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The COVID-19 crisis has brought stark focus into the ongoing challenges to global food security from existing food systems. Therefore, how can we ensure we produce enough food for a growing global population, with supply resilient to future shocks? How can we ensure environmental sustainability and healthy nutrition for all?

Nature-positive Food Systems for a Healthy Planet and Healthy People

This is a key focus for the UN Environment Programme’s 3rd Global Science Policy Business Forum, as IBM and Yara help them explore ”Nature-positive Food Systems for a Healthy Planet and Healthy People”. Smallholder farmers have a key role to play in transforming global food supply.

We see great strides to industrialize farming in the developed world. However, future food security will depend upon the success of smallholder farmers. Deploying regenerative farming practices to protect the future viability of the soil will be key.

And it is to this endeavor that IBM and Yara forged a partnership in 2020 to accelerate digital farming. Also, it will provide smallholder farmers with hyperlocal weather forecasting, AI insights, and collaborative data sharing. This will help “predict the future,” and mitigate the significant risks of planting at the wrong time.

The FarmWeather app – World’s leading digital farming platform

In some parts of the world, for small farming families an unexpected rainfall or other extreme weather conditions can mean financial wipeout. In addition, it causes reduced food supply for an entire community. IBM is working with Yara, the Norwegian-based world leader in fertilizers and provider of environmental solutions. Together we have built the world’s leading digital farming platform to help farmers improve their yields, and to do it sustainably. More, the platform achieves this by combining unrivaled agronomic knowledge with the power of artificial intelligence and data analytics.

The FarmWeather app The FarmWeather app provides hyper-local and reliable weather insights within a three-four-kilometer radius specifically designed for the smallholder ecosystem.  This is based on using data from IBM’s The Weather Company and Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting data platforms.

The solution supports farmers to make good decisions on their farm by increasing productivity, income, and livelihood/sustainability through crop-related advice and mitigating risk, and decreasing waste on the farm through providing farmers with risk forecasts.

To allow as many as possible can benefit from the app, it is available on different mobile phone messaging platforms, and data can also be shared via SMS text with farmers who don’t have access to the internet or to a smartphone.

In other words, this highly accurate weather information allows farmers to make the best very decisions for their crops. This of course,  taking account of their own circumstances. Let us give you an example. If a crop is within a week of peak quality but heavy rain is forecast for tomorrow, it may be better for the farmer to harvest today rather than risk waiting. The Farmweather app is now available in 7 countries in 11 languages and have 3.4 million user downloads.

The future of farming

FarmWeather is just one step in IBM’s work with Yara to make technology work for the benefit of farmers. We have extended our collaboration, now working on second farmer-centric project, the open data exchange. A new platform has been implemented for collaboration around farm and field data. Each of the worlds 600 million farms has its data to help them make informed decisions. However, this data is mainly dispersed, non-compatible and inaccessible to other farmers. As a result, having a platform to allow greater open data sharing, provides a foundation for improving the efficiency, transparency and sustainability of global food production.

UN Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment

On 20 February, 2021 we joined UN Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment with among the following speakers:

• Prof. Jean-Marie Dembele, Gaston Berger University, St-Louis, Senegal
• Pal Oystein Stormorken, VP Farm Ecosystems, Yara International
• Peter Rylander, Executive Partner, Global Business Services, IBM Europe
• Jim Whitehurst, President IBM
• Sveinung Rotvatn, Norway Minister of Climate and Environment

At this event we presented Yara’s Action Africa initiative and the FarmWeather App. This forms part of the “Nature-positive Food Systems for a Healthy Planet and Healthy People” conference stream, convened in support of the 2021 Food Systems Summit and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Watch the event replay here:

Watch Yara’s presentation at 2.20 and there after listen to Jim Whitehurst, President IBM and Sveinung Rotvatn, Norway Minister of Climate and Environment.