With Agro-IoT being the focal point, domain experts and technologists believe that effective solutions using the technology can be developed not only to aid farmers but also help them in a variety of agriculture-related tasks. Now, continuing our pursuit to bring to light smart agro-IoT solutions for Indian farmers, we explore deployments that have benefited farmers real-time. Check out SmartRisk, a real-world Agro-IoT deployment by CropIn Technologies which is an Agro-tech startup with the tagline Make every farm traceable.
Deployed IoT-driven solution – SmartRisk
SmartRisk fundamentally leverages smart technologies viz data science, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) to detect the type of crop sustainable on a particular farm plot whilst analysing cropped areas to detect high risk and low risk zones and offer indication of the yield quality (and quantity).
Usefulness of this solution: SmartRisk is multi-disciplinary. Both farmers, and banking institutions can use the product.
For farmers, the biggest advantage is that they get to derive insights on their corps. These insights are offered with remote sensing, satellite imagery, plot geo-tagging, along with AI & big data. These analyse the various risk levels at the farm level, and generate reports to educate the farmers about multiple sowing related aspects such as the type of crop, the almost exact approximate yield and harvest to expect, and select sowing areas that are outside of the purview of risk.
With data in their hands, farmers should be able to procure loans easily (through banking and agro-financial institutions). Since risk level, of the farm itself, is also displayed to banking institutions, these can also take appropriate lending decisions.
“Our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based system is not a one-time intervention but a sustainable solution. Machine learning and AI based algorithm make it possible for the system to evolve every day and provide more robust information to the businesses,” states Krishna Kumar- chief executive officer at CropIn Technologies.
For businesses, SmartRisk offers complete farm auditing to completely assess a piece of land, its cultivation potential, along with yield prediction.
How does SmartRisk work?
The solution does complete farm audit, by using satellite data, weather data, along with custom-designed algorithms that is built on historical data. Technology-wise, the algorithms use remote sensing in tandem with AI, ML, predictive analysis to identify the type of crop along with analysing the risk levels of cropped plots.
At the ground level, SmartRisk solutions can monitor entire farms or even specific plot areas and use this data to help farmers in analysing cultivation and yield.
Its business-to-business (B2B) usage can be leveraged by banking institutions to properly decide on agricultural loans through accurate prediction of results. These mechanisms increase efficiency of these firms whilst bringing down their operational cost.
“Through our SmartRisk product, a large base of low ticket size but at (perceived) higher risk borrowers (farmers) have become operationally viable for financial institutes/ banks etc to service,” adds Krishna.
Where has SmartRisk been deployed?
As per Krishna, SmartRisk has been deployed by Mumbai-based Netafim Agricultural Financing Agency (NAFA) – a non-banking firm that works with farmers at the ground level to offer easy financial solutions and to monitor loan portfolio risk on fortnightly basis.
However, SmartRisk can also be used by everybody & anybody, interested in offering Agro-tech solutions to farmers. SmartRisk is a subset of a larger set of IoT-driven smart agricultural solutions called SmartFarm. We have covered deployment of SmartFarm extensively.
Agro-IoT solutions developed by other players have also been covered by us, as part of our efforts to enable the agricultural community to take efficient decisions by harness smart technology (which has the potential to start the next green revolution).
With the internet of things (IoT) having showing signs of rapidly evolving in India, experts generally believe that the technology and smart concepts associated with it would solve societal problems by serving as important tools for varied purposes. One purpose that needs the IoT evolution at this instant is agriculture in India.
