Several studies have demonstrated the need to significantly increase the world's food production by 2050. However, there is limited amount of additional arable land, and water levels have also been receding. Although technology could help the farmer, its adoption is limited because the farms usually do not have power, or Internet connectivity, and the farmers are typically not technology savvy. We are working towards an end-to-end approach, from sensors to the cloud, to solve the problem. Our goal is to enable data-driven farming.

Between 2013 and 2016, U.S. farmers and ranchers weathered a 45% dip in net farm income -- the largest since the Great Depression -- while the number of mouths to feed grew sharply by the day. The global population is expected to increase by 2.2 billion by 2050, and the world's farmers will have to grow about 70% more food than is now produced. If you ask Microsoft, the solution lies in technology. The tech giant's FarmBeats program, which launched in preview today on Azure Marketplace ahead of Ignite 2019, is a multi-year effort to bring robust data analytics to the agriculture sector. With a backend built on Azure and compatibility with hardware from a range of top manufacturers, it aims to promote what Ranveer Chandra, FarmBeats project lead and chief scientist at Azure Global, calls "data-driven" farming techniques. The International Food Policy Research Institute claims these can boost farm productivity by as much as 67% while reducing resource usage.

At its annual Ignite event in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft today announced that Azure FarmBeats, a project that until now was mostly a research effort, will be available as a public preview and in the Azure Marketplace, starting today. FarmBeats is Microsoft's project that combines IoT sensors, data analysis and machine learning. "The goal of FarmBeats is to augment farmers' knowledge and intuition about their own farm with data and data-driven insights," Microsoft explained in today's announcement. The idea behind FarmBeats is to take in data from a wide variety of sources, including sensors, satellites, drones and weather stations, and then turn that into actionable intelligence for farmers, using AI and machine learning. In addition, FarmBeats also wants to be somewhat of a platform for developers who can then build their own applications on top of this data that the platform aggregates and evaluates.

Farmers around the world are facing the urgent question of how to sustainably feed a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 -- and the answer, in part, might be found nestled among the cornstalks and soybeans on a farm a short distance from Washington, D.C. The fields are outfitted with a network of high-tech sensors that could revolutionize how food is grown across the globe by putting data in the hands of farmers and scientists in ways unimaginable a few years ago. The sensors are part of a groundbreaking new partnership between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The 7,000-acre farm at the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland is using FarmBeats, a project that aims to harness data and artificial intelligence to help farmers cut costs, increase yields and sustainably grow crops that are more resilient to climate change. "We can't simply double our acreage to produce this food," says Dan Roberts, research leader at the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Research Laboratory, located at the Beltsville center.

Let's think differently and use IoT to solve local problems says Jack Ngaare, MD of Microsoft Africa Development Center, Kenya site. He was sharing insights on Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Internet of Things(IoT) during keynote address at the third East Africa IoT and AI Summit. Speaking to delegates at the conference he emphasized the need to focus on the problems Africa has and be more deliberate about solving these problems using such emerging technologies. Let's think differently and use IoT to solve local[Africa] problems He asked "What problems do we have? What are the focus areas and what are the simple solutions?

As it stands now, farmers are employing new-age technologies to transform production driven by the fact that there is a need to feed more with less and the necessity to address the influences of industrial farming. At present around half of the current food produced, roughly 2 billion tons a year, ends up getting wasted while approximately 124 million people across 51 countries suffer food insecurity or worse. In addition to this, several other climatic challenges are lowering agricultural production. Governments across almost every country need to look into the matter and solve it as the world population is forecast to grow from 7.6 billion to 9.8 billion by 2050. On the brighter side, the world has ventured into the second green revolution through the fourth industrial revolution.