For farmers, water is everything—it’s perhaps the single most important resource to ensuring crop survival. Unfortunately, it’s also quite scarce in much of the world. Water-conscious farmers are always looking for ways to help their crops thrive while reducing water consumption, and Poland-based Digital Crops wanted to help.

Digital Crops set out to build a solution that could help farmers predict adverse conditions, like heavy rain or drought, and automatically adjust their irrigation systems accordingly. By deploying innovative weather stations across the farm and wireless IoT sensors in the soil, this new solution, called FieldControl, would help farmers around the world maximize yields while reducing water consumption.

Unfortunately, Digital Crops faced an insurmountable challenge during solution development: building a platform to connect their hardware, ingest data, and derive insights was going to be cost-prohibitive. They needed to partner with someone who already had a reliable, agriculture-ready platform in place.

Finding a platform partner in Agri Solutions and Microsoft Azure

Digital Crops quickly found their ideal partner in Agri Solutions. Also based out of Poland, Agri Solutions has been an innovator in the agriculture technology sector for years. Their flagship offering, FarmCloud, is a robust platform that integrates customers’ IoT ecosystems from end to end, offering them full control of their environments, easy communication with their partners, vendors, and customers, and deep visibility into their farming operations. By connecting the entire food-production lifecycle into one simple, consolidated platform, Agri Solutions enables customers to track their food all the way from farm to fork, ensuring safety and transparency every step of the way.

But functionality wasn’t Agri Solutions’ only priority when designing FarmCloud, as security and reliability were key considerations as well. Like all businesses, farmers need to protect their operations because if their systems were ever compromised, it could negatively affect the health of their crops and their own livelihoods. This is why Agri Solutions Partner with Microsoft Azure to build FarmCloud. By leveraging the world-class security of Microsoft Azure, as well as its robust and reliable infrastructure, Agri Solutions knew that their platform would be a safe, powerful tool their customers could trust.

Accelerating solution development

When Digital Crops reached out to Agri Solutions about building their new FieldControl solution on FarmCloud, Agri Solutions was thrilled. This would mean a new, valuable offering for existing FarmCloud customers, helping Agri Solutions further serve their clients. This partnership also benefitted Digital Crops by dramatically shortening their timeline for solution development. By leveraging the already robust FarmCloud platform, Digital Crops reduced their costs and could focus their efforts on making their solution as impactful as possible, carefully honing its functionality, algorithms, and data processes without having to worry about security or reliability as those elements were provided by Microsoft Azure.

While developing their solution, Digital Crops kept a close eye on their go-to-market date. In agriculture, seasons dictate everything, so if you’re selling farming technology and you miss your go-to-market deadline by even a few weeks, it could mean that you’ve missed your window for the season and you’ll be waiting around for another year before you can start generating revenue. But, with the help of Agri Solutions and Microsoft, Digital Crops successfully met their development deadline and was ready to go to market on-time.

Co-selling with Agri Solutions

Once it was time to start finding customers, Digital Crops’ partnership with Agri Solutions proved beneficial yet again. Because their FieldControl solution was being deployed on FarmCloud, a platform with numerous existing customers, Digital Crops had immediate leads for farmers who could benefit from their solution. Even better, these farmers already had FarmCloud in place within their environments, so deploying FieldControl was incredibly easy—it was as simple as adding a few pieces of hardware to their farm and spinning up some additional software.

By partnering with Agri Solutions and Microsoft, Digital Crops was able to accelerate solution development, reduce costs, and reach new customers, all while helping farmers predict adverse weather and preserve water.