(cheerful music)
- We have a solution here
from our research team
that we're also starting to scale out
around precision agriculture
it's called FarmBeats.
And it really consists
of a few core elements.
In-ground sensors which for
any crop are 8-10 variables
are necessary to really
ensure the health of a crop
and so we have the sensor
module that we've created
with our device partners
in China called Seed that
functions remotely in the
field, can operate for about
2 years in terms of battery life,
and really can support a
number of different crops.
We have TV White Space which
is a connectivity technology
that was developed by Microsoft
and has been open sourced by us as well.
There are other connectivity
technologies such as
LoRa, and Narrowband IoT,
but this TV White Space tech
looks for space, unused
frequency between TV channels
and can send IoT data, in
some cases 30 to 50 kilometers
through cloud cover even
to actually transmit data
back to EDGE and cloud devices
in these rural farm environments.
We also have drones; this
specific drone was announced
at Build as part of our
partnership with DJI.
Drones really have an amazing
opportunity to innovate
in agriculture, to make farm
vision capture, pest detection,
phenotyping, these kind of
core functions that have always
been performed by people,
make them more efficient
and more frequent.
So drones are a great
vision camera in the sky.
When combined with
sensor data in the ground
and actually transmitted,
they all aggregate at an EDGE.
In this case, it's a PC class EDGE.
We also have server class
EDGEs for bigger farms.
And they can produce some
amazing data rendering.
So, we have moisture maps, PH maps.
When you are kind of look at these things,
we are able to track cows,
where they're eating,
where they're doing other
activities, but if they are stray.
I think these things are
very exciting in terms of
understanding animal and plant behavior.
It's very exciting to see
Microsoft's role in really
pushing this paradigm forward
across a number of different aspects.
