Agriculture is the world's largest industry. It is the primary source of livelihood for more than one billion people, who are the frontline workers in the world's efforts towards eliminating hunger and achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2. As the world population grows, the pressure on food producers grows to increase production to meet future food needs to achieve zero hunger.
The most vital and fundamental input to enhance agriculture is seed production. The impact of other inputs in the production process depends on the seed quality. This makes it essential to maintain the quality and purity of seeds so that when other agricultural input resources are managed efficiently, yield per acre is maximized.
To ensure the integrity of the seed from the breeder to the grower, traceability across all stages of production is vital. Digitization holds immense potential as it enables end-to-end traceability of the seed value chain.
Rapid advances have been made in the development of quality seeds over the past few decades. But the adoption of modern agricultural practices by farmers has not been up to the mark. This is attributed to farmers being unaware of innovations happening in the agricultural sector, especially in view of the slow rate of information dissemination. This issue can be resolved through digitalization of agriculture.
An internal survey conducted by Cropin revealed that 90% of seed companies surveyed saw a need to overhaul their farmer engagement practices, and 54% of respondents agreed that building farmer trust and credibility is one of the key benefits of digitizing the end-to-end seed business value chain.
Seed companies can overhaul farmer engagement with digitization and empower farmers. Farm digitization solution like Cropin Grow from Cropin Cloud help enterprises establish secure two-way communication with farmers. It provides knowledge on scientific Package of Practices specific for a seed variety, provides farmers with linkages across the entire system, and improves their visibility to all stakeholders in agri-ecosystem.
Another critical area for farmer empowerment is financial inclusion of smallholder farmers. Cropin's time-tested solutions have enabled governments and development agencies drive financial security among smallholder farmers.
Meeting the needs of women farmers and smallholders is crucial to ensure that there will be enough to feed tomorrow's population. Cropin's survey revealed that training programs targeting women is an area that is lagging, with only 12 of 67 companies surveyed providing these across all regions. There is an opportunity for nonprofits and corporate social responsibility initiatives of organizations to bridge the gap. Training women farmers empowers them to build market-led enterprises and take on community leadership roles.
When field and farm management is done manually, data collection is error-prone and there is no transparency of farming operations or field officer productivity. Technology-enabled smart farm management through drones in agriculture, remote sensors, connected devices and robots collect and securely store digital data.
Agriculture cloud leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data, and advanced computing techniques with data on weather, soil fertility, water tables for irrigation systems, and growth patterns to compute trends and provide actionable and relevant insights for responsive risk mitigation. This data mining also helps predict genes and traits to zero in on the best seeds suited for a specific climate and location.
Improve farmer engagement with Cropin Cloud apps
Cropin Cloud, the world's first purpose-built industry cloud for agriculture, brings together agriculture digitization applications; ready-to-use, powerful data sources; and AI-enabled agri-intelligence into an integrated easy-to-deploy-and-use platform. The platform leverages its pioneering experience in studying, learning, and structuring data generated by the global agri-ecosystem to improve farmer engagement through easy-to-access mobile phones.
Cropin Grow on Cropin Apps is a seamless, simple user interface that supports multiple languages and multi-channel communication. This complete farm ERP and CRM suite helps configure the best package of practices for each crop variety, provides alerts, and tracks adherence so that the right practices are followed at the right time to ensure high-quality produce compliant with international standards and regulations. Push notifications about smart farming agri-inputs and market and financial services are the enablement benefits farmers gain by onboarding on the platform.
Dashboard view in Cropin Grow
The globally field-tested intelligent solutions on Cropin Cloud can help agri-businesses with advisories manage risk and plan for predictable growth. Seed companies can digitize and capture agri-data from farm-to-fork with Cropin Apps. The application platform comprises an integrated portfolio of highly customizable web solutions and mobile apps that businesses can pick and choose.
End-to-end tracking, managing, and remote farm monitoring of each step of farm operation (from input to execution) on one platform improves efficiency, traceability, and output predictability leading to sustainable farming practices. Combining pre-season and historical farm data and in-season data captured in real-time can help create accurate and insightful reports to improve processes and performance.
Managing field and farms with innovative agriculture cloud platform
Cropin Data Hub eases management and access of large volume and variety of farming management and advisory data coming in from structured and unstructured sources on and off the field. It resolves this by structuring of agri-data through an agri-object model. Its advanced prebuilt data frameworks are structured to solve challenging problems in remote farm monitoring, such as segmentation of land use, boundary detection of farm plots, cloud-free satellite imagery, and so on.
Cropin Data Hub can seamlessly interface with a range of agri-data sources; from IoT devices and drones, in-field farm management apps and mechanization data, from farming equipment to weather advisory sources and remote sensing satellite information. The data so collated is analyzed by AI/ML models on the cloud platform to provide suitable insights and advisories that help mitigate risks. Agri-businesses and seed companies can now access clean, contextualized, and structured data from multiple sources for correlation and analysis at scale to improve their business metrics.
Customizable for the field management team and farmers, Cropin Apps allows role-based configurability and access control. It records all in-field activities and provides easy access to operational dashboards to plot and monitor farms remotely, increasing transparency of manual operations. Custom forms help with data collection, streamline farmer engagement, and enable verifiable logging and reporting of farmer activities. Warning alerts and advisories offered by Cropin Cloud allow for timely risk mitigation. In this way, intelligent Cropin Cloud can transform field and farm management for seed production companies.
