Sencrop Improves Sustainability in Farming by Using AWS for Its In-Field Data Application

When building its app, Sencrop needed to find a way to gather and analyze large amounts of data from radar, weather forecasts, and nearly 40,000 in-field sensors, and then present insights to farmers in a readable, easy-to-interpret way. It also wanted its app to integrate input from farmers directly, allowing them to share their observations with other users to foster a community of sustainability-minded growers.

Initially, Sencrop used AWS microservices to deploy infrastructure quickly and efficiently, but it has since expanded its use of AWS to take advantage of the broad range of services and low costs of operation and maintenance.

Sencrop uses Amazon EMR to process data in near real time. The data is then stored using Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system built for the cloud. Sencrop applies ML to analyze the data as it is collected, using AWS for the compute power needed to handle the enormous amounts of data to train its ML models. Using AWS, Sencrop’s app ingests 1.5 billion data points from weather forecasts daily and processes a total of 80 TB of data in its system. The company recently launched the Sencrop Forecast feature, which uses ML to analyze weather forecasts to create accurate, hyperlocalized forecasts for its users.

From a representative sample of over 1,000 farmers, 90 percent of vine and potato growers reported reduced chemical spray treatment frequency, 68 percent of farmers saved farm vehicle trips, 43 percent of farmers using Irricrop saved water, and 76 percent of respondents declared Sencrop helped them in their agro-environmental practices (for example, sustainable agriculture, soil conservation, or regenerative farming).

To further improve its data analysis to benefit farmers, Sencrop is conducting research and development projects in France using AWS and ML. The company is also planning to expand its solution to new regions.

“Using AWS, we can expand to a new region in a new part of the world and keep our architecture exactly the same,” says Mathieu Despriée, chief technology officer of Sencrop. “We know that there will be good connectivity and that everything will be congruent.”