As the Indian farmers embrace technologies like big data and analytics in improving crop yield, BharatAgri app is offering personalised crop advisory to the farmers by generating a personalised crop calendar using big data and analytics taking more than 30 parameters into account.
These parameters are collected from soil, water, satellite imaging, weather and other crop parameters, according to Siddharth Dialani, Co-founder at BharatAgri.
In general, the company was able to increase the income of farmers by 30-50 per cent by enhancing their productivity by 20-30 per cent and reducing costs by 10-20 per cent.
Here are the excerpts from an interview:
How are you leveraging big data and analytics to help farmers make better decisions?
Through our BharatAgri app, we offer personalised crop advisory to the farmers by generating a personalised crop calendar using big data and analytics taking more than 30 parameters into account. These parameters are collected from soil, water, satellite imaging, weather and other crop parameters.
BharatAgri farmers also get advice on the exact amount of fertilisers and pesticides along with their spray date enabling the farmer to save on the costs associated with these crop inputs. Through our satellite monitoring feature, we can gauge the farm performance and advise farmers before any probable pest attacks or nutritional deficiency in certain areas hence the production of the farm is maximised earning more income for the farmers.
In general, we have observed, we are able to increase the income of farmers by 30-50 per cent by increasing their productivity by 20-30 per cent and reducing costs by 10-20 per cent. BharatAgri farmer sees an increase in income by Rs 20,000 per acre in a year. And their costs go down by Rs 5,000 per acre in a year.
Looking ahead 4-5 years, what are some of the technologies that excite you the most which can lead to more innovation/disruption in Indian agriculture?
In 4-5 years, we believe satellite imagery combined with the advanced machine learning models could replace the manual or physical testing of soil/water completely, helping the farmers monitor their farm health with better precision.
It will also help Agri-Tech firms like us to provide better real-time recommendations to the farmers about irrigation practices and optimise the usage of different nutritional and protectional components such as chemical fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides. Further improvements in predictive analytics on cohort-based user behaviour would lead to enhanced user experience of non-tech savvy users from tier 3 cities and rural areas.
We are also excited to see improved transparency across the Agri value chain as weather and satellite imagery based predictive analysis are integrated for market prices of crops. Another exciting technology emerging in the agriculture domain is image processing. With advanced algorithms, the crop health and produce quality can be analysed using images taken by the user. This would not only improve the real-time advice but also bring parity in crop prices based on quality of the produce.
What are the challenges you face when it comes to farmers embracing new technologies? Tell us about your growth over the last few years and how many farmers currently use your app?
There are multiple reasons as to why farmers aren’t very comfortable using a digital app. One of the prominent reasons is the rural infrastructure around mobile networks and internet connectivity. Since a lot of farmers use low-end smartphones they are always struggling with storage issues, slow internet and even low mobile network range. Another factor that adds to the issue is the apprehensiveness of farmers for using the digital payment services like UPI, net banking for making any sort of payments.
However, this has changed significantly in the last few years. The smartphone penetration has increased significantly in rural areas. Farmers can now afford good quality phones with better storage capacity. Moreover, the internet speed/quality is much better now in villages than a few years back.
Our app on the Google play store has been downloaded by more than 3.5 million users. We have impacted the lives of more than 30 lakh farmers so far from our app and currently we have more than 1.2 lakh active-paid farmers associated with us through our subscription service.
BharatAgri has successfully monetised the advisory services and users have now become comfortable in purchasing digital subscriptions. Bundling that with value added services like crop-input ecommerce, talk-to-expert, etc have further increased uptake and retention.
In terms of sustainability (conserving water, reducing carbon footprint etc.), how has the farmer and the agriculture landscape benefited due to your services?
Indian farms do not need as much chemical fertilizers as much are being added by the farmers. Moreover, since farmers do not follow scientific techniques of pest prevention, they further end up using more chemical pesticides.We advise farmers to use only the required amount of fertilisers and pesticides on their crops so that leaching and washing out is minimised. This helps our farmers conserve a lot of these chemicals as well as they experience better soil longevity due to less amount of chemicals in the soil.
In terms of environmental impact, BharatAgri has helped the farmers reduce their carbon footprint by 30 thousand tonnes of CO2 in the past 1 year and has saved 4.8 thousand tonnes of chemical fertilisers and 175 thousand litres of pesticides from going into the soil and then ultimately leaching into the groundwater.This would increase the soil longevity and would increase production from the farm. This reduction in the use of the chemical fertilisers and pesticides also helps maintain the pH and softness of the soil.
What has cloud technology allowed you to do that you couldn’t do before?
Mainly, AWS allowed us to scaleour operations as we onboard a largenumber of farmers on our platform.We are planning to leverage Amazonforecast predictive learning models.