Enabling Agriculture through AI & Blockchain

The agriculture sector in the country, with its complex value chain components — from the farm to the consumer’s plate — presents a huge opportunity to be rebuilt. Given India’s complexity, it is likely that myriad tailormade solutions are needed to address specific use cases. However, globally validated technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain can provide platform level solutions that solve for more general problems and enable more specific solutions to be built on them.

Sriram Raghavan — Vice President, IBM Research & CTO IBM India, believes that the two major problems faced by the agriculture sector include low productivity and lack of visibility through the supply chain. AI can play a major role in improving productivity by bringing information and insights into the supply chain. This includes disease prediction, weather forecasts, acreage estimation, soil nutrient estimation, moisture estimation and so on.

IBM, for example, is using satellite data to come up with such solutions. Using AI to fuse data from multiple satellites, the IBM platform is able to locate underperforming patches of crop at nearly the same accuracy as that of on-ground Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. For one of their clients in South East Asia, IBM was able to predict crop stress in a region due to pest/disease contamination. It then took the on-ground team several hours to just reach that spot. For big swathes of land, such platforms also simultaneously end up solving the logistics problem of constant monitoring and upkeep.

Because satellites are non-specific and can often be obstructed by clouds and weather, fusing data from multiple sources becomes crucial. With a capable AI driven fusing engine working across satellites, the accuracy of such systems is now on par with on ground sensing. With that level of accuracy available and the scale satellites provide, such platforms unlock enormous value — especially for fragmented land holdings like India, where IoT solutions are too expensive.

These satellite/aerial platforms can also be combined with IoT or smartphone picture/video to create even stronger insights. On ground sensing is also critical in validating the insights gathered from the sky, before they become reliable.

The same remote sensing capabilities that help with productivity can also generate visibility for applications like credit and insurance. Companies that would have no way of tracking risk in a remote farm in the interior of the country, can now use satellite data to monitor and manage exposure real time.

Compared to AI, Blockchain, might be a slightly longer-term solution to the visibility problem,. As per the United Nations Development Program, upwards of 35% of India’s produce is wasted. One of the reasons for this is that communication in the agriculture supply chain is broken. For instance, in the case of food recall, due to lack of information about the source of products, the only option for companies nowadays is to over-recall. This leads to increased logistics costs and a loss of sales. Furthermore, customer experience is also impacted due to unavailability. With Blockchain, however, the product can be tracked all the way from the inputs to the crop to the final packaged product. This vastly increases the efficiency of undertakings like product recalls, certificate management, wastage management, planned logistics, and quality control.

As the downstream ecosystem starts to digitize through Blockchain, another set of use cases can emerge. Produce based financing, e-receipting, warehouse management, time shifting of product sales all start to become viable. With more visibility about the upcoming produce reducing the risk for traders, they can start pricing goods more appropriately and finance companies can introduce new credit and insurance products.

Overall, agriculture in India presents one of the highest return avenues if done right. As per McKinsey, agriculture, when empowered by technology, has the potential to have an economic impact of nearly $45–80bn in the Indian economy in 2025. Moreover, there is an opportunity to learn from other economies and create the right, future ready infrastructure and solutions from the ground up. These will be the solutions that propel the major populous of India into a prosperous new decade and beyond.

Acknowledging Milind Bansia, a contributor to this article. Milind is a Kstart Fellow.