Advanced digital tool for the agricultural risk management

Abstract

The State of São Paulo is one of the most prominent states in the Brazilian agricultural sector, being of great relevance to the agribusiness of the country. The objective of this proposal is to develop an Advanced Digital Tool for Agricultural Risk Management, focused on Sao Paulo state, i.e., which can allow the coverage at a local, regional, and national level. It will be developed a robust system for risk management in agriculture based, which can meet the integration of a friendly decision making process based on knowledge and qualified information for farmers in order to anticipate, avoid and react to shocks. The proposed processing services will be implemented on a cloud computing infrastructure to create a cloud computing service, specific to geospatial applications, big data and analytics tools. Further, the processing procedures, information products and geospatial imagery are going to be exposed through web applications built on mapping. The integration of processing and web application allow the users, i.e., also partners, to customize their applications adaptively to the crop they are working with, and based on the cloud infrastructure, content, and diverse data sources. As the data could be searched and accessed through web interfaces and standard APIs, it can be accessed and processed into derived value added products almost immediately following acquisition. Such risk management system will preserve the standard of living of those who depend on farming, strengthen the viability of farm businesses, and provide an environment which supports investment in the farming sector. Besides, the processing system is going to beneficiate smaller companies and researchers that may not have the budget to purchase the required capital equipment. Three basic sources of agricultural risk will be considered: agricultural risks, logistical risk and risk of loss. The options for the delivery of geospatial data include: web map service, tiled map service, web coverage service, and ftp/http file delivery. Currently, no single system is available to expose the required multispectral data to the end user in an efficient and timely manner. The development of such system will improve on existing data access models, which at present are costly, require excessive management, and do not provide access to data quickly enough for agricultural applications. The delivery options are going to facilitate flexible access to data. The selection of delivery will be dependent on the user application. The concept of information agriculture, i.e., agriculture 4.0, will be applied and consideration will be given to the design of a decision support system to store, retrieve and process specific knowledge on the agricultural environment to monitor these key risks associated with biomass production and food security. The proposed research product has significant commercialization potential since the benefits are largely economic since it can reduce agricultural risks, logistical risk and risk of loss, and minimize the food insecurity, among others. Also, the developed tool can be used to reduce false agriculture insurance claims. Secondary benefits include the increasing of food safety and the reduction of environmental impacts, since it profit sustainability. Finally, it will increase the availability of derived agriculture information products for Brazil, as well as increase geospatial knowledge leadership and innovation. The proposed initiative will also foster knowledge transfer between the researchers and the productive sector, including the agricultural industry in Brazil. (AU)