Jeffrey Preston Bezos Executive Chairman of Amazon | Amazon
BANGKOK—May 30, 2024—Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that AXONS, a Thai AgriTech firm specializing in IT solutions for the agri-food industry, has developed its FarmPro app on AWS's cloud platform. The FarmPro app is designed to assist small-scale farmers involved in the contract farming project under CP Group. It currently supports over 30,000 farmers across Thailand and Vietnam, with plans to expand to Myanmar and India this year.
The global population is projected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, while the number of farmers is declining due to aging populations and younger generations moving away from manual labor. To address this challenge and increase agricultural productivity, AXONS created FarmPro. The app aids farm agents and farmers in predicting, detecting, and managing crop issues such as disease and poor irrigation. This enhances livelihoods and business expansion for farmers while allowing agents to work more efficiently. Additionally, FarmPro facilitates knowledge sharing among users about farm yields, suitable crops, and efficient management of raw materials like seeds and fertilizers.
Using AWS's scalable infrastructure, AXONS has introduced new monitoring and communication services through FarmPro. These services help small-scale farmers optimize harvests and logistics, achieve higher income with transparent market pricing, and reduce operational costs by over 20%. The mobile app provides valuable cultivation insights that can increase yields by up to 60%, driving profitability through actionable data.
AXONS plans to leverage advanced generative AI and machine learning (ML) services from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock. These technologies will provide weather condition monitoring and prediction capabilities such as temperature, rainfall, wind speed, and humidity. In the future, AWS AI/ML technology will help farmers better identify crop issues like disease or infestation early on. This will enable more efficient treatment deployment, optimizing resource use and enhancing food security and farmland profitability.
FarmPro was developed through the AWS Builder Studio program where customers engage with AWS’s Prototyping and Cloud Engineering Team over three-to-six weeks based on Amazon’s innovation methodology. This approach allows customers like AXONS to create a working prototype for validation before full-scale production.
AXONS utilizes Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for scalable compute capacity during peak times such as harvesting or planting seasons. All data related to FarmPro—including farmer information—is stored on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which simplifies database management with features that enhance scalability.
“FarmPro on AWS has simplified monitoring farmers’ activities for our agents and helped improve crop cultivation quality,” said Teerapong Wichayaruangrom, Director-Strategic & Digital Transformation at AXONS. “By leveraging AWS technology we have improved supply planning, crop management, traceability efforts leading towards a sustainable agriculture industry.”
“The agricultural industry across Southeast Asia is rapidly adapting to growing food demand using cloud capabilities,” said Vatsun Thirapatarapong of AWS Thailand. “AXONS has built a service on AWS that uplifts thousands of small farmers' lives via a user-friendly app.”
AWS remains committed to its customers in Thailand with plans to invest over $5 billion over the next 15 years while training more than 50,000 individuals in cloud skills since 2017.
