Garnering AgriTech Power to help South Africa’s small-scale farmers

Microsoft South Africa as part of its AgriTech Programme selected The Awareness Company as its beneficiary to develop three-high impact agricultural solutions within 2022. This is expected to reach and impact the nation’s one of the critical domains while helping it towards growth, sustainability and employment. 

With the aim to accelerate digital transformation in the South African agricultural sector, The AgriTech programme plans to collaborate with the technology company where small scale farmers interests are met. 

With an array of challenges encompassing the small-scale farmers of South Africa such as infrastructure issues, security concerns, lack of business and advanced production skills etc, the technology-driven AgriTech programme is built to garner the ability to empower farmers and enable them with high-quality productions and access to a competitive market. 

Solving challenges

South Africa has 2 to 4 million small scale farmers that play a crucial role in maintaining food security and driving economic participation. With forever staying distinct from technology, the programme gives farm security and value chain a high momentum. 

This is where the AgriTech programme steps in with its solutions that help to increase yield and reduce the cost of production.

These solutions are:

HYDRA FarmSecurity: The drive towards higher farm security encapsulates AI (Artificial Intelligence), sensors and data analytics. This combining of cutting-edge technology is done through an easily accessible mobile platform. It offers the benefit of perimeter detection, workforce monitoring, livestock tracking and suspicious activity alerts. Moreover, it reduces the risk associated with the operating environment by raising a warning before the incident happens. 

HYDRA FarmAwareness: The awareness campaign that allows the digitisation of farms in order to enhance the overall livestock management capability, besides the assets and crops. The farm awareness solution enables farmers to track the health and weight of their livestock which will ensure a healthy output, offers them access to real-time information on gynaecology of livestock, personnel data, rainfall, planting & harvesting analysis, quality checks, pest scouting and employment searches.

HYDRA AgriInsights: With innovating through IoT (Internet of things), analytics, AI and data-driven insights into the ways to improve the agriculture organizations, the solution helps reduce the risk and shell out more value hence providing value-added services in agriculture.