Cropin, a Bengaluru-based Agtech firm, has built the world's first agriculture intelligence cloud (Agcloud), which can provide data generated over a decade and guide agriculture stakeholders to improve crop yield and quality. "Agcloud will be formally launched next month." It can help manage 488 crops across 56 countries and 10,000 varieties," said Cropin CEO and co-founder Krishna Kumar.
About Agcloud:
The Agcould will contain information about farmers' locations and the crops they grow. It includes applications that can solve a variety of agricultural problems, primarily those involving the digital transformation. Grower information can be digitized and used to run an agronomy programme for crop selection and best practices for farmers to adopt.
"You can warn about diseases 15 days ahead of time and track risks like weather to keep the farmer up to date on crop quality and yield," he said.
It is a comprehensive solution, and if any enterprise wants to export food to Europe from Asia or Africa, it can provide traceability and compliance standards by constructing track interest solutions. "It has multiple applications for farmers, scientists, agronomists, managers, and senior people," Kumar explained, "so that the entire industry can work together to solve problems."
Cropin has built a data hub with a large amount of pipeline. It has aided in the resolution of numerous complex problems, health risks, and yield. Kumar described it as a pipeline for developing artificial intelligence-based models.
This can help make every farm more productive by ensuring profitability and sustainability by limiting the use of pesticides and fertilizers. It would contain information on 500 million farmers as well as resources on how to reach them.
"You require this platform in order to reach all of these farmers." Farmers can sign up for this. "We are B2B and work with companies like Pepsi, McCain Foods, ITC, and Syngenta," he explained. Cropin also collaborates with governments such as Punjab, Jharkhand, and Meghalaya on climate-smart agriculture, export traceability, and advisory and seed programmes.
"We collaborate with the Prime Minister's Fasal Bima Yojana to provide yield benchmarks based on artificial intelligence capability, so that crop details are recorded village-by-village." Previously, it was done manually. We are offering deep-tech solutions, including tracking commodities,” the Cropin CEO said.
In this context, the agricultural intelligence platform Agcloud is being launched, where the industry can collaborate. "They are welcome to come to collaborate and build." They can broaden it because it is a broad subject," Kumar explained.
Cropin serves 7 million farmers growing crops on 16 million acres across 56 countries, including the United States, Europe, and Brazil. This gives it the breadth and depth needed to provide a global crop knowledge graph. "This can provide comparisons such as how a potato grows in India, Europe, and Africa." "This can help build a more predictable lab," he explained.
Cropin launched the Cropin AI lab last month in order to collaborate with governments, universities, and businesses. "We want to accelerate the pace of agricultural technology to reach out to farmers in faraway areas.” the Cropin CEO said. Cropin AI Lab focuses on three issues: agricultural sciences, earth observation capability development, and AI research. "We have had great success in rolling out these models in 12 countries across 32 crops." In Nigeria, we forecasted the wheat crop by estimating the number of farmers who planted it and the yield. "We did something similar for paddy in Bangladesh," Kumar explained.
Cropin tracks 30 crops in India, predicting farms pixel by pixel. Over the next three years, it hopes to compute one-third of the world's data and provide crop intelligence based on it. "We have built the capability to layer intelligence such as crop, expected yield, and pest attack." "That's our point of view," he explained.
Almost all major crops in the world are tracked, including plantation crops, mango, citrus, soyabean, cotton, pulses, and all field crops. "Our plan is to cover 1,000 crops and 20,000 different varieties." "Because our platform is crop-independent, it can be deployed anywhere in the world," he explained.
Cropin has predicted the sugarcane yield for a South Indian sugar company, in addition to corn in the US. "These have been tested and commercialized." We've been paid, which means our accuracy is paying off," Kumar explained.
Cropin intends to track commodities as it works with traders looking for monthly intelligence. "We want to track commodities and provide insight into how a crop will perform and what position a trader should take. We will provide these intelligence inputs on a monthly basis,” the firm’s CEO said.
Cropin's AI system can predict yield in the middle of the season in addition to providing details such as the likelihood of a disease striking the crop, water stress, weather pattern, or pest attack. "There are a lot of parameters on the model of the architecture we built to predict the crop using thousands of permutations and combinations," Kumar explained.
The AI can also look at data from the previous three years, which can help banks underwrite loans or decide on loan amounts. "It can forecast crop harvest and income, and banks can use it," he explained. The Agtech firm works with over 100 businesses in 56 countries. Cropin has worked in India with Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and the Centre in the Prime Minister Fasal Bhima Yojana, in addition to Punjab, Meghalaya, and Chattisgarh.
The Bengaluru-based firm, Alliance for a Great Revolution in Africa (AGRA), operates in seven African countries, managing three million farms to help farmers improve their livelihoods through technology. It was recently given the opportunity to work with farmers in Africa on climate resilience at the CoP26 meeting in Glasgow, and it has also been picked up by the Asia Disaster Preparedness Centre to work with farmers on smart practices in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Cropin, which is part of the Centre's Agristack, has a seed company as a client that operates in 32 countries. The company, which was founded in 2010 and was the first to discuss data in agriculture, has subsidiaries in Europe and the United States. It is more of a business-to-business firm that is attempting to address various challenges that farmers face.
