The Saudi Agriculture Exhibition 2019 highlighted the new sustainable methods and technologies of ‘smart farming’ and its role in improving productivity and achieving food security.
Notably, Smart Farming won’t only change large traditional farming operations, but can also represent a new arm to leverage other agricultural growing trends.
Aditya Shah, Executive Chairman and Co-founder at MBM Amnex Technologies, who attended the Saudi Agriculture Exhibition 2019, stated that agricultural innovation has become one of the key determinants in the industry, especially with the increasing population facing the world in general, and the Middle East in particular.
“The increasing need for Food Security across the world calls for sustaining and robust solutions paving pathway for innovation in sustainable production”, Aditya Shah further noted, “One of the key areas of Agriculture focus is precision farming, and that’s our main area of expertise as we aim to create a significant difference through cutting edge technology”.
Stressing on the importance of agricultural innovations, Managing Director and Co-founder at MBM Amnex Technologies, Aditya Shah commented: “Large Scale farm requires a birds eye view to constantly monitor the spatial coverage throughout the crop life cycle where human eyes are limited. Technological improvement with Remote Sensing data to understand the nature of crop growth and its phenology is essential for farmers to visualize their own farm on mobile devices in local languages”.
A number of innovative agricultural methods and technologies were showcased during the Saudi Agriculture 2019, which was organized by the Riyadh Exhibition Company Ltd (REC) under the theme (Agricultural Innovation, for a better life). One of the displayed technologies was the digital farm maps, a near real time farm maps with farm ID’s that can be produced in a range of formats, portable for everyday use on the farm operations such as fence-line distance measurement and field areas calculation.
The weed mapping product, another innovative solution introduced in the exhibition, can detect weeds accurately within crop rows using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images in the early growth stage which helps farmers in Site-Specific Weed Management (SSWM). These location coordinates can further be used in farm machineries for Variable Precision Control of Weeds.
Additionally, the new mobile & web application which was developed by MBM-AMNEX will enable farmers to visualize & make decisions. Some of the application’s features include a multi-temporal aerial view of a crop field to observe spatial crop growth patterns, and crop health indicators to monitor crop vigor throughout the season, in addition to zones management for identifying in farm field variability.
Another notable innovative technology that was highlighted in the exhibition is the field variability maps in which the spatial variability of crops within the field is mapped using high resolution satellite images. This can be caused by a variety of reasons such as soil fertility, moisture content, and weed /pest infections. The technology will help farmers identify the problem areas (Smart Scouting) precisely and take necessary site-specific management practices.