Zuari FarmHub Limited and ICRISAT(International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) have signed a Memorandum of Agreement(MoA) which will bolster Zuari FarmHub’s mission of creating value for farmers and stakeholders by providing integrated agri-solutions for all farm needs.
Zuari Farm Hub, one of the leading agritech players in India announced a collaboration with ICRISAT. Under this collaboration, ICRISAT will develop data-driven digital agriculture platform that will bring all required data for the decision-making process on a single platform and the knowledge-driven tools developed on top of this data platform will provide actionable information for dissemination.
Commenting on the partnership, Mr. Madan Mohan Pandey, MD, Zuari FarmHub said, “We want to build a digital platform that is able to create value for farmers and stakeholders by providing precise advisories to farmers. Farmers face problems such as lack of awareness about advisories backed by data and the unavailability of such solutions to those who are aware. This results in very low adoption rate of data-backed digital tools by decision-makers. The advisories will be offered to the farmers on digital mediums such as Jai Kisaan app as well our network of retail stores – Jai Kisaan Junction stores across the states of Maharashtra , Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh. Through this collaboration, we aim to provide advisories customised to each farmer.”
Commenting on the Partnership, Dr Jacqueline Hughes, Director – General , ICRISAT, said that “Seeing is believing. It is important for farmers to see the positive impact of improved soil on their crop yields and income before embracing new technologies.”
ICRISAT aims to develop a digital agriculture platform with multiple components such as cloud infrastructure with capabilities of machine learning and artificial intelligence, geodatabase to store spatial and non-spatial data. The partnership will also build web and mobile applications for data collection and information dissemination, computation models for the decision support system, and reporting dashboards. These dashboards will provide actionable advisories to the farmers.”
Utilisation of precision driven advisories will help the farmers improve their revenues as well as prevent damages to the crops by taking preemptive action against diseases and pests.
“Artificial intelligence will be used extensively for pest and disease detection, and soil nutrient recommendations will consider farmers’ budgets and yield estimates,” said Dr ML Jat, Research Program Director, Resilient Farm and Food Systems, ICRISAT.
