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Executive Summary

The case for developing wireless sensor network for agriculture monitoring

yuktix received a grant for developing wireless sensor network for agriculture monitoring idea into a viable POC (proof of concept). What is the need for creating this technology for agriculture sector and what is the commercial viability? We have put together this paper to answer that question.

Agriculture employs more than 43% of the population and contributes to 17% of the Indian GDP and yet remains a sector with low adoption of digital technologies. There are four critical areas for improvement in agriculture. We need

  1. Better market linkages
  2. Innovation credit facilities
  3. Innovations in input
  4. Digital systems

Our focus area is (4), the digital technologies required for climate smart agriculture that uses less input, No GMP, NO pesticide and works on renewable energy. To create sustainable practices to obtain climate smart agriculture goals, agriculture practitioners need access to a technology platform that can apprise them of current conditions and suggest implementation of best practices in terms of action items.

Agriculture practitioners need to take decisions on a daily basis. During a season, a grower may have to take more than 50 key decisions and often that is done in absence of data and only based on guess work. The crop health, stored produce quality, water usage and fertigation can all improve with right climate data and analytic. To drive the vision of zero pesticide, less water, and more productive on the same footprint of land than traditional agriculture we need to monitor and manage the entire process from seed to store.

However, most of the farmers lack access to a digital system that can provide data 24x7 and can act as a digital assistant with advice on what to do. They end up instead relying on guess work and gut feelings. There is no information on onset of diseases for grape and plantation crops like Tea for scheduling pesticide, no data about soil moisture and crop water stress before doing field irrigation, no rain forecast before putting fertilizers in the soil, no information on crop management during growth stages, no information on effectiveness of chemicals at recorded temperatures and not having even the basic growing conditions for greenhouse owners harvesting dragon fruits.

The lack of climate, soil and data crucial to input coupled with absence of best agricultural practices result in poor operations management, yield loss and sub optimal resource utilization. As per ICAR, 30-35% of the annual crop yield in India goes waste because of disease and pests. As per CIPHET report , the post-harvest losses in India stand at a staggering 40 Billion US$ . More than 75% of ground water in India, a precarious resource, is used for irrigation. The pesticide usage is rampant and chemical residues is a big factor in export ban of Indian products.

A digital system that can capture the climate data accurately and translate it to concrete action items for daily operations will save resources like water, maintain soil health and improve crop yield and quality.

The current way to bring domain expertise to solve above problems would be to first record data that tell us more about the environment and conditions.

  • weather condition of a field
  • soil moisture of the field where we want to do irrigation
  • daily temperature trends that influences pathogen production
  • rain forecast for the day
  • The color and texture of leaves

and then bringing in domain expertise to arrive at the decisions that can follow best practices, take preventive measures and save resources.

A digital system that can capture the climate data accurately and translate it into concrete actions for daily operations will save resources like water, maintain soil health and improve crop yield and quality. Yuktix is creating an IoT platform for agriculture monitoring and risk management. The system comprises of sensors capturing climate data in real time and software linking the climate data to actionable items enabling climate smart agriculture (CSA).

The first step of a climate smart agriculture platform is to ensure 24x7 availability of climate data for decisions. To do so we need equipment that can measure climate data and make it available on a network for further analysis. However, the existing equipment to do so is costly, lacks mobility and good software integration. From the proposal,

At present, most of the equipment are costly, imported and doesn't make any sense from an ROI perspective for our growers. Our Agriculture sector is not using climate sensing technology because it is not available at an affordable price.

Our plan calls for creating affordable and low power ubiquitous computing devices that can provide climate data using sensors on a continuous basis for climate smart agriculture. That would help agriculture production, logistics and planning based activities. We envision these devices to be powered only on batteries or solar (solar computing) and have built-in network connectivity for data collection and analysis.

Should we really be making the hardware? is that not a solved problem?

Do not make a part that you can buy from a catalogue.

We believe it is critical to go back to the drawing board because agriculture setup are very different from industrial setup in our country. We need to leapfrog the existing technologies and create devices that can run from renewable sources (solar) without requiring a power socket ever, is networked for mobility, is easy to use and is capable of creating local networks.

The commercial viability of our devices are in

  • Open field agriculture production (micro weather for production) where we are trying to disrupt the traditional instruments industry.
  • disease and pest prediction using environment conditions
  • saving water for irrigation and ensuring optimal water stress for crops
  • post harvest quality monitoring
  • supply chain monitoring
  • IoT platform for equipment manufacturers