Johor Corporation’s (JCorp) digital-first agrofood company, FarmByte Sdn Bhd, is harnessing advanced cloud, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to revolutionise the agrofood sector in Malaysia.
By utilising AWS solutions, FarmByte aims to further augment its digital infrastructure and data-driven approach to farming by offering farmers comprehensive crop monitoring solutions and insights, including weather information and fertiliser and pesticide application rates. These insights, provided through the innovative FarmByte app, allow farmers to plan and optimise their resources better for improved yield outcomes while mitigate the risks from today’s unpredictable climatic conditions.
FarmByte is leveraging AWS’ cloud infrastructure for scalable and reliable hosting of data sources and applications, AWS Data Exchange for secure data sharing with partners, and Amazon S3 and AWS Glue Data Catalog for secure storage and management of a scalable data lake. By building and deploying a data lake on AWS, FarmByte can now conduct comprehensive analyses and generate actionable insights for Crop Pricing Analytics, Demand Forecasting, and Supply Chain scheduling. Through AWS’s pioneering data aggregation and management services, FarmByte is also able to aggregate data from various sources within its ecosystem and externally to provide key insights to the farming community.
FarmByte’s Head of Digital, Mohd Fakhri Mohd Noor said, “Our vision at FarmByte is to revolutionise the agrofood sector in Malaysia so that we can enhance the nation’s food security and empower farmers with good farming know-how and insights that can enable them to produce higher quality and higher value crops to uplift their livelihoods. We are proud to be among the first in the industry to employ a digital-first approach in what we do for our farmers and the food security issue.”
Fakhri added that by utilising AWS’s world-class solutions, FarmByte can enhance its data aggregation, AI and ML capabilities to provide even more advanced predictive analytics and personalised insights to its farmers through its app, as well as offer innovative solutions that can transform farming practices to ensure a stronger, more sustainable agrofood value chain.
Farmers in Malaysia are currently facing many challenges from climate change to market fluctuations and unprecedented supply chain disruptions.
Apart from providing farmers with comprehensive farming and pricing insights, the FarmByte app digitalises and accelerates the finance payment process for farmers, and allows them to go through the entire process of offtaking – from scheduling to communications with retailers and wholesalers – digitally.
Complementing the FarmByte app is a FarmByte B2B online marketplace that showcases its farmers’ product catalogs and allows buyers to see and buy the available product range. This B2B marketplace will be fully launched by the 3rd quarter 2024.
