Wolfgang von Loeper the owner of Mysmartfarm, open Innovator and an Entrepreneur resides in Cape Town Area of South Africa. In the interview published in Data Science Weekly he has opened up all the secrets of his passion towards Big Data Analysis for agricultural research.  He wasborn is Africa and went to Germany for his last three years of schooling. He completed his study in business economics at Germany and came back to South Africa. When he came back to South Africa he started his own family business of wine making and he converted it to organic. Even he won few awards for that. He used to record high volume of technical data for many years. It seems that he was not harvesting the crops but harvesting the data. As a farmer he was forced to work with data. It was the organic farming operational requirements that really got him into collecting farming data. He designed just to bring this data collection much easier and quicker to the farmers who are not using data for farming. He has utilised the received pages from labs of soil and crop leaf samples. He retyped all the data collected from the lab and maintained his own dataset in excel. This helped him to understand and structure the data better. He applied his analysis to balance his soil and fertilisers. After that he started working on soil moisture data to further refine farming techniques. He and his group of farmers analysed a data manually to achieve optimum phenolic constitutions of the grapes and even succeeded in it. He found that Big data analysis can be best utilised to overcome the drawbacks which previous one has bought us through the different farming techniques. According to him the areas like chemicals, water, and fertilisers are more impacted by the data science. After devoting so many years for preparing and analysing the data with excel sheet his group of well-wishers which includes farmers, scientist’s, and agronomists suggested that he should commercialise the methodology adopted by him so that other farmers can also get benefitted. So he has created a SaaS cloud platform which is automatically collecting a data. His MysmartFarm collects all the farmers’ data which comprises data of crops, leafs, soil, moisture, harvesting, fertilisation and many more parameters.

MSF(Medecins Sans Frontiers) data service then combines all the farmers’ data together to the climate data. This MSF data and forecasted data are combined on the SaaS platform and the valuable insights are provided to the farmers with various predictions or observed tendencies so that farmers can act with timelier manner. IBM is supporting technology stack of MysmartFarm and it is using business intelligent stack from their portfolio. According to Mr.Walfgang MSF will drive farmers to more sustainable practices and will evolve numerous agro-ecological practices through knowledge transfer of profitable farming practices.

This inspirational story truly justifies that technology can be best utilised for maintaining ecology. To get best possible result optimum prediction of possibilities can be performed in any of the domain if you know the data analysis thoroughly. The results will be mind-blowing. The only requirement from an individual is the passion towards learning, upskilling and best possible utilisation of gained skills for the betterment society.

So stay tuned and be ready to enter into fascinating world of data science going hand in hand with us and don’t forget to visit www.skillville.in

References:

https://mysmart.farm/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolfgangvonloeper

https://www.datascienceweekly.org