An Assam-based start-up has developed a multilingual smartphone application for farmers to smartly manage their farms and remotely monitor distress activities.
AgSpert, the agri-tech startup co-founded by IIT Guwahati students and alumni of NIT Silchar and Dibrugarh University, Assam, have developed the application called AgSpeak. It has an Assamese language option as well, a first among all the agri-tech apps available in the market.
The app aims to optimise in-farm productivity through artificial intelligence (AI), helping farmers in making decisions and managing farm activities by the click of a single button on their smartphone or computer.
The app along with the IoT hardware has been tested for the past three months with 500 farmers and two tea estates in Assam.
Some of the “major” breakthroughs by the algorithm were “precise prediction” of blight in potato and tea mosquito bug and water stress in winter crops, a statement from IIT Guwahati said. These are the major woes for farmers and small tea growers of Assam leading to huge crop loss if not controlled in time.
“The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a system of interrelated, Internet-connected objects that are able to collect and transfer data over a wireless network without human intervention. This is the technology that AgSpert start-up uses for the app for farmers,” the statement said.
AgSpeak was launched by IIT Guwahati director Prof. T.G. Sitharam here on Sunday.
The app was co-founded by Siddhartha Bora (an NIT Silchar alumnus), chief executive officer, Manik Mittal, chief operating officer, Akash Sharma, software development engineer, Nitin Chauhan, cloud systems architect (all four students of IIT Guwahati), Dhritiman Talukdar (an NIT Silchar alumnus), software development engineer and Kookil Pran Goswami (Dibrugarh University alumnus), hardware developer.
Highlighting the need of technological advancement in the agriculture sector, Mittal said technological development in the sector has been very slow, with farmers relying on traditional methods, which are getting outdated day by day due to several factors, including population growth and climate change.
“We at AgSpert believe that technological intervention using artificial intelligence and drones will ensure food security, by increasing the productivity more than two-fold,” he said.
Driven by hyper-local crop data coming from satellite and smart IoT devices, AgSpeak considers up to 20 local crop parameters which are 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 optimising the resources used and maximising productivity.
Nearly 250 farmers have already been provided hands-on training in utilising the full potential of the app. However, the user-friendliness and multilingual features of the app make it extremely easy for farmers to use and they seldom require training.
The mobile app is completely free for general small farmers. There are in-app purchases like soil testing and agri-doctor consultation. Besides this, the IoT devices can be rented on monthly/yearly basis by commercial farms to further enhance precision farm management.
“It has been tested with many farmers and its practical utility established. Major commercial users of the product include commercial plantation farms (tea, lemon orchards, grape vineyards),” the statement said.
Sitharam said, “To end this global starvation, we need to double agricultural productivity in the next 15 years. Unless we use technology appropriately in the agricultural sector, this would be impossible.”
