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Future of Farming in India
With the development of technology, everything has become so easy in our daily lives. Through digital platforms, we can now book a cab, order food, buy clothes, get furniture installed, pay our bills, and even find life partners. While advancement of technology has made a major impact on different domains in our life, Agriculture still remains the domain least affected by the changes. Advanced technology like Satellite Image Processing has entered Agriculture but on the other hand, field agents still visit farms to capture land records following the traditional approach.
Imagine a world where everything is so easily available to the farms. Imagine if there is a ‘Farmer App’ through which a farmer can get seed and fertilizer information, weather updates, information about sowing time and soil health, government scheme information, and information about every type of data that can make his/her farm a profitable asset. That app would be the future of farming. In order to create such an app, there are some technical solutions that need to be executed.
What is the future of farming in India?
- Information Services Based Agriculture Loans
- Digital land Records
- Yield Assessment Technology
- Image Processing in Agriculture
- Technology Turning Unused Land into Profitable Business
These technological solutions will help farming in attaining a better and profitable state in the future.
How?
Lets find out one by one.
1) Information Services Based Agriculture Loans
Reserve Bank of India found that agriculture Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) increased by 23% from Rs 48,800 crore in 2016 to Rs 60,200 crore in 2017. While agriculture accounts for 8.3% of the total banking sector NPA, an alarming trend has emerged as bad farm loans increased by 142.74% from Rs 24,800 crore in 2012. Banks need to radically rethink farm credit, if they hope to tackle this issue.
Banks can now add to agricultural loans a new feature — FarmGyaan. Investing just Rs 60 for every agricultural loan, banks will actually be directly investing in farm production through FarmGyaan — FarmGuide’s IVRS-enabled information and communication technology (ICT) service capable of 10,000 concurrent customised advisory calls per second in all Indian languages.
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2) Digital Land Records
Harvest inspection in India is the world’s largest data collection process that affects the country’s overall agricultural performance. The 60-year-old harvest inspection system, known as Girdawari, is paper-based and thus the data can’t be verified. This is when FarmGuide proposed to the Rajasthan government that we can offer a digital Girdawari app for its field agents.
The reason Digital Girdawari stood out was because it did not seek to radically change the practice, it only sought to make a digital reflection of paper-based Harvest Inspection. The solution also made Girdawari reliable and transparent.
To make an impression, Team FarmGuide worked non-stop to deliver an impeccable app that would perform effectively. The app being a digital image of the paper-based system helped the field agents known as Patwaris to understand and adopt the technology within a day. The user-friendly app also made it quicker for Patwaris to cover land parcels within their jurisdiction, thus meeting Girdawari deadlines.
3) Yield Assessment Technology
Yield assessment is a vital process that provides decision makers like the government with critical crop production forecasts to prepare policy measures if the crop needs to be imported in case of a shortfall or exported when in surplus.
Yield Assessment Technology for the Government
FarmGuide’s Yield Assessment App incorporates remote sensing to timely forecast accurate crop specific estimates at the farm level. Our app captures video and GPS coordinates of assessment area, and validates the estimate using remote sensing. The government will also be able to remotely monitor the process on a real-time basis.
Yield Assessment for the Seed Companies
While farmers are aware that HYV seeds are more beneficial, they are unable to differentiate between authentic and fake seed providers. However, seed companies can create market differentiation by opting for the yield assessment tool being used by the Government of India.
FarmGuide, which also provides the e-governance tool for crop insurance, has developed a multi-hierarchical app for Yield Assessment capable of validating and integrating estimates using satellite imagery. The Yield Assessment app is a data management solution facilitating accurate estimation of average harvest yield by ensuring reliable crop cutting experiments.
4) Image Processing in Agriculture
Change is the only constant, and agribusinesses today are at a crossroads where they need to adopt new technologies to gain a competitive edge.
Competitive edge can only be created with tested product and FarmGuide’s Image Processing (IP) Labs has passed this test. Using proprietary image processing algorithms and techniques, FarmGuide’s IP Labs has successfully segmented and identified 13 crore individual farms based on its coordinates, size, boundary, and information about their nearest road, railway stations, bank, irrigation source and storage facility with real-time holding capacity.
Image Processing can provide real-time insights on land use, cropping behavior, soil and plant health. This technology enables us to optimize and improve operational efficiency of agricultural businesses, which creates the competitive edge.
5) Technology Turning Unused Land to Profitable Farms
India has the second highest arable land after the USA at 160 million hectares, yet the country’s yield levels are far below other major agricultural producers. This is because large land owners are no longer choosing to cultivate their entire farm. With rising input costs and sale of produce fetching prices below the government’s minimum support price, farming isn’t profitable even for large farmers.
Large land owners are only partially cultivating their farm and letting the rest go barren because they would suffer heavy losses if they do. In many cases, if farmland remains uncultivated for a long period of time, the state government can place it in their land bank.
So how does a farmer ensure that they do not suffer losses and also keep the government from placing it in land banks? Well, they can now turn their uncultivated land profitable using FarmBuild.
FarmBuild is our web marketplace where large land owners can virtually develop their profit-making farm, which Farmguide turns into reality.
Land owners can choose to either be directly involved in FarmBuild or they can opt to lease the land to an interested agri-preneur who optimizes resources to create the profit-making farm.
Conclusion
Many have cast doubts over the ambition of government to double the income of farmers by 2022 and change in the future of farming in India. As Ashok Gulati, former chairman of Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices notes, doubling of real incomes of farmers would be a “miracle of miracles”, as it would imply a compound growth rate of 12% per annum.
But guess what?
INNOVATION😊 believes that miracles do happen!
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