Microsoft today released the Azure Data Manager for Agriculture in a bid to support organizations building digital services for farmers with clean, quality data ideal for precision agriculture.

The data manager, which extends from Microsoft's Intelligent Data Platform, is a development platform that uses data already being collected from disparate sources on farms and aggregates it for analytics.

"When you think about things like weather data, satellite data, data that's coming from sensors on the ground and in very important equipment like tractors [and] irrigation systems that are on the field – those are intelligent equipment, and they're collecting a whole bunch of data. And today, it's really hard to bring that into shapes you can run analytics on, because it comes in all different kinds of geospatial resolution," Claudia Roessler, who directs agriculture for Microsoft industry clouds, told SDxCentral.

Because each tractor sends different data, for example, "a lot of the work that we're doing is about aggregating, harmonizing, and getting this data ready for analytics so you can get the value out of the Microsoft intelligence platform by running machine learning on it [and] predictive analytics on it," she said.

More significantly, Roessler highlighted the solution's capability to address challenges like "serving enough food to a growing population" while reducing the agriculture industry's impact on the environment, especially "in the light of more changing climatic conditions," she noted. "Those are the future business models that truly are going to help both the farmers but also, to be honest, the entire population in terms of having enough food and doing this growing in a sustainable manner."

She explained the data provided with this offering will help companies build predictive solutions that could tell farmers about vegetation health, point out weather or disease risks, and help farmers address other threats. The cloud provider's data manager allows for more granularity and precision in making those decisions on the farm, Roessler said.

In addition, the data manager can be used to monitor what types of practices are in action on a farm, like tillage or cover crops, and "being able to observe that and use that for carbon models in the future is is a very important part of the product as well," she noted.

The cloud provider's agriculture-focused data offering is as an evolution of Project FarmBeats, which Microsoft started in 2015. The project was focused on understanding challenges related to gathering farm data.

"A lot of the learning, a lot of the challenges we got from the research work informed the product strategy early on," Roessler said. "We learned about the siloed data that's coming from different data sources," and "we eventually saw the opportunity in helping organizations that want to build digital services for farmers and helping them manage the data better," she said.

And while Microsoft isn't the first company to address agricultural data, Roessler touted the cloud provider's ecosystem approach as unique. "On one hand, we want to enable the data side and getting to this clean data set. ... At the same time, we also want to create this ecosystem where we bring on solution partners that are building and developing solutions on top of [Azure Data Manager for Agriculture] so that other companies have the freedom of choice if they want to develop on the platform themselves, or if they want to work together with a solution partner and license their solution," she said.

This ecosystem approach "makes us pretty unique in a way that we bring our expertise and enterprise and our work together with companies like Bayer and other partners we bring to the table and really create an ecosystem approach that enables them to work with other companies and organizations in the value chain," Roessler explained.

To that point, this effort is geared toward "getting digital transformation solutions out to farmers and those new business models where the entire ecosystem and the entire value chain in agriculture is taking a role," she said.