This document proposes a "Food as a Service" (FaaS) project to help improve Egypt's agricultural sector through the use of cloud computing, big data, and other technologies. The project aims to centralize agricultural information, manage production data from farms, and provide services like agriculture extension and contract farming to connect farmers, food companies, and researchers. It outlines technical approaches using tools like OpenStack, Hadoop, and Arduino wireless kits, and proposes a business model for an FaaS startup to compete in agriculture through competitive advantages like open source solutions and contract farming.

1. Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD
http://www.ieeegoldegypt.org/
FaaS (Food as a Service)
Faculty of Electronic Engineering Menoufia university

2. © 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 2
Introduction (Problem definition)
Information Technology is used in various fields like education, business, Medicine, Weather
forecasting systems, Communications… etc., but not vastly used in Agriculture sector. We
see increasing revenue in the agricultural industry as a key to overcoming challenges facing
the country with regards to food security, local economic development and job creation.
Yet, our current agricultural infrastructure is outdated and inefficient. Many do not calculate
production costs and revenue on a per crop basis. In the future, however, farmers will need
to start focusing on profitability, which will mean making more informed decisions about what
crops to grow. We have decided to make a project that help governments, research centers,
farmers and also companies in agriculture field to improve the agricultural sector by using the
latest technologies such as Cloud Computing and Big Data.
As we try to enhance the agricultural sector In Egypt by providing an innovative way to
manage agricultural information. The modern way for agriculture is “FaaS”, Food as a
Service. We’ve treated agriculture as some sort of traditional expired way as we don’t think
it’s become our vital sector of developing,
The most common issues responsible for that are:
 We suffer a gap between research centers and farmers' work. Farmers plant their
fields using inherited experience based on what they used to do. Over the years,
we’ve become more sophisticated and decentralized about the average experience,
communication and production.
 The food-related industry must respond to an increasing consumer demand for safer
foods of higher sensory quality that fulfill their nutritional needs and expectations. The
industry must develop, adapt and adopt technologies assuring food wholesomeness
and responding to consumer expectations while increasing the value added to
agricultural commodities, so as to benefit farmers. The development of such
processes requires broader and deeper knowledge of food properties starting from the
water properties, soil characteristics, seeds origins, fertilizers affectivity and pesticides
safety.
 Marketing the yields for the rural farmers seems difficult that makes merchants almost
consume most of the yields profit which add more pressure on both the farmer and the
food processor making Food prices continue to rise.
 New farmlands investments as smart / semi smart farms, indoor farming and soil free
agriculture still have a long way to take place in Egypt. It still need a great support like
computing power, some sort of intelligence to operate and maintain the farm which
allow the owner to remote monitor his farm and market his products . Robotic and
sensors which compile farmers Big Data are using to increase agility and
management.
 Egyptian farms tend to be fairly simple. Farmers generally can't monitor output from
one year to the next, and with no data, it's difficult to make smart business decisions.
We are already seeing data sets from a multitude of sources which support faster and more
reliable research and discovery. For farming, not just increasing the quantity of food, but also
improving the quality.

3. © 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 3
Objectives (Problem Solution)
 The SaaS-based agricultural production management solution will provide
comprehensive management tools for administration, production and sales. Farmers
will be make use of collecting, storing and analyzing data about on-farm operations,
crop plantings and yields via mobile and tablet devices. FaaS aims to help farmers
improve operations, earnings and efficiencies. Additionally, FaaS will offer innovation
support services.
 FaaS will also offer services to food processors, wholesalers, retailers and
restaurants, allowing them to leverage this centrally managed data to manage orders
and quality control with their producers.
 The Web form is used for solving on-site problems, answering any queries and
promoting Agricultural Extension easily and simply over cloud using mobiles or tablets.
The market segments, farmers, farms, and food-related industries, quantitative and
qualitative needs are the creation of a fixed-time, fixed-quantity, fixed-quality, fixed-price
supply model, and supporting improvements and enhanced efficiency.
The outcome – supported features and functionalities – of the project:
 We build the system using Cloud Computing and Big Data definitions.
 The system has much information about crops so we introduce Agriculture Extension
via cloud using SMSs and the web portal.
 The system has a database of the characteristics of the soil and crops to determine
the best suited crop to be planted in a certain region.
 The system has a database of many problems and diseases that harm plants and
introduce the solutions for these harm effects.
 We design The Web form that is used for solving on-site problems, answering any
queries and promoting Agricultural Extension easily and simply over cloud using
mobiles or tablets.
Our project offers new outstanding features, services, deliverables and support:
 Hosting and storing all the agricultural information and experience centralized on one
place being processed at, using powerful computing resources with plenty of storage
space available.
 Centrally managing data, such as production schedules, production history, harvest
volume, and planting information, from the several hundred to several thousand
contract farm product suppliers across Egypt, the status of products can be
ascertained from the production stage. This enables contract producers to engage in
production management, supporting procurement based on a fixed-time, fixed-
quantity, fixed-quality, and fixed-price model.
 On time reports, tips and procedures for planting and growing crops to highly increase
yield output, avoid disastrous effects of bad events such as bad climate change,
energy prices rising, market needs, agricultural pests.

4. © 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 4
Business Approach
The output of our project will be a Service
Business Model (Market and Competition)
The main business objective of our project is to launch our startup company “FaaS” to
compete strongly in the field of agriculture in Egypt to be a key to overcoming these
challenges of improving food self-sufficiency, stimulating local economies, and expanding
employment to expand earnings in the agricultural industry and improve international
competitiveness, while at the same increasing the number of young agricultural workers.
 The market segments of the service are farmers, farms, food-related companies.
 The needs that our project addresses are the sponsorship to achieve our important
goals like networking, in business mean, and the cost of the hardware part and data
collection that will be solved by asking the government to help us in.
 The targeted segments buy our service because of the advantage of Agriculture
Extension for farmers and famers, contract farming for farmers, farms, and food-
related companies, and guiding them to the best suited crop to be planted in a certain
area based on the soil characteristics and climate.
 In Egypt, we consider that our project is the only one that employs systems are similar
to the Expert Systems in the management of the agriculture process so maybe there
are no strong competitors in this area.
 Our competitive edge can be presented in using open source and cloud computing in our
system and the concept of contract farming that makes marketing more easily.
Technical Approach
The project is Hybrid Both HW and SW
Block Diagrams

5. © 2013 Made In Egypt, IEEE Egypt GOLD 5
Software/ Hardware Development Tools and components
Master Project Time Plan
Item Type
(Hardware/Software)
Usage Price
in EGP
IP camera Hardware monitoring the farms 1210
Arduino
wireless kit
Hardware send data to the cloud platform 756.8
Control
equipment and
sensors
Hardware Collect data and send it to the kit 4816
Openstack Software free and powerful open source platform Free
Hadoop Software process all data to get valuable
information
Free
KVM Software Act as hypervisor for virtualization Free
CentOS Software Stable Open source Operating System Free
Ubuntu Software open source platform where we can run
Hadoop tools
Free
Server Hardware the host for all virtual machines 5000

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Project Photos/Screenshots
Cloud:
Centos operating system

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Virt-manager (GUI for KVM hypervisor)
Openstack Horizon login page

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Big Data:
Log in screen for Hortonworks workstation for training using Hive, Pig, and HBase.
these workstation Containing live example of :How to use Hadoop file system (HDFS)
Also Map Reduce function.
Cloudera platform for Using Hadoop tools and how to deal with data (Moving data
from directory to the file system like XFS,GFS, and HDFS) storage.

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