Long Way To Go

India must increase farm income and become globally competitive. Technology can help.

- Joe C. Mathew

DANCING CROW FARM, near Seattle, US, finds a special mention in gatesnotes.com, the personal blog of Bill Gates, the founder of information technology (IT) behemoth Microsoft. The farm is a pilot site for FarmBeats, a key research project of Microsoft which strives to make data-driven precision agriculture affordable for even the poorest farmers. What Gates considers “remarkable” about Dancing Crow is that the team of researchers at FarmBeat, led by IIT-Kharagpur alumnus Ranveer Chandra, utilises unused TV spectrum or airwaves to transmit data from sensors installed at various locations of the farm and digitally analyses those to offer crop advisory. Unlike most farm data systems, which require expensive transmitters to connect, this one is low-cost and helps collect and analyse weather conditions, temperature, pH, moisture level of soil, and other parameters, using low-cost sensors, drones, and vision and machine learning algorithms. The result: up to 30 per cent less water needed for irrigation, 44 per cent less lime to control soil pH, updates on ideal time for planting seeds, and a more productive harvest.

“One of the big challenges in Agtech (agriculture technology) adoption is cost, and we are developing techniques to make it more affordable. We are doing a few trials in India, and our research is focussed on bringing down the cost of Agtech solutions to make them relevant in places like India,” says Chandra, Chief Scientist, Microsoft Azure Global, in an e-mail response to Business Today. “There are several things that the Indian government could do to accelerate the adoption of digital agriculture with Indian farmers, including allowing data transmission from farms on unused TV channels, and some new algorithms that we have developed using satellite data,” he adds.