How can precision agriculture help to optimize costs and reduce waste for seed production companies

Team Cropin
September 3, 2024
9 min read

The seed industry, the foundation of the global $5 trillion food system, is a dynamic and challenging environment. According to Mordor Intelligence, the global seed market, valued at $73 billion in 2024, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.38% and touch 99.94 billion by 2030. Rising production costs, reducing arable land, climate change, fluctuating market demands, and the increasing complexity of global operations are just a few of the challenges seed companies face. These hurdles can significantly impact profitability and sustainability. In today’s market, seed companies must prioritize cost optimization and waste reduction to remain competitive.

Key challenges faced by seed companies

Some of the top challenges faced by the seed production companies are:

Revamping seed production: precision agriculture for cost optimization

In today’s tough seed market, it’s not enough to just grow crops. It’s about increasing quality seeds sustainably to harvest profits amidst climate change disruptions. Traditional farming often falls short in addressing these challenges. That’s where precision farming comes in. Precision agriculture for cost optimization leverages data for decision-making to reduce waste.

By addressing these two core challenges, seed companies can proactively address a wide range of interconnected obstacles and improve profitability:

Data-driven decision-making to optimize input resources: The lack of real-time field data and transparency across the value chain hinders effective resource optimization.
Need to improve accuracy in yield prediction: By improving the accuracy of yield prediction, seed companies can reduce buffering, which often leads to overproduction, resulting in spoilage of perishable seeds.

Challenges faced by seed companies in cost optimization

As mentioned, the seed industry faces a host of challenges: rising costs, climate change, global complexities, and the ever-present threat of pests and diseases. These factors converge, making cost optimization a critical imperative for seed companies.

Production and supply chain disruptions, diverse regulatory landscapes, increasing costs of raw materials, labor, and energy, and many other factors exert immense pressure on seed companies’ operational costs. Climate change adds another layer of complexity, impacting seed quality, germination rates, and overall yields.

Seed companies must optimize costs across the entire value chain to ensure profitability. This involves utilizing resources efficiently, optimizing logistics, and minimizing losses due to pests and diseases.

Challenges faced by seed companies in waste reduction

Seed companies often find themselves caught in a balancing act between overproduction and underproduction. Buffering, while seemingly a safety net, can lead to significant wastage. Accurate yield estimation is critical to striking the right balance. One of the primary reasons for skewed yield estimation lies in sample collection. The random sampling process treats the entire farm as uniform, but in reality, all farms are heterogeneous. By using advanced vegetation indices, zone sampling accounts for the diverse nature of fields and redefines sampling with a scientific approach.

Powered by advanced technologies, precision farming offers a solution to both challenges. By harnessing the power of data-driven insights, seed companies can streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance profitability. In the following sections, we will explore how precision farming can help seed companies:

What is precision farming?

Precision farming, also known as Site-Specific Crop Management (SSCM), is a technology-enabled approach to transforming agriculture. By recognizing the inherent variability within fields, precision farming titers inputs for each polygon in the field, optimizing resource use and enhancing productivity. This data-driven approach boosts seed production and stands in stark contrast to traditional farming practices that treat fields uniformly.

How does it work?

Identify variations: Precision farming utilizes satellite imagery to identify your fields’ biological, physical, and chemical heterogeneity.

Variable rate application (VRA): This insight allows input resources to be applied precisely where needed, avoiding over- or under-usage.

Optimize resource use: VRA optimizes input resources like water, fertilizer, pesticides, etc., maximizing efficiency, increasing yields, and reducing costs.

How precision farming can help to optimize costs: the power of data-driven insights

Traditional farming involves uniformly applying fertilizer, water, and pesticides across the farm. Excess resources are washed away, polluting the environment and wasting valuable inputs. Precision farming leverages real-time data and analytics for informed decision-making and efficient framing practice. Cropin Intelligence harnesses the power of advanced AI modules to provide actionable insights that optimize resource allocation and maximize yield.

How cropin intelligence enables precision farming

At Cropin, we provide you with a crop health report card by harnessing the power of remote sensing by satellite imagery and our advanced AI/ML algorithms. Cropin’s AI models analyze data from satellite imagery to arrive at three crucial crop insights:

Canopy greenness: Derived from the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the overall health and vigor of your crops are categorized into five buckets. It helps identify pests and diseases in plants and nutrient problems, if any.
Canopy nitrogen uptake: Cropin’s AI/Ml models estimate how much fertilizer your crops need by examining the Normalized Difference RedEdge Index (NDRE), an indicator of chlorophyll. It is classified into five buckets.
Canopy water stress: Canopy Water Stress is derived from the LSWI index based on parameters using Cropin’s AI capabilities. It is categorized into three buckets for a specific crop in that plot at a specific location.

Cropin intelligence: your partner in precision agriculture

Cropin Intelligence offers a suite of tools empowering you with real-time insights to optimize your seed production:

Disease Early Warning System (DEWS): By overlaying weather data and historical patterns, Cropin’s advanced AI models predict the likelihood of specific diseases or pest attacks. The model analyzes datasets using a decision tree under unsupervised conditions at a crop variety level. This intelligence, offered daily, with a forecast interval of seven days, enables seed producers to gain actionable insights for proactive risk mitigation.

Crop stress alerts: Receive near real-time insights on crop stress factors like water stress, nutrient deficiencies, and pest pressure, enabling data-driven decision-making for proactive interventions to prevent crop losses.

Targeted irrigation: Cropin’s Canopy Water Stress module helps you identify areas that require targeted irrigation. This enables optimized water usage by preventing overwatering and underwatering, which in turn saves on power consumption. The feature helped identify a faulty sprinkler for a client, allowing swift intervention to prevent crop loss.

Precise weather forecasting: Access pin code-level weather forecasts to make informed decisions about strategic activities like planting, irrigation, and harvesting. This hyper-local alert allows for proactive adjustments at a granular level.

Harvest optimization: Leverage satellite imagery to identify optimal harvesting times, minimizing losses and streamlining logistics. Cropin’s near real-time insights into crop health and maturity enable companies to identify “harvest-window” with high accuracy. This insight is invaluable in allocating machinery and personnel and efficiently planning harvesting logistics, labor, and storage facilities, preventing post-harvest loss.

Supply chain optimization: Identify the nearest procurement centers for efficient transportation, reducing costs and minimizing spoilage.

Harnessing Cropin Intelligence helps you optimize costs in the following ways:

Reduce waste and increase efficiency through data-driven decision-making.
Protect your crops from diseases and pests with early warnings.
Optimize resource allocation for water, fertilizer, and other inputs.
Ensure timely and efficient harvesting for maximum seed quality.
Streamline your logistics and supply chain for reduced costs and minimized losses.

Reducing buffering to control wasted seeds

When planning seed production, it’s common to include a buffer to account for uncertainties. However, buffering across multiple stakeholders can lead to overproduction and increased costs. The key to reducing buffering lies in improving the accuracy of yield estimation. Cropin provides two options: the Smart Sampling module and Yield Estimation intelligence.

Zone sampling: the science behind precise yield estimation:

Traditional random sampling methods often fail to use precise data to estimate yield. Cropin’s Smart Sampling module addresses this challenge by leveraging advanced geospatial analysis to create intelligent zone maps. This human-technology collaboration enables agronomists to plan targeted sample collection that accounts for the unique characteristics of different areas within the farm. By doing so, Cropin ensures that the collected data is representative of the entire field, making it scientific to enhance the accuracy of yield estimation.

Hyper-tuned yield estimation models:

Cropin’s yield estimation models take this precision a step further. These models deliver high accuracy in yield predictions by incorporating Smart Sampling data alongside satellite imagery, weather forecasts, historical insights, and real-time field data. This empowers seed companies to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and production planning, minimizing waste, and optimizing profitability.

By reducing buffering, seed companies can save not only on wasted seeds but also on other resources, such as fertilizer and water, that would have otherwise been used. This results in significant cost savings and improved overall efficiency.

Conclusion

In a rapidly changing market, quickly adapting to new trends and demands is crucial. Seed companies can ensure a sustainable and profitable future by leveraging precision farming, data-driven insights, and advanced technologies. By controlling buffering, seed companies can minimize wasted seeds. With over 14 years of experience and multiple iterations, Cropin Cloud provides granular visibility across every field operation, from planting to harvesting. Our innovative solutions offer seed companies a powerful toolkit to curtail wastage, optimize costs, navigate the challenges of the modern agricultural landscape, and be more agile and responsive to market changes.