FarmGuide Farm Profile Applications
Image processing is changing the world around you as you read this. Drones are not just covering your big fat Indian weddings or birthday parties, they are being used for defence and healthcare and rescues.
Far west in the University of California, a professor and his students are using image processing to enable the blind to create a 3-D map of the environment.
Back home in Ahmedabad, a student has engineered GIS-enabled drones to detect land mines. In defence operations, GIS is being used to conduct rescue procedures. You experience it daily while driving when GPS brings home the real-time images of traffic snarls and crashes ahead to afford you a safe and congestion-free bypass.
In healthcare, 3D images help doctors perform complex surgical operations of delicate anatomical features like veins. To combat crime, AI can scan through millions of images in fractions of seconds to nab a fugitive on the run.
Farmguide Addressing Skewed Data With IP
That is precisely the expertise that Farmguide has developed which could benefit not just the current businesses involved in agriculture but upcoming, and especially upcoming, startups and application developers and other related industries.
Farm profile provides a user with about 40 data points around a farm such as area, activity in past 2/4/8 seasons, how it has changed historically in terms of size, connectivity with banks, market, warehouse, cold storage, road, water source, railway, NPK ratio, soil composition, max-min NDVI, temporal NDVI through the season, sowing and harvesting week, potential crop, etc.
Startups in India generally grapple with missing bits of information or complete lack of it. As such, Farmguide not just publishes dashboards from its rich database accumulated from detail-oriented and extensively gathered data but also using image processing algorithms and techniques on satellite land images to identify the exact farm coordinates and farm sizes, making it easier for the seed, fertiliser and machinery seller to identify the best markets for themselves.
3-D visual Display of Farming
Farmguide’s Image Labs uses image processing to provide historical RGB imagery of farms; in case of Barhapur farm, the images go 15 years back in history. The feature also provides cropped farm images, farm shape and changes in vegetation in a time series with all desired coordinates.
The farm profile includes other details to help industries make well-rounded, schooled decisions, such as the nearest bank in kilometres, nearest road, nearest Mandi, nearest storage type, waterways, soil classes of the district and crops grown in every season.
The farm profile provides infrastructural information of the Tehsil as well, such as general administrative information, Mandi administration, market area, and market functionalities, transportation method, railway information, market charges and market timings and other auxiliary services and facilities.
Let’s take a closer look at the science that Farmguide has developed to aid companies involved in the agricultural sector;
Market Risk Analysis- Farmguide uses analytics to identify sowing and irrigation pattern, and helps farmers make better decisions regarding farming operations by eliminating manual discrepancies by any middleman in the process. This will also help seed and fertiliser suppliers determine the best market for their products. CCE (Crop Cutting Experiment) data combined with weather and land data, can advise farmers about best crops to grow on a particular field.
Actuarial Science: Through this data, Farmguide provides farmers with suggestions regarding best suited crops and other farm inputs, allowing weather forecast companies to customise their research and solutions for farmers. It is used to warn farmers against unfavourable weather conditions and take precautionary measures. The information will also be useful to input sellers, APMCs, Mandis and commodity exchanges.
Agri dependency Index: The land size, income and household data are used to calculate agri-dependency index, which is used to determine how much a farmer is dependent on agricultural income. This will help banks and insurance companies to devise solutions for smallholder farmers and livestock owners and improve the quality of insurance products for farmers.
Logistic Analysis: This data is used to tell farmers which warehouse and cold storage is most suitable for their produce in terms of proximity. This will prevent post-harvest loss. The information also makes it easy to find locations where new warehouses and cold storage can be set up.
The food processing companies can use the data to build distribution network in the domestic market that sell their products. The information can also be vital to APMC (need full form) and Mandis. The soil health card data combined with land and weather data is used to suggest farmers the most compatible crops.
Crop risk analysis: Calculation of region-wise crop risk associated with various crops can be identified using our in-house data analytics algorithms based on weather, soil, past yield and many other parameters. The resultant can come handy for the farmers to plan the farming cycle in any particular season in a specific area.
Farming is Not a Job, it’s a Lifestyle
Farmers don’t have a day off, they don’t have a weekend, it’s 24 x 7 toiling in heat, chill, rain, and they hold a constant guard against adverse conditions like unpredictable hail storms or winds or sudden downpours or insect infestation.
There is no escaping it and their only hope lies in timely information, solutions, safeguards from the supporting farm supply companies that need to partner with technology to avoid disappointing anticlimax.
