Agriculture in the age of AI in the country of billions of people, India

Farming in India is very difficult. Water shortages, rapidly changing climates, and chaotic supply chains make nearly every crop a calculated gamble. But farmers like Harish B., 40, are realizing that artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help eliminate some undesirable factors.

Harish B. took over the family farm on the outskirts of Bengaluru, southern India, 10 years ago. His father has been farming this 5.6 hectare land since 1975 and switched from growing vegetables to growing grapes to earn higher profits. Since taking over, he has planted more pomegranates and worked to modernize the farm, installing drip irrigation systems and misters to spray agricultural chemicals.

A year and a half ago, Harish B. started working with Bengaluru-based startup Fasal. The company combines Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, predictive modeling and AI weather forecasting to provide farmers with tailored advice, including when to water, fertilize and fertilize. The farm is at risk of being attacked by pests.

Predictions are not perfect, Harish B. said, and farmers still need to rely on intuition if the advice doesn’t seem right. However, he is satisfied with this service and has saved significantly on pesticides and irrigation water. “Earlier, with the old method, we used more water. Now things are more precise and we only use the right amount of water,” Harish B. said. He estimates the farm is using 30% less water than before working with Fasal.

India is heavily dependent on agriculture with about 65% of the population involved in this sector. Since the “green revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, when new crop varieties, fertilizers and pesticides boosted productivity, the country has become self-sufficient in food – an impressive feat. for a country of 1.4 billion people. India also exports more than $40 billion in food annually.

Yet Indian agriculture remains extremely inefficient. About 80% of farms are small with an area of ​​less than 2 hectares, making it difficult for farmers to generate enough revenue to invest in equipment and services. The supply chain that brings food from growers to market is also not well organized and depends on middlemen, reducing farmers’ profits and leading to massive waste.

Indian farmers now have many options to improve the way they work as the country’s agritech sector thrives. A host of startups are using AI and other digital technologies to provide agricultural advice and improve rural supply chains. In 2018, India announced agriculture as one of the focus areas of its AI strategy. In September this year, the government also announced a grant of about 300 million USD for digital agriculture projects.

While technology is not a “cure-all,” according to Ananda Verma, founder of Fasal, there are many ways in which technology can make farmers’ lives easier. Fasal sells IoT devices that collect data on important parameters such as soil moisture, rainfall, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and humidity.

This data is transferred to a cloud server, fed into machine learning models along with weather data from third parties, thereby making predictions about the farm’s local microclimate. The results are then fed into specially designed agronomic models to predict issues such as water needs, nutrient absorption and pest risk of crops.

The output of the models helps advise farmers on when to water, fertilize, and spray pesticides. Typically, farmers make these decisions based on intuition or calendar. But this can lead to unnecessary use of chemicals or over-watering, increasing costs and reducing crop quality. “Our technology helps farmers make accurate and informed decisions, eliminating all the guesswork,” Vernma said.

The rapid development of digital infrastructure in India also creates favorable conditions for Fasal to provide services, especially widespread 4G coverage at extremely low data prices. The number of smartphone users increased from less than 200 million 10 years ago to more than a billion today. “We can deploy the device in rural India, where sometimes you don’t even find roads, but still have Internet,” Verma said.

Reducing water and chemical use on farms also helps reduce pressure on the environment. A statistic shows that, on an area of ​​about 80,000 hectares that Fasal is operating in, this company has helped save 82 billion liters of water. Fasal also helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions from water pumps by 54,000 tons and chemicals by 127 tons.

According to Harish CS, who runs his family’s 24-hectare fruit farm in north Bengaluru and is a Fasal customer, one wrong decision on what to plant or when to irrigate can lead to months of wasted effort. strength. Therefore, farmers are very cautious and tend to make decisions based on advice from trusted suppliers or farmers.

AI can enable farmers to share such knowledge. Advanced large language models (LLMs) provide efficient ways to analyze and organize information and help interact with technology more naturally through language. That could help “unlock” Indian farmers’ archives of agricultural knowledge, according to Rikin Gandhi, CEO of the international nonprofit Digital Green.

Since 2008, Digital Green has been filming short videos in which Indian farmers explain the problems they face and their solutions. Staff will then go to villages to present the video. According to a study conducted by a team of experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Poverty Action Lab, this program helps reduce the cost needed for farmers to apply new methods from about 35 USD down to $3.50.

When operations were severely limited during the Covid-19 pandemic, Digital Green tested a WhatsApp bot that helped farmers access relevant videos in the database. Two years ago, the organization started LLM training with video scripts to create a more sophisticated chatbot that can give appropriate responses.

More importantly, chatbots can also integrate personalized information, such as the user’s location, local weather, and market data. “Farmers don’t want to just receive general answers like on Wikipedia or ChatGPT. They want advice that is specific to each time and place,” Gandhi said.

Purushottam Kaushik, head of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) in Mumbai, is leading a pilot project using AI and other digital technologies to streamline agricultural supply chains. The project has helped 7,000 chili growers in Khammam district, Telangana state, India, increase their income.

Launched in 2020 in partnership with the state government, the project combines advice from Digital Green’s first-generation WhatsApp bot with soil testing, AI crop quality assessment and a digital marketplace to connect farmers directly with buyers, reducing intermediaries. Thanks to that, over 18 months, farmers have increased their income by 21% and increased their selling price by 8%.

The project is being expanded to 20,000 farmers in the region. While still in its early stages, this could be a model for agricultural modernization efforts around the world, according to Abhay Pareek, manager of agriculture at C4IR.

With its diversity of agricultural conditions, large proportion of small farms, thriving technology and strong support from the government, India is the ideal “laboratory” to test deployable technologies. for developing countries. “What is being done in India will be like a testing ground for most emerging economies,” Pareek commented.