A truly AI-in-the-loop farming companion for agronomy decision-makers and the ultimate digital twin for stakeholders in the global food system
Bengaluru, July 17, 2024: Cropin Technology, the world’s most advanced AI Platform for Food and Agriculture, today announced the launch of Sage, the planet’s first real-time agri-intelligence solution powered by Google Gemini. Cropin Sage converts the world’s agricultural landscape into a proprietary grid-based map with options of 3×3 meters, 10×10 meters, or 5×5 kilometers, delivering data and intelligence with unprecedented scale, accuracy and speed. This enables CPG players, seed manufacturers, food processors, multilateral organizations, financial institutions and governments to make informed decisions based on historical, present, and future data on cultivation practices, crop, irrigation, climate, and soil. Sage enables the Cropin Cloud platform to help agri-food businesses future-proof their production and supply chains.
This innovation from Cropin fuses state-of-the-art technologies such as Generative AI, multi-layered global climate data, a global crop knowledge graph, earth observation data and advanced crop models. This synergy aims to unlock the untapped potential of crop production planning, marking a significant advancement in precision and sustainable agriculture. Beyond analyzing historical data on agriculture, crops, and weather patterns, Sage leverages advanced AI tools to forecast future yields. This translates to pinpointing the ideal locations and favorable conditions for growing crops on a global map, helping to build a robust and resilient food system – a previously unimaginable feat. At launch, Cropin’s enterprise customers can deploy Sage across geographic locations, providing intelligence on 13 key crops, including wheat, rice, potato, and maize, which collectively cover almost 80% of the world’s food demand. Cropin plans to build and deploy Sage globally in a phased approach, aligned with enterprise customer requirements and demand.
Unveiling the world’s first on-demand global agri-food map
One of the biggest hurdles facing agri-food sectors today is a lack of transparent visibility into the global agricultural landscape. Sage tackles this challenge head-on by introducing a dynamic on-demand global food and agriculture cultivation map for regions and crops of interest. Each grid holds valuable information and insights to guide food production planning in the short, medium, and long term. It seamlessly navigates through a vast universe of proprietary and public datasets, linking grids and crops from around the world and integrating and analyzing them to deliver comprehensive insights. By condensing months of data processing and analysis into seconds, Sage transforms complex information into actionable insights with an intuitive user interface featuring charts, data, graphs, and infographics using GenAI capabilities.
Despite its critical role in human civilization, agriculture and food systems often lack robust digital infrastructure. Traditionally, players haven’t had access to the kind of agri-intelligence needed to make informed decisions. Cropin’s Sage changes this game. It allows decision-makers to ask critical questions about crop performance and lifecycle in their native language, revealing insights on crop productivity, climate, practices, soil, and more. They can explore a region’s historical crop performance, understand weather parameters influencing specific crops, and recommend crop suitability based on changing climate conditions for optimal yield. It delivers highly granular, regional-level insights, eliminating guesswork from food production planning.
Google’s technical prowess meets cropin’s AI-powered agri-intelligence
Cropin Sage is a visually rich and intuitive agriculture data intelligence platform built on Google Cloud. Building and managing such a platform to support global scale is a significant challenge, given that agricultural land spans 4.8 billion hectares worldwide. This vast area is influenced by numerous factors, including weather conditions, soil quality, water availability, socio-political developments, and farmer conditions. Creating a digital twin of all these factors is incredibly complex, contributing to the slower digitization of agriculture compared to other sectors. Over the past decade, Cropin has been developing its global crop knowledge graph to handle these complex datasets effectively.
Sage leverages Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) services to scale its operations in real-time as demand increases, processing massive volumes of data. On top of GKE, Cropin Sage also uses the Gemini Flash 1.5 model to convert user queries to SQL queries, which allows Sage to generate user-friendly, grid-based data in a visually appealing platform. The data is processed by Sage into different grid sizes and aggregated at different temporal frequencies, including yearly, seasonal, monthly, weekly, and daily, based on customer requirements.
Future-proofing global food production and supply chains in a climate impacted planet
Global food systems are facing significant challenges, with many adverse factors severely impacting farmers’ ability to produce enough food. This is evident with the cocoa crisis affecting chocolate makers. Cropin Sage serves as a powerful shield against these threats by empowering the global food systems with the necessary intelligence to navigate these challenges. If a crop underperforms in a given season and this trend is likely to continue, Sage provides comprehensive insights that help agronomists to address the issues in almost real-time. Such prompt decision-making enables chocolate and other food manufacturers to take corrective measures and secure their supply chains.
Global food security under threat
The world can survive with seasonal fluctuations in the availability of commodities like cocoa, coffee, bananas, and oranges, despite these crises impacting the performance of businesses in these sectors. However, shortages of staple crops and cereals such as wheat, rice, maize, and potatoes pose a far more severe threat. The COVID pandemic, geopolitical tensions, and harvest shortages have already caused supply disruptions in these commodities, serving as a warning that dependence on certain regions for staple crops is risky. Europe, for instance, cannot rely on just a few regions for its wheat supply, nor can the world depend solely on Asia for rice. Sage provides the necessary intelligence for countries and agri-food stakeholders to build robust domestic cultivation, thus safeguarding food security for their citizens.
“Cropin Sage redefines the landscape of agricultural intelligence, becoming an indispensable tool for navigating uncertainty and championing climate-smart agriculture. By ‘gridifying’ land parcels with proprietary algorithms and integrating layered insights, Sage forecasts crop futures using historical data and the impacts of changing climate and weather on an unprecedented scale. This empowers informed decision-making, securing both business interests and the global food supply chain. Sage is a testament to Cropin’s relentless dedication to transforming global food systems with state-of-the-art AI solutions,” said Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO of Cropin.
About Cropin
Founded in 2010, Cropin is the world’s most advanced AI Platform for Food and Agriculture. Cropin Cloud, the world’s first industry cloud for agriculture, empowers stakeholders to make informed decisions that enhance farming efficiency, productivity, and sustainability through digital technologies and predictive intelligence. Cropin is not merely a participant in the ‘Ag-intelligence’ movement; we are spearheading it through strategic partnerships with over 250 B2B customers. Cropin has digitized 30 million acres of farmlands, positively impacting over 7 million farmers worldwide. Our crop knowledge graph, spanning 350 crops and 10,000 varieties in 103 countries, powers the Cropin Cloud in providing predictive intelligence for over 200 million acres of farmland globally. Cropin is at the forefront of uniting agribusinesses, development agencies, international organizations, and governments in leveraging Agtech systems to transform global food systems and attain climate goals.
Media Contact:
- Dileep M
- +91 98863 69634
- dileep.m@cropin.com
