How agritech startups are boosting agricultural economy by employing AI and Data Science - Expert explains

"The need of the hour is to drive a dynamic shift in agricultural operations from legacy structures to technology-driven solutions."

"Agritech companies are developing and implementing AI-based solutions to solve legacy issues, deploy logistical solutions, create market linkages."

India’s agricultural revolution, or agriculture 4.0, is being driven by the rapid adoption of deep-tech solutions across the country. The emerging agritech space has slowly but surely captured the eye of visionary entrepreneurs, investors, businesses, governments and most important of all, farmers. According to the latest Bain & Company report, the agritech sector received $1 billion dollars in funding from 2017-2020, and is projected to grow to a $30–$35 billion market by 2025. With increasing penetration of technology and rising opportunities for innovation in the agricultural ecosystem, the agritech sector is poised to transform India’s agricultural economy. Subrat Panda, Chief Technology Officer, AgNext, shares his knowledge on agritech and explains how agritech startups are boosting agricultural economy by employing AI and Data Science.

"India is a major agrarian economy, wherein over 50% of the population is still employed by agriculture. However, this sector only contributes approximately 20% to the national GDP. This represents a major efficiency gap, which underlines multiple productivity losses that have cemented over time in agri-value chains due to persisting structural and operational challenges. Consequently, this results in profitability losses, evident by the limited change in farm incomes and declining contribution of agriculture to the national workforce over the years. Technology can help to off-set this productivity and profitability losses in food value chains, and minimize agrarian stresses by reducing manual errors and providing a deeply-integrated digital framework for operational management.

The need of the hour is to drive a dynamic shift in agricultural operations from legacy structures to technology-driven solutions. Agritech startups are leveraging cutting-edge technologies to use the power of data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT) and software as a service (SaaS) to disrupt the conventional agricultural modus operandi. This is helping to solve several pain points across the traditional agriculture value chain spectrum, opening a market potential of even greater than $24 billion," says Subrat Panda.

Subrat Panda adds, "Agriculture sector is a goldmine of diverse data wealth; however, most of this data is unstructured or inaccessible. With AI-based technologies integrated with sophisticated data analytics, this data can be processed to generate critical insights to improve agriculture processes. Agritech companies are developing and implementing AI-based solutions to solve legacy issues, deploy logistical solutions, create market linkages, digitize food quality assessment, remove existing operational complexities, increase access to agri-services, improve trade profit margins and bring more trust and transparency in food value chains. Similarly, in pre-harvest space, AI-solutions are deployed for real-time crop management, pest management, monitoring soil and weather conditions, and instant alerts for quick harvest management.With the rising small landholding farms and immense diversity in Indian geographies, commodities and food value chains, flexible AI-models are being used to structure data and paint a more holistic picture of Indian agriculture."

"Today, agribusinesses are limited in terms of traceability, operational visibility in real-time, standardization in quality assessment, broad market access and lack of critical business insights for improvement. Integrated AI-tech in combination with sophisticated data analytics can help to circumvent the challenges, and minimize losses across the food value chain. With rising population and increasing food demand, the pressure on agriculture (and environmental) systems to deliver will increase. Frontier technologies can be the catalyst to not only improve the existing processes, but also create the blueprints for India’s future of agriculture," concludes Subrat Panda.

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