Digital Frontiers In Farming

Banking Frontiers in association with The Weather Company, an IBM business, organised a round table on the growing importance of digitization in farming:

The digital wave has enormously transformed all businesses, and the agri sector is no different. The prediction about returns from the sector gets the highest level of accuracy when mediums like satellites, drones, mobile devices, fuel pumps, commodity markets, exchanges etc., are used. The farmers can use these key information factors and then determine the success or failure of the crops. They can thus reduce risks and maximize returns.

After the green revolution in India nearly 55 years ago, time is now ripe for the next revolution as technology is ready to support it. What is needed is support from the ecosystem – from the corporates, banks, insurance companies, agri-companies and the government. All these stakeholders have already started their digital journey and it is now time to include the farmer for mutual benefit.

Himanshu Goyal, India Business Leader, The Weather Company, an IBM Business:

We are digital experts, but in agri technology, our company is learning from the markets. Most people don’t trust the weather accuracy. Named by ForecastWatch as the world’s most accurate forecaster, The Weather Company combines weather data from major centers around the world with information collected from thousands of personal weather stations and an enterprise-class Internet of Things (IoT) platform to create forecasts for 2.2 billion locations. These forecasts are supported by advanced machine learning algorithms and monitored by a team of more than 160 meteorologists to help improve accuracy and create better insights.

Our technology helps in getting live weather forecasts including parameters such as soil moisture and temperature for a given area. These insights are useful for farmers, traders as well as stock brokers. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) help with precision weather forecasting.