Agriculture is one of the most interesting sectors when it comes to digital transformation. Our perception, which turned out to be wrong, is that digital technologies are disrupting many industries and major sectors such as finance, media, retail, technology and more. One sector that, until recently, was under our radar, is agriculture. Reality proves that this field uses technology quite aggressively to optimize all aspects of knowledge in agriculture. Artificial Intelligence, Remote Sensing, Satellite Data, Internet of Things, AI, Drones, Big Data, GPS and the like. Accurate weather forecasting models and other technologies are rapidly penetrating almost every aspect of the agricultural value chain and business models. This is good news: the world needs more food and more efficient ways to deal with the growing world population. By 2050 the world will have to produce 70% more food for the expected population of 9 billion people.
A fascinating case study is the Israeli startup SeeTree that developed an end-to-end intelligence network that remotely collects data from the many trees on the farm. They use artificial intelligence and machine learning combined with fieldwork and multi-dimensional sensing photography using drones and specialized vehicles to collect accurate data, provide farmers with the ability to see and monitor the health of their trees, while recommending actions (e.g. , change irrigation parameters, etc.).
A Forbes article entitled “How this company is changing the smart-agriculture industry by merging drones and artificial intelligence”, published on their website on January 16, 2019, describes SeeTree and how they are changing agriculture and tree management by using advanced digital technologies.
In chapter 2 of the book “Doing Digital” (Hebrew), the authors Raz Heiferman and Prof. Yesha Sivan describe some of the digital technologies, which they claim are part of the technologies of the third digital era. Some of these technologies are also the ones that SeeTree uses to challenge and change tree management. In Chapter 5 of the book they discuss innovation and provide several case studies of companies (for example, John Deere) that used digital technologies to change the organization: from a product-oriented company – selling agricultural equipment, to a solution-oriented company – selling farm management solutions.
