Disrupting Agriculture with DeepTech

In the second edition of DQDeepTech, DeepTech innovators in the agritech sector spoke about how the former empowers the agriculture vertical and how advanced technologies will bring in different business models.

Rajesh Jalan, CTO, Cropin Technology, said technology is going to be everywhere in the agri ecosystem. With coming in of cloud, IoT, satellites, etc., and development of AI/ML, it is rising. The cost at which we are able to do things has also changed. We can analyze the world, on demand. With technology, the whole agriculture ecosystem will get connected. That would bring in different models. A trading company is trying to procure things without lot of intelligence.

Agriculture is going to become very scientific and prescriptive. Farmers will be able to do things that are supposed to be done. It would take into account the changing climate, soil and atmosphere. Farmers would be able to get huge value for per acre of land. Amount of produce for the next 10 billion people will come from technology.

Lalit Gautam, CEO, SenseGrass, said agriculture is a traditional industry. We are using a combination of all things. Use cases are huge, and dependent on what you want to achieve. Combination of two things can solve multiple use cases. We are creating the farm operating system, a one-stop solution for farmers. Scope of using new technologies in traditional markets are very high.

We work with two markets, the small-scale Indian market and the US market. The problem is on the dependancy of seeds and how they will perform. This is dependant on quality of soil. People have no idea what is happening under the soil. We work with a company to manage soil nutrition and soil efficiency using sensor and satellite imagery. The soil and the seed can perform much better.

How does deeptech empower you? Rajesh Jalan, Cropin Technology, said there is huge opportunity to change the landscape of agriculture. Rice is grown different to even varieties. Agriculture is very complex as the data you need to capture. Seed varieties, soil neutrients, etc. come in. We need this data as and when we want, it will open us for lot of insights and innovation. We have cloud solution. Anyone can easily onboard with few clicks. Technology has to become an enabler. A co-operative may want view of hundreds of acres. We are trying to help all these different experiences with different persona.

Lalit Gautam, Sensegrass, said we can apply certain things in India. Farm sizes are relatively large in the USA. Here, farmers are not that tech savvy. They may not be able to use solutions. This is a tough industry to work in. Policies are also important. We also have solutions. You can also tie up with co-operatives, government, etc.

Rajesh Jalan, Cropin Technology, talked about opportunities. There are various aspects of sustainability. We can also do carbon capture. There should be right amount of neutrients and pesticides, etc. Policies of free water and power also encourages us to misuse them. Through technology, we can save gallons of water. Large land-holding farmers may have difficulty to determine neutrients for specific areas. We can spot areas through satellite and sensors. We are also working on technologies meant for carbon capture. We can renumerate the farmer for doing right practices. Enterprises are also looking to buying carbon credits. We need to certify how do you check when a farmer has done right. We can reach out to much larger farmer base.

How is deeptech bring about disruption in farm tech? Ryan Mertes, Chief Solutions Officer, Dairy.com, said the holy grail in dairy industries is an example. We can get 100 liters of milk and get more cheese. We can capture data points. We are starting to apply ML for improving yield and product quality. We are seeing this in brewery industry, where lot of brews are going through ML. Some customers found that if you take milk from an animal from cold and quicker point, you can actually get more cheese yield. We can create the operations to be more better, create more products and have less waste.

As for challenges, he said that it is getting easier to implement deeptech as things go forward. IoT devices are the perfect example. A sister company has developed a solution that tells how fertilizers are used. They are also keep track of planting and harvesting. The technology is getting easier and easier to do. You can capture data in real-time. You can also know where it can be profitable to plant in a field. This spreading data is part of sustainability. You can also get the wind speed.

Dairy industry is also looking at sustainability. As new products are created, that puts pressure on processors. Deeptech comes in, tracking data electronically, and get what is in the milk. We can capture how the butter fat was in the farm, and the status when it goes into the machine, and maintain sustainability practices. We also have requests like the milk came from farms that followed best practices. Deeptech can help how animals were fed, and link with farm data.