Making it rain with SunCulture and Microsoft Azure

Whether they’re located in Europe, the United States, South America, or Africa, any farmer will tell you that the most vital ingredient to a successful crop yield is water. But for a smallholder farmer like Monica Riitho in the Kenyan village of Matanya, there’s an even bigger challenge: gaining access to water in the first place, and then efficiently managing water consumption to maximize crop output. In the past, Monica would have to manually pump water from her well, then physically carry it to whatever plants needed watering—a hugely inefficient process that resulted in consistently low yields. But thanks to the RainMaker solar-powered pump and irrigation system, created by SunCulture and running on a Microsoft Azure-based IoT platform with Azure machine learning tools, Monica is spending up to 17 fewer hours per week manually pumping and carrying water, water consumption and distribution is much more efficient, and crop yields have risen significantly. Watch this fascinating video to learn how Microsoft’s technical and financial support of SunCulture is not only helping Monica and other smallholder farmers like her to thrive, but is also enabling the Kenya-based business to scale up its solutions and expand across Africa and neighboring regions.