ICL and Amazon to develop open digital ag platform

ICL, a global specialty minerals and specialty chemicals company based in Tel Aviv, announced that it will work closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the development of its open digital services platform designed to enhance the capabilities of agronomists and other agriculture professionals, driving farming improvement.

Actionable insights empowered by data analytics

The platform is to harness in-field, crowdsourced and academic data, as well as data contributed from leading global partners, to create new capabilities for agro-professionals, and the ability to quickly create actionable insights, empowered by data analytics.

The development of the new digital services platform for agro-professionals is to provide access to currently untapped data as well as actionable recommendations provided by insights and analytics.

The platform is taking advantage of AWS advanced analytics and machine learning tools to unlock these agronomic insights and enable agronomists and other agro-professionals to extend better services to drive growth of crop yields and sustainability.

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The platform is to harness in-field, crowdsourced and academic data, as well as data contributed from leading global partners, to create new capabilities for agro-professionals, and the ability to quickly create actionable insights, empowered by data analytics. – Photo: AFP

Field trials

“Currently, there is a wealth of valuable agronomic data, which is not gathered, not widely accessible or unstructured, and therefore not practical for agronomists to leverage. One example is field trials, which are carried out by businesses, academic institutions and agro-professionals around the world, but only a tiny amount of this agronomic knowledge is actually accessible to all agro-professionals.”

“With the help of AWS, our platform will provide unmatched access to these untapped sources of knowledge and will promote collaboration between agro-professionals, to allow improved farming, towards meeting global food and sustainability demands,” said Raviv Zoller, ICL President & CEO.

Focus on enhancing data for experts

Mr. Zoller added, “Unlike other digital solutions currently being developed in the market, our approach is to enhance the capabilities of agronomists and other agro-professionals, thereby creating significant additional value for meeting current challenges of farming, by providing insights and tools to increase crop yields. We focus on enhancing data for the experts driving the professional farming decision making. By choosing this path, we believe digital solutions will be adopted faster and more efficiently by the agricultural community.”

AWS machine learning solutions

AWS will extract data from internal ICL sources and external sources by using AWS machine learning solutions. Agro professionals will be able to analyse and query the data using advanced AI analytics tools, including AWS-powered data lakes which can handle the scale, agility, and flexibility required to combine different types of data and analytics approaches.

For example, this should allow agro professionals to gain deeper insights, to predict the effect of inputs on crops, while weighting different scenarios of humidity, temperatures and type of soil.