Malaysia has been using agriculture as one of its principal economic activities for poverty reduction and stability. According to the World Bank, 78% of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their living. The country aims to ramp up domestic production using technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and precision farming, in order to reduce import dependency ¹.

MIMOS, Malaysia’s leading government technology provider, is developing a regional Internet of Things (IoT) hub for agriculture to deliver better yields and lower costs for a more sustainable approach ². The IoT-based smart agriculture in Malaysia aims to improve the agricultural sector and improve poverty in the region overall. IoT is an innovative solution that helps rural farmers boost their operations in many ways. It provides real-time data that can reduce the risk of crop failure, increase crop yields, reduce fertilizer usage and water consumption, therefore decreasing production costs and increasing profitability and sustainable practices ³.

Some of the IoT-based agritech solutions being implemented in Malaysia include:

• Vegetables collection by Malaysian manufactured drones
• Algorithms that help sort vegetables by quality and weight
• Driverless agricultural vehicles such as tractors and harvesters
• Automatic controls of warehouses for temperature and humidity ⁴

In addition, a homegrown agritech platform is combining traditional farming with state-of-the-art Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud-based solutions to provide Malaysian farmers with robust digital tools that aim to revolutionize the agriculture industry