Digital agriculture is a massively important use case for IoT. From simple solutions monitoring soil moisture levels to control watering, to complex AI solutions for animal health, IoT is helping farmers bring food to the tables of the growing world.

In this session, Jim is joined by Bryn Lewis, a Microsoft MVP and IoT expert who is working with farms in New Zealand to implement solutions using AI and IoT. Jim and Bryn will dive into some of the cool projects that Bryn is working on, discussing how AI and IoT can improve cow health, make milking easier, and even reduce water usage for cleanup, all within a hostile environment with wide temperature variances throughout the year, and way too much poop.

Join us for this AMA style conversation, and bring your own questions on digital agriculture to get answered by our Kiwi expert.

Speaker:
Jim Bennett, Regional Cloud Advocate, Microsoft
Jim is a Regional Cloud Advocate focusing on building out and skilling communities in the Pacific North West, with a focus on the Microsoft Reactor in Redmond, Washington. He’s British, so sounds way smarter than he actually is, and is happy he moved to Redmond in time to be locked down at home and not see the office he came to work in, or the places he wanted to visit. In the past he’s lived in 4 continents working as a developer in the mobile, desktop, and scientific space. He's spoken at conferences and events all around the globe, organized meetup groups and communities, and written a book on mobile development.

He also hates and is allergic to cats, but has a 9-year-old daughter who loves cats, so he has 2 cats.

Bryn Lewis, MVP - Azure & Windows Development
Bryn started as software devloper the year Rick Astley's "Never going to Give you up" was number 1 in New Zealand.

He has been working with Microsoft Technologies for several decades and recently re-discovered a TechEd
backpack from 1997 in his garage.

Bryn has built software in a lot of problem domains, from blood bank management, mobile radio networking,
process control, SCADA, heavy power engineering, online gambling, AML & CFT, a few start-ups, consulting
role at a large US corporate, started a consulting company and a few other things he can’t remember.

Currently he works part-time for a Fintech which specialises in foreign currency management for use by
SMORGs, banks and auditors. He also works for a SmartAg start-up building machine learning based
solutions for dairy farms.

Bryn has a number of opensource projects mostly in the low power wireless (LoRa, LoRaWAN, Swarm etc.) area.

He has presented at a many TechEd/Ignite conferences and .Net/LPWAN focused user groups around the world.

Bryn runs after school maker clubs teaching electronics and coding at a couple of local high schools. The
students develop hardware and software solutions to problems they are passionate about. e.g. environmental
monitoring, sports fitness, and smart agriculture.

His co-workers joke that his specialist area is “anything a bit weird”.