Contributors

A Core Agricultural Technology API Contributors Dr Michael Dever - Senior Developer Shane Byrne - CEO

Foreword Shane Byrne - CEO

My first memories of farming are bottle feeding lambs and feeding calves out of big white plastic buckets on my father's dairy farm in the early 90’s. My first venture into entrepreneurship was selling eggs within whatever radius my father was willing to drive, which I funded by lambing sheep for local farmers in the previous winter. Farming is a global business and during my time in Australia, I went back to my grass roots by milking 1000 cows for six months in the harsh but amazing location of King Island, Tasmania right in the middle of the Bass Strait. I was fortunate to grow up on a farm and the tools that I learned while farming have lent themselves well into turning Showoff from two men, €4,000 and 80 Sheep into a company that has developed over 150 projects across multiple geographies and multiple sectors ranging from Augmented Reality to Agriculture and which supports over 20 people from our rural HQ in County Wicklow, Ireland. Agriculture has played such an important part in the foundation of Showoff and my own life as an entrepreneur. I have always felt that with the advances in technology and the major impacts that this could create for farms and farmers, the solution has to be further the field of Agricultural Technology advances. There is no doubt that the experience farming gives lends itself to people of a farming background becoming outstanding entrepreneurs, as they have to make do with what they have and the tools that are available to them at any given time. The factors that make a great entrepreneur are ingrained within the farming community: honesty of effort, dedication, and the drive to succeed in the face of adversity in an ever changing environment. At the end of the day, farmers invented the pivot. At Showoff we believe that advancements in Agricultural Technology are going to revolutionise how people farm, work and grow the food of tomorrow. We want to work with the best agricultural agencies, companies and most importantly, new Agricultural Technology entrepreneurs to create the farms of tomorrow.

Copyright Showoff 2017

A Core Agricultural Technology API Introduction

Introduction Dr Michael Dever - Senior Developer

This paper presents a high level introduction to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and describes how they can be used to augment and enhance the current state of the art in Agricultural Technology. The Internet of Things has brought about some incredible advances in such technology, for example, data driven decision making influenced by satellite imagery, herd monitoring and awareness and health & safety solutions. However, while individually each of these solutions is incredibly impressive, at Showoff, we feel they would offer a much more complete and helpful solution if they were married together. One problem exists with this though: each of these technologies is generally implemented by individual vendors and there is currently no way for these software and hardware solutions to communicate with each other in a commercially viable manner. An obvious solution to this problem is to define a means for all agricultural technology vendors to communicate with each other, enabling them to further the reach of their products. Enabling each of these solutions to communicate with each other will open up a new world of opportunity for agricultural technology providers as well as opening up the market to newcomers. If each of these technologies can communicate with each other through a common means, then that common means would be capable of enabling next generation analytics, trend mapping, predictive analytics, machine learning and data driven decisions to be determined and applied to agricultural technologies and the enterprises that they support. At Showoff we are proposing to build and establish a common core Agricultural API which will provide a standardised means for all Agricultural Technology providers and their technologies to communicate with each other.

Predictive Data Analytics

Animal Data

Sensors

Next Gen Farms

Precision Agriculture

Plant Data/Analysis

Robotics and Drones

Marketplaces

Smart Irrigation Farm Management Software



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What is an API? Dr Michael Dever - Senior Developer

An API is an Application Programming Interface. It allows developers and clients to interact with functionality that has been designed to fulfil the requirements of a consumer product. It is perhaps most straightforward to regard an API as the backbone of any well designed application. An API can be thought of as a producer and manipulator of data that is consumed by client applications, such as mobile applications and web applications. In the context of how solutions are developed at Showoff, all of our APIs are designed in such a way that they are interoperable between consumer applications. As a result of this, there are several benefits to using an API: they abstract away the underlying software and/or hardware, and in doing so, enable the developers of applications and solutions to require little knowledge of how the functionality of the application is developed. They provide a common, straightforward way for developers to interact with that functionality. Development becomes much simpler, with the API doing most of the heavy lifting for the application. An API-centric approach results in reduced development costs, as the main functionality for a product need only be developed once. Consumer applications can then leverage the functionality of the API in order to present a product and interact with 3rd party services and APIs. This results in much more straightforward and a much less error-prone development methodology. All Showoff APIs use a standardised approach, which are well documented and will be familiar to any modern API backed application developer. This means that consumer application developers can concentrate on building robust applications that offer their clients and their customers an awesome user experience, rather than worrying about the complexities and nuances of the problems and issues that are being solved. Essentially, the use of a common core agricultural API will significantly accelerate the development of new products and the extension of existing products.

3rd Party Services

Data base

API Consumer Applications



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How can an API help Agricultural Technologies? Dr Michael Dever - Senior Developer

APIs typically interact with many 3rd party services and other APIs. By integrating these services and APIs with our consumer APIs, this, generally, saves on the need to integrate these services with the consumer applications, and again, provides a common, standardised means of interacting with these 3rd party services and APIs. This results in reduced development time for the consumer applications. Showoff are proposing the establishment of a uniform, core agricultural API platform. This platform would allow for existing and new agricultural providers to connect and leverage data provided by other agricultural providers. This would represent a groundbreaking and disruptive step forward for modern agricultural technology, and would enable previously distinct, disconnected agricultural providers to connect to and communicate with each other, in a transparent fashion. As a consequence, the field of agricultural technologies would potentially become more open and inviting to potential newcomers. To recognise the worth of such a product, consider the following simple example: temperature and soil monitoring; currently these are typically used in isolation

to achieve distinct outcomes, however, connecting these two solutions via a common API which would allow them to share data would optimise the agricultural process by allowing for agricultural providers to offer improvements in the growth levels of crops to their customers through the identification of optimum periods for adding fertiliser to the crop. Indeed, this example could be taken further by connecting these monitors to an agricultural product platform which could automatically order appropriate fertilisers based upon the soils current composition. Going one step further, if the enterprise were to make use of drones and/or robots, then these could be used to deliver the fertiliser to the appropriate crop. As is commonly known, agriculture is an expensive, dangerous, and operationally intensive enterprise, and offering such a solution would improve the process for all parties involved. Bearing the above in mind, it makes sense to think of new and future technology backed agricultural solutions as 3rd Parties. Indeed, this makes sense when considering the establishment of a common agricultural API as the backbone of the modern, forward thinking agricultural market. The establishment of such an API would allow for an independent, but connected

Agricultural Cloud Predictive Analytics Reporting

API

Alerts Management Consumer Applications

3rd Party

3rd Party Services


Data base


Machine Learning

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central means for 3rd party components, software and hardware to communicate. Such an API could also provide a new approach to data and knowledge sharing between the vendors of each agricultural product.

sector, and would allow for improvements across all areas of agricultural technology. In addition to providing a new avenue of research and development to the agricultural technology industry, there will also be many opportunities to create new and improved products which should result in significant improvements to agricultural safety. These improvements should present across all areas of agricultural operation, from management to operative, from livestock to crops, as well as offering substantial optimisations to an agricultural enterprises costs and overheads.

This common API would provide potentially unlimited opportunities for growth and advancement within the field of agricultural technology, and as a result of this could revolutionise every corner of the agricultural sector. As well as offering a means for incumbent and newcomer agricultural providers to improve their offerings, this API could also become an agricultural technology provider in its own right, as it would be ideally situated, at the core of other agricultural solutions, to conduct independent analytics, machine learning and reporting to agricultural consumers. One of the more substantial benefits of being at the core of connected 3rd party offerings is that the API would be the conduit through which data flows from one provider to another. This would mean that it would have access to all of this data, which it could then evaluate in order to further optimise the agricultural sector. This could present many new opportunities for both combined and predictive evaluation and analytics, across the broad field of agricultural operations, as well as providing many new opportunities for research, both academic and industrial. The potential applications of such an offering are wide ranging and a sample of these are explored at a high level in a later section. Showoff propose that the establishment of such an API would allow for an acceleration of technological adoption and disruption in the agricultural technologies

With the current growth rate of smart agricultural technologies and solutions, and the ever increasing interest in the field, now is an ideal time to build this core agricultural API, in order to capitalise on the growth of these companies. By providing such an API during the same period that a lot of new and existing agricultural technology companies are in their growth phase, this will allow for these companies to build support for the API into their offerings, while also allowing for newcomers to interact with and leverage the technologies provided by existing, well established providers to improve their new products. In addition to allowing for advancements across agricultural technologies, the core agricultural API should also result in a massive savings in cost to existing agricultural businesses. By extending the capabilities of both new and existing smart agricultural technologies such as crop monitoring, grassland monitoring, health and safety technology and using the results of the analyses and learning, which will be undertaken by the agricultural API to inform data-driven decision making,

API



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many existing agricultural businesses will be able to implement new, data backed cost saving procedures. Using the agricultural API will allow individual agricultural businesses to reduce costs across their enterprise. However, this becomes much more interesting (and effective) when considered at scale. By using the analysis and learning engine that Showoff are proposing to build into the core agricultural API, agricultural enterprises will be able to benefit from the data gleaned from other enterprises, essentially allowing each enterprise to use what is effectively crowdsourced data to optimise their businesses in order to reduce costs. In addition to all of the benefits described previously, the development and implementation of the proposed core agricultural API will present many new opportunities for industrial and academic research. By establishing the analytics engine proposed by Showoff, the core agricultural API will be capable of providing significant data sets to researchers, should the need arise.



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Example Applications of an Agricultural Core API Dr Michael Dever - Senior Developer

One of the key areas that Showoff are exploring with such an API and analytics engine is that of Health & Safety. This section presents four three high level examples of the advancements and support the use of a common Agricultural API would bring to the current state of the art in the agricultural health and safety sector. Farming accounts for close to 25% of all workplace deaths. By defining a core agricultural API that allows for 3rd party solutions to communicate, this can be used to vastly improve the current state of safety in the agricultural sector.

Example 1 - Dangerous Periods Predictive analytics could be used to identify periods of increased danger based on current & historical data. In addition to this, real-time analytics can also be used to identify areas and times of increased danger, based upon real-time events, both at a local level, as well as on a geospatially aware level, for example at regional and country levels.

opportunities for evaluation and analyses into these trends. Once the predicted and real-time danger profiles associated with an enterprise have been generated, the agricultural API can respond to these by alerting enterprise managers and operatives to any significant increases in danger, both on a local level as well as a global level. This will directly result in safer workplaces and will result in increased awareness in agricultural operatives.

Example 2 - First Responder Awareness The API could then send push notifications to operatives within the targeted areas alerting them to the danger. The analysis used to generate these notifications could be applied to several geo-spatial areas: • Facility (e.g. farm) local notifications. • Municipality local notifications - Metrics and data across all facilities in a municipality could be used to generate danger profiles for the whole municipality across a time period. • Country-wide notifications - Metrics and data across all facilities in country could be used to generate danger profiles for the whole country across a time period. By analysing both historical and real-time agricultural data from all connected agricultural providers, the agricultural API will be capable of obtaining and providing new insights into the trends around dangers in the agricultural environment. As the agricultural API will not be locked to a specific region, and will receive data on a global scale, this will present many new


In the event of an accident, the proposed agricultural API could be used to provide first responders with increased advanced situational awareness. This is perhaps one of the most important advancements that Showoff foresees if a common core agricultural API is established. By combining all agricultural technology providers that are connected to the core agricultural API, the API will have access to an unprecedented amount of both historic and real-time data, and if a health and safety component is established, then whenever an accident or potential accident has been detected, then the API could provide the first responders (as well as any follow on responders) with crucial data from the following sources: • • • •

Sensors GPS Drones Cameras


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In addition to the above, the API could also provide all responders with real-time information on any hazards present in the immediate or nearby vicinity by providing: • Chemical Warnings • Personal Protective Equipment recommendations. By responding in such a way, the agricultural API will be capable of attempting to raise situational awareness in first responders, and attempt to enhance the chances of survival for the victims of any detected accident. This will directly result in safer workplaces, less accidents and significantly improved outcomes in the event of an accident.

Example 3 - Accident Prevention If an operative is in an area that contains toxic chemicals, or anything that is potentially health threatening/ damaging and is there for more than the known recommended period, a smart Agricultural API could respond to this danger in the following ways: • Send a Push Note to the operative and their managers alerting them to the danger. • Automatic Venting of the area to remove the danger. • Alerting emergency services to the danger. By responding in such a way, the agricultural API will be capable of attempting to mitigate the risk. If risk mitigation fails then the API will attempt to remedy the situation (where possible) and alert emergency services to the situation. In such a situation, the agricultural API should also be capable of providing the emergency services with advanced situational awareness per Example 2, above.



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Conclusion Dr Michael Dever - Senior Developer

To conclude, using a common, decentralized agricultural API as the core of an agricultural platform will allow evolution in the field of agricultural technology. By allowing for existing agricultural technology providers to become interconnected, this will allow for next generation agricultural technology to be implemented, as well as for existing technologies to become enhanced and augmented by the data generated by other agricultural providers. In addition to allowing for these new technologies to be developed, and for the enhancement of existing technologies, such an API will naturally become a provider in its own right. One of the benefits of providing a common agricultural API is that it will have implicit access to and control over the data that is passed to and from other providers. This will allow for the core agricultural API to define an analytics engine to evaluate all of this data, and will allow for new responsive and predictive technologies to be developed across the full gamut of agricultural technology fields. Based on the results of the analytics and evaluation, the API can make use of predictive technology to enable and assist operatives across all areas of agriculture, from herd management to health and safety, and everything in between. Ultimately, a common core API will become the backbone of any modern agricultural application and will serve as the warden of all events throughout that platform. It will probably become the most important piece of a complete solution as it provides and manipulates the data consumed and presented by all client applications. It should be reliable, stable, robust and responsive as without each of these traits, the API will not withstand the pressures applied by modern applications.

“Agriculture has been huge part of our story at Showoff and we believe that Agricultural Technologies will be a huge part of our future. ”

Shane Byrne - CEO Email - shane@showoff.ie Phone +353(0)86 086 2481

Website www.showoff.ie Office Ireland +353(0)404 20682 Office UK +44(0)208 068 5837