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Improving Farm Productivity for Apple Orchards
No full textMicgrowCrop has partnered with Microsoft’s FarmBeats to bring data driven agriculture to the apple orchards of Washington State. The apple industry of Washington State produces about 70% of the apples grown in the United States, accounting for over $2.5 billion USD of annual revenue [ 1]. With the FarmBeats platform, MicgrowCrop is developing an IoT application for orchard monitoring and crop load management, powered by Azure. With the world population climbing towards an estimated 10 billion people by the year 2050, the output of food production needs to rapidly increase [ 2]. Previously, the high cost of manual data collection was the main factor preventing the adoption of data driven agriculture. FarmBeats technology helps solve this challenge by providing long range connectivity in rural areas and enabling data collection at lower cost. Data driven agriculture can enable growers to make more timely and informed decisions about the state of their orchards. By combining multiple data streams from weather stations, weather forecast, satellite images, and more on a single platform, insights that were previously guess work based on experience can now be automated. One of the project main goals is to use these data streams for frost prediction and early warnings so that growers may deploy frost prevention tactics such as heaters, sprinklers, and fans in their orchards to keep apple blossoms alive during cold temperatures. Early spring frost is a chief risk in the development of apple crop as varied temperatures can trick apple blossoms to open, putting them at higher risk for future cold temperatures to kill them.Microsoft Azure Globa
