KENYA – The Directorate of Resource Surveys & Remote Sensing (DRSRS) and the Kenyan Smart Agri-Tech Company, Agrvision, have signed a 5 years strategic partnership plan to develop a nation-wide unified platform for crop monitoring and yield forecasting powered by Satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.
The agreement aims to bring the two entities’ expertise into action to develop a smart unified platform to digitally monitor and classify crops around Kenya and to provide an advanced analytics tool to enhance data driven decisions.
This will contribute to the social and economic development of agriculture and forestry sectors in Kenya.
According to the Deputy Director of DRSRS Charles Situma, “DRSRS entered into this strategic collaboration with Agrvision to work together with an Agri- tech expert in developing the right digital tools and usage of advanced data collection and analytics technologies that can help the agricultural sector and decision makers in the country, have full visibility and data driven decisions that enhance food security programs to achieve better sustainable results.”
DRSRS is the official institution advising the Government of Kenya on matters related to Remote Sensing and Geographical Information systems (GIS) and gathering of data on the environment and natural resources around the country.
The agriculture sector is extremely vulnerable to climate change largely due to the increasing temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and extreme weather events with poor agricultural practices, low quality inputs and lack of access to knowledge.
Serious steps and programs need to be adapted to ensure provision of adequate food for a growing population and to increase export crops to generate foreign exchange.
Situma added, “A full transformation in the agricultural sector is needed, in which data plays the major role for better, more timely and actionable knowledge as a precursor.
“And that’s where DRSRS found the interest to work with Agrvision in using and customizing their well-developed crop monitoring and forecasting digital tools to develop a unified platform to work as the main sources for data collection and analytics to the agriculture sector.”
With more than 15+ years domain expertise in the Agri-tech sector globally, Agrvision developed a smart crop and forestry monitoring digital platform analyzing all big data collected through satellite imagery and specialized drones, using advanced data analytics algorithms, powered by machine learning, and artificial intelligence customized models and tools.
This is aimed to help farmers, forestry professionals, agricultural institutions and NGOs having useful insights and predictive analytics for a better data driven decision making, delivered through customized convenient easy-to-use digital channels.
With this strategic collaboration and long-term partnership, Agrvision seeks to work closely with DRSRS team to develop and customize the unified platform with interactive digital map classifying all crops around the country, powered by Ai with field boundaries.
It also aims to have real time analytics for crop monitoring and rotation, weather forecast and soil moisture to be collected from high resolution satellite imagery and specialized drones to be able to provide predictive analytics and yield forecasts
“We believe that this collaboration with DRSRS with the in-depth knowledge they have on the agricultural mapping and remote sensing, will add strength to the development and customization process for having the digital platform up and running,” Agrvision Chief Operations Officer Oscar Mwai said.
As part of this MoU, both entities appointed the project team to work closely together on drafting the final project scope of work to build the project strategy and road map for the platform development, with plans to start directly running the pilot project to analyse the needed final features to be embedded in the model.
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