How Agritech is reshaping the farming landscape in India

By Amith Agarwal

Indian farms and farmers have braved age-old challenges for centuries, with new obstacles added every few decades. Arguably, the agricultural sector around the world experiences similar problems. However, the conditions in India are unique. Therefore, it necessitates solutions designed for the Indian agricultural landscape.

From feeding one’s village to state and country, Indian farms now feed the world in today’s highly globalised economy. This has regained the spotlight amidst the recent global uncertainties. It has established Indian agriculture’s influence and contribution on the world map.

At this turning point, modern technology is further strengthening Indian agriculture’s role in the global context.

Enabling scientific farming

While Indian agriculture shoulders increasing responsibilities, the majority of its problems remain the same. Undoubtedly, challenges related to weather, soil, seeds, irrigation, etc., continue to affect farming in India. But new-age technologies & innovations and applying scientific thinking to farming are gradually ushering a change in Indian agriculture — perhaps the biggest since the Green Revolution.

For too long, farming in India has depended on nature’s mercy. However, advances in meteorological sciences and satellite farming, backed by emerging digital technologies, like ICT, IoT, Big Data, cloud, blockchain, and so on, are making farming predictive and resilient to uncertainties. Satellite technologies are increasingly being used to assess agricultural factors like soil quality and moisture. Weather predictions have become much more accurate and farmers have access to advanced information such as adverse weather patterns, rainfall trends, etc.

Facilitating integration

Technology is enabling the integration of the country’s severely fragmented agricultural landscape. Agriculture in India engages 90 to 150 million farmers (93.09 million households). Over 90% of this population has marginal and small (0-2 hectare) to medium landholding (2-10 hectares). The fragmentation becomes evident when one realizes that the average size of operational holding is 1.08 ha. Delivering knowledge, goods & services to such fragmented demography is highly challenging.

Digitalisation and electronic mandis are also playing a critical role in integrating not only the agricultural landscape but the entire food production value chain. It enables sharing the latest scientific knowledge and delivery of goods & services to the farming community. Furthermore, it is building transparency and trust amongst farmers.

Farmers have direct access to larger markets and the assurance of transparent prices and a higher return of value. By facilitating traceability, digitalization is instilling confidence in the global market and consumers on the quality of Indian produce and agricultural processes.

Introducing automation

Western-style farm mechanization and corporate farming has not been successful in India. That’s because, unlike developed and less densely populated nations, India’s fragmented low-landholding farmers do not have the means to own or rent highly mechanized and expensive farming systems. However, unique, affordable and mechanizing solutions like drone technologies are introducing a critical shift in certain farm operations.

Drones are helping with accurate field mapping, determining drainage patterns, collecting data & intelligence, crop monitoring & surveillance, agricultural spraying, and seed plantations. Drones are also infusing Indian farming with better resource utilisation and higher energy efficiency, resulting in reduced costs and enhanced productivity.

Optimising resources

Agriculture is water and energy-intensive. With the need for higher output and more production cycles, agriculture is consuming more water than before. This is also resulting in increasing water wastage and decreasing groundwater table. The extensively implemented micro-irrigation technologies, such as drip irrigation, are some of the most significant agricultural innovations. Today, over 19% of irrigated land area is covered with drip or sprinkler irrigation technologies. As for energy, the agriculture sector accounts for around one-fifth of India’s total electricity usage. 1 The sector is increasingly leveraging solar technologies to power various farm equipment like pumps, feeders, etc.

Motivating a generational shift towards agripreneurship

Perhaps one of the most important benefits of farming technologies and innovations is that it is motivating a generational shift back to agriculture. Agritech is making pursuing a career in agriculture fashionable. In the last few decades, the agriculture sector developed a labour shortage as new generations moved to urban areas in pursuit of professional employment.

Now, agritech is infusing renewed interest in the sector. Educated professionals even from IIT’s and educated in foreign universities are founding agri-tech start-ups to design technologies that make agriculture a more valued, attractive, tenable, and knowledge-intensive sector. This is rekindling the value of farming amongst the agriculturalists of tomorrow.

If India is to become the world’s food bowl, it needs its human resource and intelligence invested in the agricultural value chain. And agritech is just doing that — redesigning the Indian farming landscape of the 21st century.