Agro-informatics at Scale: Revolutionising Food and Agriculture through Data-Driven Insight

Agro-informatics, a powerful approach integrating information technology with agricultural data management, analysis, and application, offers a revolutionary solution to tackle critical global challenges like improving nutrition, agricultural productivity and sustainability, rural livelihoods, and global food security. Agro-informatics depends on reliable, timely, high-resolution, integrated location-based information across diverse sectors, including Food Security, Crops, Vegetation, Livestock, Agricultural Trade and Production, Land Cover/Use, Soil, Water, Fisheries, Forestry, Socioeconomic, Climate, Topography, Environment, Emergencies and Infrastructure. However, the complexity and fragmentation of heterogeneous data sources present a significant challenge. Empowered by big data and the cloud, agro-informatics at scale is revolutionising food and agriculture through data-driven insight. Near real-time data analysis can identify potential threats such as droughts, pests, and diseases, enabling timely interventions and mitigating their impact. This presentation explores how the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is tackling these challenges, building a unified environment for accessing, managing, visualising and analysing diverse datasets. We delve into the approach and architecture, detailing the tools, infrastructure and techniques used to collect, store, process, integrate, federate, and analyse diverse agricultural data sets. We also acknowledge the challenges associated with developing and operating such a platform at scale. We showcase the transformative power of agro-informatics at scale by exploring use cases in early warning, decision support, intervention design, monitoring, and evaluation. Finally, we outline the data governance and operation of the platform.