I am going to make a pitch here, for the betterment of agriculture, or just say adding some value to the Internet for agriculture.
We have always heard about how agriculture in India is always a difficult domain to innovate in, I agreed to that statement until recently. I really started thinking after a friend of mine sparked this conversation about developing services rather internet services for the agriculture sector in India. He was keen on providing some value adding service which would really help in a simple way to any farmer in the country who is say literate not necessarily educated.
Pitch:
Create a service by which a user (farmer) by taking/posting a picture of a piece of farming land would receive the information about; which crops would be suitable for him to sow in order to reap most yield and hence most profits or vice verse.
How to go about this Idea:
The service will rely heavily on the data available, it will be a big data task with some machine learning on it. Say for e.g. one has a data set of all the soil analysis done by a particular lab/organization. Based on that data one can map what ever the information available in the reports to the images of the soil (that would be a hard piece of information to find), solution is simple for an soil analysis organization which do analysis on a mid to large scale, it just has to add a step in the process: capture the image of soil, its easier to collect the samples that way and faster too. Once the data is available one can process that information and categorize it to what so ever possible, which makes the comparison easier with the posted image by the user.
Parameters that can be added:
Lets say we have the below data available,
1) Soil analysis reports
2) Pictures of Soil samples/land
3) Weather data for last 10 year (available on IMD — Weather on Web)
4) Fertilizers information
Well once we have the above piece of information, it would be easy to tie that together and provide a service to the agricultural sector.
Monetization:
It would not be hard to monetize the idea to turn in some cash flow. I can think of multiple ways to do that say for ex. plug in some information related to the cattle/poultry and provide paid services. Provide paid services for fertilizers buying. Implementing business model on the service I discussed above won’t be that hard.
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