture of innovation, technology, insurance, good financial practices and data analytics is still in a juvenile stage.

Nevertheless, governments and private capital are incentivizing fast growth through technology and new services are becoming more common every day.

Innovation and Market Growth

For us as an agro data analytics company, innovation is the only way to break through such barriers and use our knowledge to evolve the growing market. This is our main drive, our oxygen and our compass. As Harvard Business Review’s article: Breaking down the barriers to innovation states:

To us, innovation doesn’t mean mere inventiveness. In our work we define it as: something different that creates value.

As we work with agricultural big-data, we face the challenge of gathering, processing and delivering useful information in the context of market needs and opportunities. By doing this, we look to make our EcoProMIS platform a value generator for growers, governments, and financial and insurance institutions.

Analytics for Decision Support

In order to capture what really drives the agricultural market in terms of financial services, risk management and productivity optimization, our innovation process aims to understand the market and develop tailored solutions that make the decision-making process more efficient, thus giving business intelligence the recognition and merit it deserves for the immense toolkit it provides us with.

We believe that by bringing sustainable agriculture into the digital era, better conditions for growers may be achieved. We believe that when real value is generated it can also be garnered.

We believe that corporate institutions can see a benefit as well, using high quality information and business intelligence, improving their margins, creating new delivery methods, enhancing R&D and, finally, increasing sales.

Our EcoProMIS platform sends farmers notifications using a suite of apps

With the richness of precise, accurate and relevant information, we enable an increase to the market size of agro insurance and provide the much-needed agronomic crop management data necessary for a new and creative product development ecosystem.

The world is changing. And so are we. Breaking through the barriers of convention, we have come to innovate and leave the world in better shape than how we found it. We believe that a new era for sustainable agriculture and analytics has come at last.

Connecting growers with an essential service in the modern world

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By Richard Strange, Head of Engineering at Agricompas

As individuals we all grow in wisdom and capability when we take time to reflect on our actions and find lessons to apply to tomorrow’s challenges. We look at our achievements and the memories that are anchored around them. We use them to guide us in becoming better in both our professional and personal lives. Modern business is very much the same. In the modern world, when a business moves, the byproduct of their actions is data.

Agricultural Data Gap

Whether it is a financial officer’s log of transactions, the record of work hours from an employee’s timesheet, or the number of clicks a website receives each day. It is rare to find a part of a business that isn’t measured or collected, either directly or by proxy through other measures. Yet in agriculture, little information is available around many crucial farming practices that often mean the difference between a bumper crop or financial devastation for families and communities.

It is not enough to say that you have an employee, or a website, or an invoice. The crucial questions are if the employee is doing their work, if the website is drawing attention, if the invoice is correct. Yet farmers are not able to answer critical questions about their own farms. They have sown their seeds, yet cannot say how many are germinating. They apply fertiliser, yet cannot tell if it is cost-effective. By leaving agriculture behind in this wave of data-driven business, the world is abandoning millions of farmers in data poverty, and powerless to compete against their wealthier first-world counterparts.

EcoProMIS Collects Quality Data

In leading the EcoProMIS project, the aim of Agricompas is to make a difference by empowering farmers with the knowledge they need, from sensor to survey to satellite to weather to drone data. But with each additional source of data, the difficulty of pulling them together increases exponentially. I’m the Head of Engineering at Agricompas, and I’m responsible for all the data EcoProMIS gathers. My job is to work out how we pull all this information together, understand it and then provide the information to those that need it.

There are two approaches to tackling a challenge like ours. Firstly, you can manually handle the data, with a team of analysts pushing round files via email, shared folders and collaborative spreadsheets. This does come with the advantage of immediate productivity and visibility. But there’s little certainty over the quality and completeness of data, and no way to be sure what information is where. The second option is to invest time and effort into a fully-fledged platform for data. It must allow the scientists we work with and the farmers that we support to put in and take out the information they need effortlessly.

Advanced Data Platform Prevents Errors

Only recently, the failure of the first, manual approach was highlighted by the loss of the records of 16,000 positive COVID-19 cases by the UK government. Was it a catastrophic server failure? the act of a malicious hacker? The truth was far more mundane. An analyst had opened the spreadsheet holding the list of COVID-19 cases in an old version of Excel, slicing 16,000 rows of data off without ever realising their mistake. Suppose this approach cannot work reliably in the hands of a team as well-staffed as the Public Health England team. How can we trust our own information in a similar system? We owe our growers and our own team better than that.

The cost of getting your data platform wrong (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54412581)

Over the last six months, the EcoProMIS team has been carefully creating a central platform that can look after farmer data responsibly and safely. A system of databases, redundant servers and security measures means that data doesn’t get forgotten, doesn’t get destroyed and doesn’t get leaked. Over the coming months, we are combining our suite of analytics, models and AI with new apps.

These apps will allow farmers to provide and see their data about their farms and help them make the right agricultural decisions. We already have the first app in early tests, with a knowledge presentation app in the works for release by the new year.

Connected Growers

As we evolve our platform and grower apps through close feedback with early users, we will be able to put more power back into the hands of growers, irrespective of their literacy or agricultural experience.

Agricompas and the EcoProMIS project exist to level the playing field and make agriculture fairer for farmers in the most challenging economic, environmental and social settings. I am incredibly proud of what our technical team has achieved to make that happen.

Data Analytics Make Sense

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By Simon Dzurjak, Data Analyst at Agricompas

With the advent of the big data era, the way we gather insights about processes affecting our everyday lives has changed dramatically, and the domain of agriculture and food production is no different.

As a result of the widespread availability of various sensors, from satellites and UAVs, to climate and soil measurement hardware on farms, we can now gather data at unparalleled rates and volumes. However, in its raw state, the data we collect often provides little, if any, insight. These raw measurements need to be processed and analysed through complex pipelines to be turned into a valuable product.

The engine responsible for driving the change of raw data into worthwhile insights is data analytics.

Data Analysis for EcoProMIS

Since joining Agricompas in July, I have been working on ensuring that the EcoProMIS data which is stored and arrives on our cloud platform, is as high quality as possible. Analytics and predictions are only ever as good as the data from which they are sourced, hence rigorous checking of data quality is always a necessary layer in data intensive projects. To help with this, I wrote a number of programs generating data quality statistics, which will ensure that any analytics we produce will be reliable and trustworthy.

The statistics produced by these scripts are then visualised and fed into internal dashboards, which provide a quick and intuitive way of keeping an eye on our data and making sure that it looks the way we expect it to.

Data analysis is an essential part of our work on the EcoProMIS project.

Eddy Covariance Data

So far, one of my most enjoyable (but challenging) experiences was working with large eddy covariance tower datasets. Eddy covariance towers are brilliant at logging and producing rich atmospheric chemistry flux datasets allowing us to understand the minute gas exchange processes in agricultural fields. This data is important for our crop modellers, allowing them to produce various models capable of predicting crop phenology and yields.

However, due to the way that the hardware transmits the data, it is common for gaps in data to form (e.g. as a result of signal loss). Luckily, with the power of statistics, we can accurately discern the missing values and fill the gaps in the data. Working closely with the crop modelling team, after many discussions and much research, we have successfully automated this process, and allowed ourselves to further iterate and improve on it if need be in the future.

Integrating Diverse Data

As for the future, I also look to my past and hope to bring some of my previous experience in working with remote sensing and Earth observation data into our platform. Integrating and tying all the data types together will be a big challenge, however I am certain that it will bear fruit and truly create a platform which will make farming easier, more precise and more sustainable.

With advances in computational power and the high quality data available to us, I believe that data analytics and artificial intelligence will play a key role in revolutionising agriculture, and it is rewarding to be a part of a team making this happen. Combining multiple sources of data together into a single product will allow us to create a platform capable of supporting decisions via accurate insights and improving the ease with which farmers grow crops like never before.