Droning Over Drones in Indian Agriculture

Date:11-07-2022

Are we prone to droning the overblown benefits of drones in agriculture? Rhyming jokes aside, Is it possible to build business models that will make drones the next generation of call centres for productivity monitoring in agriculture?

During the recent Kharif cropping season, we got to see what happens when drones are introduced into Indian agriculture.

The timing couldn’t be more, hmm, well, inappropriate.

Drones are being introduced at a time when we are witnessing the age-old truism of ‘Indian Agriculture being ‘the oldest and most absorptive ‘sponge’ for surplus labour.’

If the recent data from the periodic labour force survey (PLFS) is to be believed, ″46.18 million additional jobs generated between 2018-19 and 2019-20 nearly 70 per cent of them are reported to have been created in agriculture. To put it in figures, this represents an estimated 32.72 million additional agricultural jobs compared to only 1.65 million in manufacturing and 3.58 million in construction.″

That said, there has been a lot of enthusiasm among the agri-input firms, and enterprising farmer/retailer ecosystems, eager to add drone services to their portfolio.

″FPOs is a model which can be looked at to quicken the adoption of drones for commercial use and in crops, we see its usages in wet rice fields, corn and sugarcane fields etc,″

 - Peter Wiebusch, Bayer India

Since the government — to encourage local production — has banned importing drones, while allowing Chinese components to be exempt from the ban, most of the local players have been assembling drones from Chinese components, racing the battle to assemble the cheapest drone and selling them in the range of 800-1000 INR (approx 10 -12 USD) per acre for spraying to farmers.

Of course, the unit economics doesn’t make sense both for farmers and agritech startups which ventured into drones for spraying. From what I am hearing, drone-based startups with a bias to survive have gone full stack to patiently build the underlying business model which is required for drones to play a transformative role in agriculture.

It also helps that government has given 100 % subsidy for agricultural research institutions, 75 % for farm cooperatives and farmers’ producer organisations (FPOs), and 40 % for enterprises offering custom-hiring services to farmers.

And so, there is always the risk of subsidy economics eating technological developments for lunch.

What excites me is to see how drones will be used for the implementation of SVAMITVA schemes - Survey of Villages Abadi and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas - and what downstream impacts it could have in the implementation of land reforms in this country.

″For [drone] mapping we are getting 10 times better resolution on the ground for almost the same cost of satellite imagery″

- Ankit Mehta, CEO, Idea Forge

There is a LOT to talk about drones from a technology and policy standpoint. In this article, I want to focus on the core mental models to think about drones and make a few predictions.

Remember this. How you think about drones will completely shape and constrain the possibilities you derive from them.

Broadly speaking, you could categorize drone business models into two types - those which are leveraging drones for spraying services and those which are leveraging drones for precision agriculture through hyperspectral and multispectral imagery.

No prizes for guessing where the excitement is more in the marketplace.

What is the right mental model to think about drones in agriculture and what can we foresee in the near future?

Drones will follow the trajectory of call centers which are deployed worldwide for productivity monitoring and enhancement. We may or may not like them. But, they will be inevitable. The business model for drones in spraying contexts will be subsumed by the current business models of agri-input firms.

My Prediction: The business model of drones as call centres will be far greater than the business model of using drones for spraying. We will revisit this in a few years once we have enough data.

To understand the role of drones in agriculture at this historical moment, we need to understand the difference between formal and real subsumption of labour.

Karl Marx, in the chapter on″Primitive Accumulation″ in his classic book Das Kapital, talks of the difference between ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subsumption of labour by capital.

When capital flows into existing labour structures in agriculture, it becomes formal subsumption of labour - You see this in the way retailers use agritech platforms in smallholding countries in a way where their monopoly is not challenged.

When capital flows in a way where labour unwillingly finds itself completely transformed, it becomes real subsumption of labour by capital.

When drones become the defacto call centre to monitor productivity in agriculture, it has the potential to completely transform every aspect of labour that goes into farming.

Will that be a blessing? - Farmers need not sleep near their farms to shoo away wild animals in the middle of the night. Drones will alert them when they detect animals in the field.

Or will that be a curse?- Farmers will face pressure to accept farm surveillance by drones, mandated by contract farming companies/agritech firms eager to improve the productivity of their farms and farmers.

A bit of both. We will explore this and more further. Stay tuned.

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This article was initially published in AgroPages' '2022 India Focus' magazine.