The last area's agriculture. IoT technology can assist farmers by performing important tasks such as analyzing the water consumption level, providing animal alerting services, analyzing soil conditions based on fertilizers and monitoring crop status. The increasing adoption of technology in agriculture and global rise in the demand for food are major drivers for growth of smart farming. IoT also helps to enhance the production and yield by providing real-time data of the farmland to assist in planning, purchasing, inventory control, planting and harvesting. Sensors, irrigation control, variable rate technology and other technologies help to reduce the wastage of input and enhance the productivity of land. So, variable rate technology is this idea of understanding how much fertilizer I need to put down today or this week or how much water do I need to use. So, that's what that means and there's a link there you can follow it to find out more about variable rate technology. So, maybe not quite as big as the other areas that we looked at in terms of revenue but platforms, software, and services, much larger than the hardware in terms of revenue. Looking out to 2022, almost $40 billion US and compound annual growth rate of 33 percent, so there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity there. Poor lowly hardware down here is clipping along at 12 percent annual growth rate. So, markets and markets predicted that the connectivity technology segment to grow at the highest rate, that's what it's called out here. In terms of revenue, sensors are poised to grow quite a bit from almost $100 billion in 2016 to close to 200 million, sorry I got the units wrong, US millions, almost $200 million and you can see the numbers for processors and the numbers for their connectivity. It's their analysis of various sensors, humidity sensors, soil temperature sensors, soil humidity sensors, pressure sensors, and temperature sensors. Humidity sensors up to 54 million US by 2022. You would know what GNSS stands for? Global Navigation Satellite System. So, think GPS, GPS modules. Imagine a livestock farmer could have every one of the animals in his herd tagged with a GPS tracker and you could get up every morning or she could get up every morning and fire up a web page and would draw a map and the farmer could see exactly where all the animals were, for instance, or if one got loose or a fence broke and they all got out and are running down the highway or something, he know where his animals are. We saw these in building automation, ZigBee, cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. No surprise there with Bluetooth for short range. Software solutions are poised to grow dramatically. Services also, dramatically, and they were predicting not a lot of revenue in the platform area and that surprises me because it's the platform that pulls all of this together. So, here's a agricultural example. The Internet of Things applies to everyone in different ways. As a farmer, this is how I incorporate the Intern of Things into agriculture. Seven years ago we decided to get into agriculture as a part-time business. So, we studied crops that we could grow in the weekends and decided on avocados. Five years ago, we finally found the perfect property. However, it needed a lot of work. The biggest problem with growing avocados in California is obviously our drought. Avocados need a lot of water. I was surprised to discover that there were no commercial systems designed to schedule irrigation based on soil moisture. Fortunately, we had components available through the Maker movement and I could build my own. This is actually the heart of the irrigation system. All of our irrigation water is pumped to the top of the hill up here so that we can mix it in with the fertilizer that's in this batch tank. By controlling the valves that we have here, we can optimize whether we're running clean water through the irrigation line or actually running fertilizer through our Dosatron injector system. This is our weather station. We use this to track the atmospheric conditions on the farm. These are the actual soil moisture sensors. There's two soil moisture probes planted at different depths so that we can see how much water's available in the rooting zone and, again, these are attached to another radio device for transmitting their data. The soil moisture data is sent to a cloud service. When the upper sensor dries down to a set point, it triggers an irrigation cycle. The irrigation cycle runs until the lower sensor is saturated, thus ensuring that we're pushing the salts and chlorides down below the rooting zone. The Internet of Things has had a tremendous financial impact on our farm. Without it, I'm not sure I could have saved it. By using technology to reduce our water usage by 75 percent, it took less than six months to recoup the investment. Not only that, I know I'm utilizing a precious resource of water as efficiently as possible, thus ensuring sustainability for future generations. I don't know if you caught it when it went by, it went by pretty quick. There was a little info, things came up and went down but the protocol they were using is Laura. Have you heard of that one? Some of you have, raise your hand, I'm just curious. Okay. We'll learn more about that next week when we look at wireless technologies. So, should be fairly obvious to you, [inaudible] theme and [inaudible] increased operational efficiency, increase awareness of what's happening, reducing costs, increasing revenue, increasing productivity, increasing uptime.
