Image Processing Labs @FarmGuide launches Village/Tehsil/District Wise Agri Reports
At the University of Southern California, Professor Gérard Medioni is experimenting with image processing to enable his visually-impaired students to develop provision to literally help them “see”. The visually-handicapped person wears a vest and a pair of dark glasses and as the person moves, the system creates a 3-D map of the environment while cameras in the dark glasses watch out for obstacles. Some decades back this was stuff that sci-fi movies were made of but this is today a virtual reality, a possibility that is existent in our days and times.
Not only is the robotic navigation system helping the differently enabled, but it is also helping fight international terrorism and crime, and healing like never before with invasive surgeries. It is already been easily deployed in everyday tasks of photography correction to create winsome cinematic effects and controlling traffic with advisory of alternate routes and crashes. Is it really a miracle then that it should make agriculture literally bear the fruits it should? Image processing is a technical analysis of the complex aspects of an image, deploying algorithms to get details of the soil, the size, the crop sown, the cropping frequency, the connectivity and irrigation prospects of any farm at any time. Farmers and other stakeholders, erstwhile, found it hard to identify farmers’ user base to reach rural markets, run markets campaigns, awareness campaigns and launch government schemes. That is now a thing of the past!
Agriculture data of India in a path-breaking database
If you are in an economy where there is endless scope for the progress you don’t need to look much further for inspiration. This is where Image Labs division of Farmguide picked up steam to match the time-bomb ticking issues pervasive in agriculture, the lack of information or the toiling over the sketchy database available in government files or with village patwari. With innovation influencing all the many departments of an agritech company like product development, marketing, manufacturing, distribution, research and development; it would be gravely surprisingly if there were no path-breaking product or tossing of the routine shift.
Lets toast today to the Image Labs repository of reports of every and any granular, last piece of information you were looking for, lets toast to this intellect shift that image processing has introduced to the world of agriculture — reinventing the way we sow seeds, seeds of a brighter future. This data gives you all the itsy-bitsy yet comprehensive details you need to know to form your macroscopic decisions at the Village/Tehsil/District levels.
Village/Tehsil/District — encompassing all levels of data
In another article on Image Labs, we told you a tale of two villages in Rajasthan — Kekri and Kumpras giving you a detailed report on the usage of Village Profiler — that gives you a detailed comparison on various levels of farm data such as farm segmentation, cropping frequency, warehouse and road connectivity. [Insert link to article 25 here] Bringing you further minuscule details here on the market, irrigation, farm size, banking and road connectivity.
Market report
The market report maps all the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) mandis and sub-mandis supporting the main APMC mandi on the GIS map with the influx, outflow and prices of agri-produce in these markets. This report gives a detail of the crops marketed in these mandis, average quantities sold per day (in quintals) and the weighted average price they fetch. Lentils, spices or seeds, everything that is produced and has a market for in these rural commercial setups. For example, Kumpras in Jodhpur trades majorly in green gram selling about 270 quintals per day.
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Waterway connectivity
It is the connectivity of farms to the nearest available water resource be it river, canal or pond. Our sample study village of Kumpras has the nearest water resource at a distance of 22 Kms.
Farm size distribution
It is the distribution of marginal, small, semi-medium, medium and large farms as identified by farm segmentation technology. Bigger the farm better is the quality of farmers or farming in the area. Kumpras has 1483 farms with again 2 largest farms at 25 hectares and about 937 marginal farms covering 28% of the total farm area of the village. Also in Kumpras, about 1283 hectares of the land is cultivation land. In another village, Kekri, there are 908 farms in the village with 2 farms that can be categorized as large with a total farm area as 25.12 hectares. There are 97 small farms in Kekri.
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Bank section
Mapping of all Rural Regional Bank (RRB), District Cooperative Central Bank (DCCB) and commercial bank branches and finding the connectivity of the farms to their respective nearest bank branch which farmer can access if under the permissible limit to get access to financial services. This report gives you the number of private and public banks in a particular village and its distance from the first and the last farms.
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Road connectivity
It is the connectivity of the farms with the nearest road be it Kaccha road, state highway or national highway. In Kekri, the nearest road is just 1 metre away and farthest is not more than 2.8 km away. About 174 farms are within the range of 1.3–1.7 metres from the road. In case of Kumpras as well, the nearest road is also only a metre away and the farthest is 2.731 km away and 864 farms are less than 1.5 km away.
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Agricultural insights in Farmguide agro reports
Today, no one dataset provides you with the cross-sectional view that Farmguide offers you. This could miraculously transform the way you do business, no requisitioning with the government bodies anymore, no negotiating with the village authorities, no joining the numerous dots of this wondrous puzzle; information available at the click of a button in your mailbox, in your phone. Technology aiding you like it should and not just on a gaming channel, but to make the business seem as hassle-free as that.
