“How can we do our collective part for the farmer’s welfare by fine-tuning technology and bringing the benefits in real-time to each and every farmer?”

The industry must collectively work towards helping improve the benefits to the farmer from multiple domains. These domains are expanding with the usage of drones, satellite imagery, and artificial intelligence-based tools without forgetting the policies set by the government to facilitate such practices. These policies play a significant role in the industry to deliver quality services and timely information to make decisions. This helps farmers become more confident in investing their efforts to implement sustainable practices and in turn supports his contribution to supporting the food security of the world.

Over the last 6 months, we have launched several technology-based products keeping in view the importance of “ Farmer Welfare”. These products have been developed to help industry players easily collect data from farmers and understand the location of their farms as a starting point. Using AI-based tools in this application, we can predict the field boundaries and tag them to the farmer’s information. This can be used by survey companies, banks, and other institutions such as fertilizer, seed, and other industry players surrounding the farmer.

Once we have the base information on the farmer, it can be submitted to the monitoring app which is an additional product to help monitor in near real-time the conditions of the farmer’s field. It can also help to generate historical information on the field boundary about what was the condition of the land several years back. This type of information will help in decision-making to understand cropping practices and if there is an urgent need to adopt new practices. The farmer can benefit by talking to experts using this historical data analysis.

The combination of data collection and monitoring is very powerful to support farmer welfare. The industry can benefit by subscribing to real-time information and reaching the farmer in case there are alerts for their farm regarding natural or non-natural calamities. Alerts can be set for companies that sell fertilizers. Insecticides, seeds, and other ancillary products to the farmers directly. They can subscribe to receiving warnings on the individual plots which are being monitored during the cropping season.

Banking and financial lending institutes can benefit by taking timely action on the farmer plots for providing insurance coverages in accordance with government policies. Such practices in a timely manner will be a huge step toward creating a trust factor between Industry, farmers, government, and the technology companies. It allows for transparency and accountability within the entire ecosystem of the stakeholders.

Having dashboards to help monitor the farms and land in real-time will be key to giving the industry a chance to help the farmers. Such dashboards maintained at the lowest level of an administrative boundary will be key to proving the necessary information on the practices, water requirements, weather information, IoT, crop health, soil information, etc. An integration of this information with Artificial intelligence models will provide insights to support “Farmer Welfare” with predictions that it will learn by itself and help grow the confidence of farmer advisory services in an automated manner.

Integration of the drone technology with the right set of tools for monitoring large areas with satellites will help pinpoint the target fields which need the help in saving the crops in distress. Technology can help identify such distressed locations in real-time. One such example is the use of drones that can be sent to the right location to help spray the required chemicals to intervene at the right time. These new generation technology stacks will play a significant role in the coming years for “farmer welfare”.

EOfactory has the modules necessary for all parts of the value chain to support “farmer welfare” and continues to build technology solutions in the Agritech domain. The key is to deliver in near real-time the right analytics with the right data. This will help support “food security” for future generations.