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The agriculture sector emerged as a favourable recipient of scientific boons, with farmers receiving training in employing digital and analytical tools. These include the techniques to embed creative strategies into agricultural practices, to boost productivity and profitability. Such an inducement is estimated to roll-up the agriculture sector’s revenue and concurrently improve crop yields. Some of the potential areas that have been welcoming of this cutting-edge technology are artificial intelligence, robotics, precise farming, block-chain technology, etc.
The sector, still is the largest absorber of the workforce, employing almost 58% of the population, especially in rural areas. This altogether produces a share of 18% of the GDP, yet there remains ample potential to improve the rate of production and efficiency. Most of the time, due to the usage of obsolete technologies, the resultant output of a range of farming tasks like water irrigation, crop monitoring, pesticide usage, etc., would usually go overvalued or undervalued. In such cases, the return on investment from such resources would sum-up to be insufficient due to ignorance of major influencing factors like weather conditions. At the same time, such hindrances have produced a breeding ground for technological innovations and solutions that had a massive positive impact on the sector.
Role of start-ups:
Agri-based start-ups such as Fasal, Ergos, Fram2Farm, Agrowave, etc., compete to provide close to accurate predictions, thereby helping to harvest high-quality products. They offer a wide range of services such as selling farm produce directly to potential consumers; enhancing the quantity and quality of yield to be marketed; transporting fresh produce straight away from producers; tracking warehouse stock in order to better maintain inventory; along with enabling farmers to sell their product much above price floor limit, these start-ups also aid in sorting, grading, packaging, and logistics.
At the crop level, AI-based technology has been helping farmers to constantly maintain the quality of food by choosing the suitable irrigation method, soil nutrient levels, temperature levels, etc. This would make the farmers educated enough to take decisions and implement appropriate cautionary measures in maintaining general health and yield of crops. In addition to this, they have also introduced warning systems about infestations.
Practicing cultivation in uneven terrain like terrace farming fails to provide a favourable space for optimum employment of manual labour and simple tools, thereby leading to productivity and energy-related constraints. Considering how Indian agriculture is characterized by the pattern of small landholdings, a pooled investment in modern technology would provide combined benefits to many farmers. Before investing, they should decide on the technology that would best suit their farm requirements. Ample opportunities are inducted into the market as pilot projects- offered by the Ministry of Agriculture with Ninjacart, Jio Platforms Limited, CISCO, ITC Limited and NCDEX e-markets Limited.
Drone technology
The military was the first to reap the benefits of drones in tracing enigmatic movements. Other industries too quickly adopted the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) technology for the range of advantages it offers. One such evident breakthrough was the introduction of drones into the agriculture sector and was assumed to be a noteworthy technological change affecting the Indian economy. The service sector is gearing up to offer full-fledged solutions by embedding data-based technologies like big data, ML, AI, analytics, BI and cloud. Companies ranging from large-scale corporations to MSMEs working closely with the agriculture sector, are expected to step in to offer drone-based services.
With such expanding demand, the market for agricultural UAVs advanced rapidly and was worth $1.3 billion. Information gathered by drones would reduce the human errors of judgement in inspecting crop treatment, crop health, irrigation, nutrient levels of soil, the extent of crop damage and much more. With extended nudges, farmers will better be able to make informed decisions regarding type of crop, type of seed, type of cultivation practices and managing the produced yield.
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