Climate change, increasing population, food-versus-fuel economics, pandemics, etc. pose a threat to food security to unprecedented levels. It has fallen upon the practitioners of agriculture and technologists of the world to innovate and become more productive to address the multi-pronged food security challenges. Agricultural innovation is key to managing food security concerns. The infusion of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, satellites data, geospatial data, climatology, sensor technologies, and climate modeling with traditional agricultural practices such as soil engineering, fertilizers use, and agronomy are some of the best ways to achieve this. Data science helps farmers to unravel patterns in fertilizer pricing, equipment usage, transportation and storage costs, yield per hectare, and weather trends to better plan and spend resources. AI enables farmers to learn from fellow farmers to apply best techniques that are transferred learning from AI to improve agricultural productivity and to achieve financial sustainability. Sensor technologies play an important role in getting real-time farm field data and provide feedback loops to improve overall agricultural practices and can yield huge productivity gains. Advanced Analytics modeling is essential software technique that codifies farmers’ tacit knowledge such as better seed per soil, better feed for dairy cattle breed, or production practices to match weather pattern that was acquired over years of their hard work to share with worldwide farmers to improve overall production efficiencies, the best antidote to food security issue. In addition to the paradigm shift, economic sustainability of small farms is a major enabler of food security.
The book reviews all these technological advances and proposes macroeconomic pricing models that data mines macroeconomic signals and the influence of global economic trends on small farm sustainability to provide actionable insights to farmers to avert any financial disasters due to recurrent economic crises.
Chandra is a seasoned Software IT Executive with diverse experience in Software Technologies, Enterprise Software Architectures, Cloud Computing, Big Data Business Analytics, Internet Of Things (IoT), and Software Product & Program Management. Chandra held engineering and Product leadership roles at GE Healthcare, Cisco Systems, St. Jude Medical, and Lucent Technologies, a Bell Laboratories Company. Chandra teaches Software Engineering, Mobile Computing, Cloud Technologies, and Web & Data Mining for Master’s Program in San Jose State University.
Additionally, Chandra held market research, strategy and technology architecture advisory roles in Cisco Systems, Lam Research and performed Principal Investigator role for Valley School of Nursing where he connected Nursing Educators & Students with Virtual Reality technologies. Chandra has functioned as Chair in numerous technology & advanced computing conferences such as: IEEE Oxford, UK, IEEE Big Data Services 2017, San Francisco USA and Future of Information and Communication Conference 2018, Singapore. Chandra graduated from San Jose State University Master’s Program, specializing Software Engineering, and completed his Master of Business Administration from Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, USA.
