SmartFarm: Improving Agriculture Sustainability Using Modern Information Technology

In this paper, we overview our ongoing work on an open source, hybrid cloud approach to agriculture analytics for enabling sustainable farming practices.  SmartFarm integrates disparate environmental sensor technologies into an on-farm, private cloud software infrastructure that provides farmers with a secure, easy to use, low-cost data analysis system. SmartFarm couples data from external cloud sources (weather predictions, satellite imagery, state and national datasets, etc) with farm-local statistics, provides an interface into which custom analytics apps can be plugged, and  ensures that all private data remain under the control of farmers.