Agricultural M2M: a platform for expansion

GSMA Intelligence is today publishing a major report on Agricultural Machine-to-machine (Agri M2M) services, which examines one of the three different types of Mobile Agriculture (mAgri) solutions. This report looks into how Agricultural Machine-to-machine (Agri M2M) services can help the agriculture sector maximise productivity and minimise costs. The second type of mAgri service, Agricultural Value Added Services (Agri VAS), is the focus of a GSMA Intelligence report published last week, and the third is Agricultural Mobile Financial Services (Agri MFS).

In order to feed over 2.5 billion more people and prevent widespread famine in the next few decades, it is estimated that food production will need to increase by 70% by 2050, placing significant pressure on the agriculture sector. The demand for smarter and more efficient agriculture is therefore on the rise.

Mobile technology is increasingly leading to the creation of innovative services and applications that are used throughout the agricultural value chain to help farmers make the most of the resources available to them. Agri M2M services can help farmers and agriculture businesses to maximise yields, minimise costs, and reduce their environmental footprint through equipment monitoring, precision management of crops and livestock, analysis of the environmental impact of production, and the tracking of tractors, harvesters and other vehicles.

Mobile operators can help lower the costs of deployment of Agri M2M services, help de-fragment the ecosystem, educate end users in the benefits of M2M to their agriculture operations, and enable the development and deployment of compelling, innovative and scalable business cases to an underserved and poorly understood vertical of the M2M industry. They can achieve this by partnering with other stakeholders across the value chain, setting up innovation hubs, investing in entrepreneurs, leading educational marketing campaigns, or providing end-to-end solutions themselves. By expanding their portfolio to services beyond just the provision of connectivity, mobile operators can capture a bigger share of the M2M pie, increase the sustainability of their own businesses, and help innovative Agri M2M services achieve scale.