Source: GEF
November 2021: As part of their continued focus to enable sustainable agriculture by leveraging technology, CropIn, the Bengaluru-based Ag-Tech major, has won the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) Climate Adaptation Innovation Challenge at COP26 UNFCCC, Glasgow, to provide digital farming intelligence solutions and increase resilience and climate adaptation of 200,000 smallholder farmers in three least developed countries in Africa over two years. The International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) has joined as a GEF partner agency for the project. This initiative will leverage CropIn’s existing footprint across 18 countries in Africa.
Climate change mitigation needs technology-enabled solutions to reach smallholder farmers without requiring them to make massive investments in infrastructure. Through this partnership, CropIn will be implementing its global Climate-Smart Advisory Platform, SmartFarm. The platform leverages AI models built on extensive agriculture knowledge graphs derived from CropIn’s trillions of farm pixel data. This solution, combined with the human efforts of 2,000 agri-entrepreneurs trained in digital technologies, will provide actionable insights and advisories using AI & ML to enable smallholder farmers across six agri-value chains – cotton, cocoa, cashew, cassava, maize, and rice.
The project includes end-to-end digitization and streamlining the farm management process for smallholder farmers, and creating a support system that provides early warnings for pest and disease outbreaks, besides advisories on climate, soil, and water management at a plot level. It will build the institutional capacity of identified lead farmers’ organizations, rural institutions, and governments for long-term asset creation and sustainability. The project aims to mitigate risks for all the agri-value chain players and improve price stability based on trust and confidence created by data and evidence.
Speaking about the partnership, Kunal Prasad, Co-founder, and COO, CropIn, said, “We are excited about this opportunity as it allows us to strengthen the farming community and make them more resilient to climate change by leveraging our solution. SmartFarm also enables farm-related businesses to respond more organically to environmental challenges and adjust their systems and processes accordingly. The platform ensures reduction in risks for all actors in the agri-value chain and increasing long term sustainability while promoting intra-engagement of actors for credit facilitation and market linkage based on trust and data.”
