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February 25, 2019

Digital agriculture through the power of ZEMA

by Rebecca Sherratt, Production editor, Milling and grain

The world is unpredictable, and nobody knows this better than farmers. With climate change drastically effecting the amount of rain we get yearly and temperatures soaring, crops are becoming a dangerous game, as farmers never know what will happen next.

ZE has a solution for this: ZEMA.
 


The Vancouver-based data company, responsible for the data and software technologies for thousands of companies globally, has designed one comprehensive data analytics software that can keep farmers and traders up to date with the latest in yields, stocks and prices, as well as monitoring the success of their own crops and their expected income. With this technology, the future of farming needn’t be so uncertain.


Minimising the risks
ZE are acutely aware of the risks and challenges that farmers and traders face, and their goal is to provide software that can harvest this data and find solutions to these problems. By turning data into intelligence, ZEMA’s advancements can innovate agriculture into a new digital frontier, making sense of big and real-time data, and considering geopolitical risks and opportunities.


ZE have placed the risks of agriculture into three categories:

Population
One big issue is where will we gather enough food to feed everyone? The most recent EU estimate suggested there are 7.3 billion people on Earth, however, this will rise by 2.3 billion, up to 9.6 billion by 2050.

Lack of investment
In the past thirty years, developing countries’ investments in agriculture have dropped significantly, especially when compared to developed countries. This is resulting in low productivity and stagnant agricultural production in these developing countries, placing a strain on other developed countries to provide food for those countries which are struggling to maintain their produce.

Climate change
Water scarcity, extreme weather conditions and rising global temperatures are all having sever effects on crop yields. Crops failing can have drastic effects on countries, most notably places such as India, where farmers commonly commit suicide during droughts where the annual hurricanes don’t arrive to nourish the fields.

The food supply chain is very delicate, complex and therefore also easy to disrupt.

Alongside all the environmental changes that effect prices of items, agricultural products also often have high transport costs, which also are subject to change and can affect local and regional prices. Wheat, in particular, is subject to sudden shifts in price. In the past ten years alone, the price of wheat has shifted dramatically.

Some years, transport costs of wheat has accounted for 15 percent of the overall price for the produce, whereas other months it has suddenly inflated up to being 20 percent of the overall costs, placing a serious strain on buyers and traders.


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine Milling and Grain
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.


For additional daily news from milling around the world: global-milling.com

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