An ambitious campaign aiming to exploit big data for the benefit of the farming community has launched on Crowdbnk to raise £2.4 million to digitise the sector and boost farming output.

The potential market for agricultural data digital services will develop over the next five to ten years to a value between $10 and $20 billion. Data-driven decision making in the farming sector can increase efficiency and productivity in an increasingly competitive market. If farmers actively use analytics to their benefit, the industry can potentially double its output to feed the projected global population of 9 billion by 2050.

The Map of Agriculture Group believes that farmers need data from markets, from other farmers, and from other information sources such as governments, weather services, land agencies, and commodity markets. Currently, all these data sets are separate. The company aims to connect the dots between all these data sources in real time to help farmers speed up the decision-making process so that they can focus on building their business instead of collating information.

The Map of Ag has developed unique analytics techniques based on data collected from approximately 72,000 farmers around the world. The company’s strategy is to expand their network to 500,000 farmers by 2020.They will use the funds raised in this round to expand the product development team and resources to bring alpha and beta software products to scalable, commercial solutions.