BANGKOK—May 30, 2024— Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that AXONS, a leading Thai AgriTech company specializing in IT solutions for the agri-food industry, has built its FarmPro app on the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AXONS’s FarmPro app is a tool for small-scale farmers in the contract farming project under the umbrella of CP Group. Farm agents used to manage contract farming with a network of more than 30,000 small-scale farmers across Thailand and Vietnam, with plans to expand the service to Myanmar and India this year.
The global population is expected to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050, while the number of farmers is declining as populations age and new generations turn away from manual labor. AXONS needed to develop a tech solution to this challenge and make farming more productive to meet the rising demand for food. FarmPro helps agents who manage farmers, as well as the farmers themselves predict, detect, and manage crop issues like disease and poor irrigation, improving livelihoods and helping farmers expand and improve their business, while agents spend their time more efficiently. FarmPro also connects users with other farmers and agents to share knowledge, predict farm yields, advise which crops are suitable, and more efficiently manage the supply of raw materials like seeds for appropriate crops or fertilizer.
With AWS, AXONS has launched new monitoring and communication services to help small-scale farmers optimize harvests and logistics, achieve higher income with transparent market pricing, and save operational costs by over 20%. By using AWS's scalable infrastructure, the FarmPro mobile app provides farmers valuable cultivation insights to help increase yields by up to 60%, driving profitability through actionable data.
AXONS plans to explore advanced generative AI and machine learning (ML) services, including Amazon Bedrock, to provide monitoring and prediction of weather conditions including temperature, rainfall, wind, and humidity. In the future, AWS AI/ML technology will help empower farmers to better identify and predict crop issues such as disease or infestation. This will help enable more efficient deployment of treatments, further optimizing resource utilization and ultimately increasing food security and farmland profitability.
FarmPro was borne out of the AWS Builder Studio, where customers can connect with AWS’s Prototyping and Cloud Engineering Team over a three-to-six-week engagement centered around Amazon’s unique culture of innovation methodology. Working backwards from customers’ needs, the aim is for customers like AXONS to leave the engagement with a working prototype – an early sample of a product or application – enabling them to validate and test ideas before spending valuable resources launching solutions into real-world production.
AXONS uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, to easily launch and scale the compute capacity required to handle increases in user demand for FarmPro, like during harvesting or planting seasons.
AXONS stores all FarmPro’s data, including information on farmers, plots, and crops on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). This fully-managed database service helps AXONS simplify database management, better manage its data with features that streamline operations, improve scalability, and allow developers to focus on their applications.
“FarmPro on AWS has simplified monitoring farmers’ activities for our agents and helped improved crop cultivation quality. The app enables agents to promptly address issues like insect-related diseases, weather fluctuations, and other problems that small-scale farmers face, as well as providing advice on suitable harvest times for each crop. By leveraging AWS, we have improved the company’s supply planning, crop management, and traceability to build a sustainable agriculture industry,” said Teerapong Wichayaruangrom, Director-Strategic & Digital Transformation, AXONS. “This ultimately leads to positive outcomes for customers and farmers, driving economic empowerment and food security. With FarmPro, the agents become collaborative partners for farmers, assisting in proactive issue resolution and driving the quality and yields of the produce.”
“The agricultural industry across Southeast Asia is rapidly adapting to the growing demand for food using the latest cloud capabilities to improve yields,” said Vatsun Thirapatarapong, Thailand Country Manager, AWS. “AXONS has built a service on AWS that uplifts the lives of thousands of small farmers on a user-friendly app, and I am excited to see what this innovative company achieves by experimenting with our latest generative AI technology services to make farming easier and more lucrative for all.”
AWS has a long-term commitment to customers and local communities in Thailand, pledging to invest more than $5 billion over 15 years and training more than 50,000 Thai individuals in cloud skills since 2017.
***
About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.