FarmBeats: Microsoft and Seeed Partnered to Democratize Technology for Agriculture

As agriculture has historically been a key factor in the development of human society, many solutions and innovations have been dedicated to apply cutting-edge technologies to advance farming. Microsoft’s FarmBeats solution — an AI and IoT platform for farmers originated from Microsoft Research — is one of these solutions designed to increase farm productivity, and reduce costs. Seeed, the IoT hardware enabler based in Shenzhen, announced a partnership to work together with Microsoft to develop the hardware for FarmBeats.

As part of this partnership, Seeed has been developing a Sensor Box for FarmBeats that monitor the environmental data of the farm. The sensor box features eight different sensors that collects real-time data of factors that may affect the growth of the crops during cultivation processes, including wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture and temperature, CO2, atmospheric moisture and temperature, atmospheric pressure, as well as rain and light exposure.

This sensor data will be gathered by an IoT Base Station, and sent to the FarmBeats gateway (a Windows PC) via TVWS, and eventually to the Azure Cloud, making it accessible to farmers all over the world on the FarmBeats app.

“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft to bring the our IoT hardware development to the Microsoft solution. From the first 1 prototype to scale, we integrate a sustainable sensing system to collect data. We do think the FarmBeats platform could put forward the development of data-driven agriculture.”

— Shuyang Zhou, Director of Strategic Partnership at Seeed

The first version of the FarmBeats solution has been deployed to farmlands of Microsoft’s POC (Proof of Concept) partners. Meanwhile, Seeed has already been working on an upgraded version sensor box based on feedback.