GUWAHATI: Now farmers can remotely manage their crops and farms, and monitor distress activities through an application developed by students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati.
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AgSpeak, an agri-tech startup, co-founded by the students of IIT Guwahati, along with alumni of NIT Silchar and Dibrugarh University, has developed this multi-lingual smartphone AI-based application for farmers with a goal of optimizing the in-farm productivity through Artificial Intelligence (AI).
This application will help the farmers in making decisions and managing farm activities by the click of a single button on their smartphone or computer.
AgSpert is leading this initiative in the North-Eastern India which reportedly has untapped potential, with diverse ecosystems, having agriculture as the major economic activity. The developed application is multi-lingual and has an option of Assamese as well. This feature is a first among all the agri-tech applications available in the market.
Driven by hyper local crop data coming from satellite and smart IoT devices, the app considers up to 20 local crop parameters which are the key indicators of their health like temperature, rainfall, sunlight hours, soil health status, among others, to alert farmers about probable crop threats in advance and suggest best practices to tackle the incoming threat, hence optimizing the resources used and maximizing productivity.
The app along with the IoT hardware has been tested for past 3 months with 500 farmers and 2 tea estates. Some of the major breakthroughs by the algorithm were precise prediction of ‘blight in potato’ and ‘tea mosquito bug’, along with ‘water stress’ in winter crops. These are major reasons of woes to farmers and small tea growers of Assam and cause lakhs in crop damages if not controlled in time.
The developers have said that nearly 250 farmers have already been provided hands-on training in utilizing the full potential of the app. The user friendliness and multilingual features of the app make it extremely easy for farmers to use and seldom require training.
The mobile app is completely free for general small farmers. Further, there are in app purchases like soil testing and agri-doctor consultation. Besides this, the IoT devices can be rented on monthly /yearly purposes by commercial farms to further enhance precision farm management.
The self-funded startup is co-founded by Siddhartha Bora and Dhritiman Talukdar alumnus of NIT Silchar, Manik Mittal, Akash Sharma and Nitin Chauhan of IIT Guwahati, and Kookil Pran Goswami, an alumnus of Dibrugarh University.