Data As The Driving Force For the Next Green Revolution in India
In one of our articles, we discussed how precision farming and AI can fuel the second green revolution in India. Today I will be focusing on how the right data will drive this revolution.
Data has been one of the crucial players in the technological revolutions that we hear about today. Forbes ranked AI & ML, IoT, and Big Data as the top three technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Not surprisingly, all fourtechnologies revolve around data, either using data for predictions, collecting it, or processing and analyzing large data.
These technologies have been able to disrupt and reshape the way we function today. And these technologies also have the potential to save the looming threat to our food security due to the growing population and threats of climate change. To truly succeed, we need to gather quality data as a means to revolutionize our agriculture system. The right data can give our growers a competitive edge by mitigating risk and assisting them in decision-making.
What sort of data are we talking about here? Any data that helps or will help a grower in the future to make decisions regarding crop management. These include farm maps, farm elevation, weather or microclimate data, rainfall data, soil-related information, crop yield for a season, historic episodes of pathogens, pests, and disease as well as information related to any chemical or organic treatments used.
The data collected by various government agencies focus on collecting data from a broader region like national, state, or district level. Very little effort has been made to collect data at the farm or plot level. That’s unfortunate because plot-level information is vital to achieving a more complete scientific understanding of a given growing season and developing effective risk mitigation strategies for a grower.
Any data that is generated can be seen as a raw good. Data will become truly valuable, and effective at risk mitigation when it is systematically represented by validated scientific methods and is in a format that enables clear and reliable use. Such data then has the potential to help in effective water management, improving economic efficiency, minimizing waste and environmental impact as well as in developing local microclimate forecasts.
We at Fasal leverage the use of IoT and along with our tech stack collect high-quality data at the farm level. We have also started the initiative to collect satellite data for crop health assessment and we strongly believe that the right data will bring precision to precision farming.
In the last couple of years, we have been able to collect 60M+ quality farm-level data points from thousands of IoT devices across the different regions in India and now adding approx ~8M+ data points month-on-month basis to strengthen our algorithm and analysis.
