Atos uses Big Data to drive next-generation farming

Paris, Hannover, 25th April 2017 - Atos, a leader in digital transformation, announces a worldwide first solution which captures agricultural data directly via satellite to optimize farming practices. Together with start-up TerraNIS, Atos is using its business analytics solution Atos Codex to convert data into valuable information for the agriculture sector.

Growing consumer expectations (demand for new products and practices, traceability and food security), regulatory requirements and environmental regulations, and the rising cost of raw materials (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, water) all put pressure on the agricultural sector.

Crop genotyping has now become a priority to support the selection of crop varieties that will be best capable of solving future food and climate crises.

As leader of the SparkInData* consortium, Atos uses the power of its Atos Codex analytics platform to capture data via satellite which has biophysical indicators to help farmers best optimise farming practices - such as best crop choice, appropriate crop nutrition and the right fertilisation and harvesting periods.

A revolution in business and technology

Extracting information that is useful to farmers from raw satellite imagery requires an immense amount of computing power in order to manage and process the large amounts of data. It also requires a great deal of business expertise to give practical meaning to the images.

Capturing and optimising agriculture data has many immediate and long-term benefits:

• Optimization of raw material management to achieve substantial cost savings of around 15%;
• Elevated qualitative results - agricultural yields and production quality become sustainable and reliable;
• Deepened knowledge of operations, year-on-year evaluation of impact of different farming practices helps farmers to continue to progress in their profession.

Case Study: European satellites for a major American customer 

Atos is using the latest generation of satellites, Sentinel-2 Earth observation, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), which is capable of providing views using visible and near infrared light with a resolution of 10m to 60m, a perimeter of 290km and a revisit frequency of five days, which is ideal for monitoring crops.

For one of its biggest clients in the U.S. Atos is monitoring more than 100,000 hectares of crops and 6,000 plots of land (including wheat, corn, soy and vegetables) to provide biophysical indicators of plant development, such as the level of chlorophyll and the proportion of green foliage. This monitoring can detect any anomalies or discrepancies within and between plots of land. By connecting this information with data from the field, thanks to Atos Codex business analytics solutions, experts can then provide diagnostics and suggest adjustments to farming practices.