How is SaaS Used in Agriculture?

Agricultural practices are no more laborious and tiring, but quick and efficient. SaaS-powered agriculture is the next solution for growing food demands and also provides efficient methods regarding the alarming food concerns, through its up-to-date technology in yield projections, weather pattern predictions, and probability mapping of diseases. Just like many other e-commerce businesses, SaaS has also revolutionized agriculture and is a great helping tool for farmers and other farm workers. 

How is SaaS Used in Agriculture? 

SaaS digitalizes the agricultural supply chains, provides cost-effective business solutions with actionable insights and promotes sustainable farming. Let’s see how this advanced forecasting tool is used, to modernize and ease out the agricultural practices. 

1. Enables Food Safety through Traceability

Enables Food Safety through Traceability

Food safety challenges need an up-to-the-par technology like SaaS that identifies the risks involved in production and consumption. This solution process is called traceability. It is meant to trace the unforeseen food safety lapses that may occur in the future, or if they already happened, it helps verify the reasons, or the location where it happened, through documented recorded identification and immediate action. 

SaaS Helps in Tracking…

To ensure food safety, it is important to keep track of the origin of agricultural products, ingredients, and their attributes, all the way from farms through food processing to the sale, food service, and consumers. The food chain is a complex phenomenon, as it covers international borders and encounters several complicated domestic and global regulations. Managing this intricate system without technology is considered next to impossible. That’s where SaaS helps in the following ways.

  • SaaS technology efficiently captures the relevant data related to the food supply chain, from multiple remote locations, which may be stored in different places and spot anomalies, thus helping farmers minimize risk and save costs on time. 
  • Years ago, the agriculture sector was stuck in a never-ending loop of using physical paper and spreadsheets. Even after the innovation of computers and many satellite image tools, farmers still had to use paper to manage the major farm operations. However, Agritech SaaS tools help these farmers manage all the farm activities, with technologies such as remote sensing apps, drones, etc., that help them collect and analyze data.
  • Drones provide the farm workers with high-resolution pictures, which helps them map and survey the field and also keep a timely check on the plants. The accurate data enables farmers to make the right decisions about spraying pesticides, soil health, and the amount of water. 

If you’re skeptical about the prices of drones for your SaaS business, take a look at how much does drone mapping cost?

2. Promotes Effective Data Management and Insightful Decisions

 

SaaS technology helps with conducive data storage. Farm workers collect and store large volumes of data, in the form of numbers, texts, images, and videos, for future decision-making. By 2030, the agricultural data size is estimated at 25 Petabytes, with the digitalization of 50% to 60% of farms. SaaS enables farm workers to efficiently store field data in the following ways.

  • SaaS-based cloud software promotes smart farming, through timely data collection, retrievement, data storage and processing, and simplified dissemination. 
  • Cloud-based farming also enables farmers to collect data on weather cycles, soil quality, crop patterns, and much more, that further helps them make accurate conclusions and decisions. The storage of entire farm data in the SaaS products also makes it easily accessible. This can be extremely beneficial because if crops are infected by a similar disease again, stored data can help them take quick remedial measures.
  • SaaS solutions also cater to the shortage of labor and unprecedented demand for food, and make farm management easy and essentially infallible for farmers, through advanced machine learning, and data analysis tools.

3. Increases the Financial Stability of Farmers

Increases the Financial Stability of Farmers

In agriculture, SaaS is not only used to address certain business needs but is also useful in providing cost-effective solutions to many agricultural problems. It helps in the yield of high-quality crops, by cutting down on the unnecessary cost of tracking tools and increasing savings and also compares them alongside production yields and many other profits against the benchmarked values. Additionally, 

  • Cloud-based farming helps in efficient farm management, particularly in the area of price risks and tackling the market. 
  • Like many other businesses, SaaS solutions provide easy integration, into or with existing IoT devices. It significantly reduces the need for heavy manual labor, by providing a range of diverse functions. SaaS is evolving continuously and is estimated to perform even more efficient tasks in the future. 
  • Eventually, SaaS helps farmers attain financial stability, by increasing their SaaS Gross Margin

4. Helps with Weather Smart Advisory

Helps with Weather Smart Advisory

SaaS solutions shrink the time required to make weather predictions, while also improving accuracy. When it comes to agriculture, the cloud also stores region-specific weather information. It helps farmers with important crop-related decisions and enables them to stay ahead of the varying climatic conditions that pose a great threat to the plantation in long run. 

With time, the need for the right predictions related to weather patterns will become eminent in the agricultural sector. The emission of greenhouse gases is a major threat to plantations and weather smart advisory reorients the agricultural systems – thus helping them tackle climate changes and meet the standard quality for farms. 

5. Provides Expert Consultation

Provides Expert Consultation

Cloud computing offers farmer solutions to common agricultural problems. Experts help farmers and devise quick solutions through their expertise. Their main goal is to provide detailed information about the right kind of soil, exact doses of fertilizers needed, and answer many other farm-related queries.

There are many cloud computing platforms available, that farmers can use on their mobiles (in the form of an app) or on a computer (in the form of a website), to find the timely solution to their problems. Through practical information sharing, agricultural scientists share their recommendations about different cultivation techniques and fertilizers used in the cloud. 

6. Promotes Agriculture as an E-Commerce Business 

Mostly, people in rural areas are not tech-savvy and can’t sell their products directly to the market. Between the retail and production process, a lot of middlemen are used, which usually ends up in the exploitation of the farmers. Cloud computing’s agricultural management information system helps them sell their products directly to the users.

 A web-based management information system is beneficial for farmers, i.e. provides them with advanced information about markets, weather, crop sowing, fertilizer, and many other related topics. 

Have a look at different types of SaaS business models

Smart Farming is the Future!

AI-driven agriculture has rightfully digitalized the traditional agricultural sector, by providing farmers with image-based insights, pest-risk forecasts, and information related to soil degradation, crop failure possibilities, and changing weather patterns, thus helping them increase their customer lifetime value

Data-driven decision-making and digitalized supply chains have promoted SaaS-powered agriculture and more people are now reaping the benefits of this technological innovation that results in increased efficiencies and higher productivity. Nonetheless, this is just the beginning and undoubtedly, soon SaaS will overpower the agricultural sector and every other e-commerce business!