Autonomous vs Automated
Farmagain’s core product offering is called GroTron — Intelligent Farm Network, one of the core features of GroTron is “Autonomous Irrigation and Fertigation”, before I get into explaining that let me clarify that “Fertigation” is not a proper english word, its an acronym for “Fertilization and Irrigation” done together.
Autonomous as a concept became more popular with autonomous vehicle efforts by Tesla, Google and other leading automobile manufacturers. But, Autonomous, Automated and Self-driving are interchangeably used today to described self-driving vehicles but there is a difference between them.
Automation has existed for several years in various industries including Agriculture. Any repetitive tasks done by human beings can be automated, for example, switching on a pump or opening a valve in a farm during different times in a day, there are automated irrigation systems available in market today which irrigate crops based on a preset schedule but the problem is it doesn’t consider for example current weather or changing soil conditions. This is where Autonomous systems differentiate.
Autonomous systems are intelligent, self-aware and learning, these systems require no human intervention. In the context of irrigation, autonomous systems do not irrigate a crop if the soil moisture levels are well within the limit or the soil temperature is high or its raining currently. More advanced use cases can be applied in fertigation of crops, like adjusting supply of nutrition to a crop based on its pH levels of the soil or disease attack.
The intelligence and self-learning capabilities are possible with Machine Learning (ML) technologies, ML is a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with intelligence to identify which data insights matter and accelerate complex processes .
GroTron is an AI driven autonomous irrigation and fertigation system which completely take care of irrigation and fertigation of crops in a farm with no human intervention. It also adapts to current situation in farm and learns based on data insights form sensors and adjusts irrigation and fertigation, this helps in increased productivity of crops and superior yield.
Why Autonomous Irrigation and Fertigation?
With precision agriculture gaining adoption, its very crucial crop receives precise irrigation and nutrition to achieve superior harvest, it is challenging to achieve this with manual operation without sensing the current soil and weather conditions, and with issues in availability of quality manpower in India to work in farms, achieving this in a farm is a huge challenge.
GroTron not only manages this completely autonomously by avoiding all human errors, it is also cost-effective and offers more visibility and insight to farmers.
To summarize, Automated systems are legacy and sub-optimal, autonomous systems are the future of precision agriculture.
Know more at https://www.farmagain.in
