KC Ag Innovation Forum to Feature Microsoft Executive

Ranveer Chandra

Ranveer Chandra, who is the Managing Director for Research for Industry, and the CTO of Agri-Food at Microsoft, will be a featured speaker at the Ag Business Council of Kansas City’s Ag Innovation Forum on Feb. 13, 2024.

The goals for the forum, according to Dustin Johansen, chair of the Ag Business Council, are to celebrate and highlight ag innovation in the Midwest. Johansen, a senior executive with Farm Journal, said the day-long program hosted by the Council will feature an array of experts looking at the promise technology and innovation are bringing to agriculture.

“Ranveer Chandra is recognized as one of the leading figures in new ag technology and has an established track record of bringing new concepts to fruition,” said Johansen. He noted that Ranveer has led Microsoft development of different technologies to bring internet connectivity to the middle of farms.

Ranveer started Project FarmBeats at Microsoft in 2015. “FarmBeats is a way to get a lot of data from the farm and merge all of that data with the different data that exists in the cloud to come up with unique insights for agriculture,” he has said.

Ranveer has presented his research to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, had his work featured by Bill Gates in his GatesNotes, and was selected by Satya Nadella as one of 10 projects that inspired him in 2017. As part of his doctoral dissertation, Ranveer developed VirtualWiFi. The software has over a million downloads and was among the top 5 downloaded software released by Microsoft Research. It is shipping as a feature in Windows since 2009.

He was recently recognized by the Newsweek magazine as one of America’s 50 most Disruptive Innovators (2021). Ranveer has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kharagpur, India and a PhD from Cornell University.

For more information, and to register for the Ag Innovation Forum, click here.