Conference Highlights
experiments are time consuming, it
involves money and effort. IBM technology
aims to make farming effective and helps
to achieve the last mile connectivity.
The world food requirement will
double by 2030, but land is not going to
increase. It is shrinking. We need to focus
on sustainable crop production. IBM
Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture
is a single platform which connects
multiple formats in the agriculture
ecosystem from fertilizers to pesticides,
agriculture advisers to farm equipment
and lenders.
IBM’s announcement of the new IBM
Global High-Resolution Atmospheric
Forecasting System (GRAF) is the first
hourly-updating commercial weather
system. Compared to existing models,
IBM GRAF will provide a nearly 200%
improvement in forecasting resolution
for much of the globe. It will provide
3-kilometer resolution that updates
hourly, delivering reliable predictions for
the day ahead.
We provide information about current
weather conditions, immediate forecast for
the next 2 weeks and long-term weather
forecast.
Dr Manish Modani, Senior Meteorologist
for India/South Asia, The Weather
Company, an IBM Business
Crop insurance companies are facing
challenges in settling crop insurance
claims. The insurers claim that it is not a
neutral process for them. By using satellite
technology, IBM provides a neutral
outcome for the insurance companies.
We are working with various insurance
companies which are part of the Pradhan
Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana scheme.
Artificial Intelligence is used for weather
predictions. We take 30-50 crop samples
and gather latitude, longitude and sowing
date of crops. Through satellite imagery
and modeling, we also gather information
on soil moisture and soil temperature.
We perform crop monitoring at periodic
intervals to assess crop health progress,
stress areas and identify crop diseases.
Our technology helps to track cyclones
or thunderstorms. We predicted Cyclone
Fani 20 days before it made landfall, which
was well acknowledged by the disaster
management departments across India.
The Weather Company solutions can drive
valuable insights for stakeholders across
the industry by combining AI, analytics
and predictive insights with industry
experience, decades of research and
relevant data – contributing to accurate
weather prediction.Sriram Venkat G, Olam International
We are working with many farmers
across the world. In India, we have started
a unique service on Android platform
to reach to the farmers. In our survey
among the Indian farmers, we found outthat most of them face weather-related
problems. In January 2019, we launched
the ‘AgriCentral’ app on Google Play
store; right now 20,000 farmers are
using our platform. The app has features
like weather predictions; it also helps us
to track GPS location of the farmers and
provide current weather and forecast for
the next 15 days.
We also provide image analytics
facility, which helps farmers to know
about crop diseases. Olam has field
executives who provide market rates for
each of the commodities to the farmers
and our backend system helps to store that
information. We have a tie-up with IBM for
integrated weather solutions. We receive
70% of weather-related queries from the
farmers in our kisan call centre. Olam has
90-95% accurate weather prediction.Arijita Dutta, Business Analyst, Olam
International
We are collecting farm location data,
which helps us to get the information
about the agriculture economic zones;
then we link IBM weather data with it.
We are providing crop advisory plans to
the farmers and we are in the process of
making an agri sense portal for targeting
the FPOs. Olam is collecting all the
information about FPOs, land sizes, crops
that farmers are growing and we are
focusing on digitizing the entire process.
We are also working on image analytics;
we are covering 14 crops and will cover
more in the coming months. We also cover
30-40 crop diseases in our app. We will be
further revamping this mobile app in the
coming months.R Pandiyen, Founding Director, Trilok Capital
One of our clients provides linkage
services between farming ecosystem by
using agri-based platform. The client is
creating a platform where payment flow
will be seamless between the stakeholders
using preloaded card information. This
platform will be useful to track weather
and seed data. The project is still in its
pilot stage.
[email protected]Two of the panelists