Could computer technology help Indian Agriculture?

How could computers possibly help in agriculture? It can't sow seeds or harvest crops or irrigate fields. But It can definitely help the farmers and the agricultural scientist in various stages of farming.And why haven't we used computers in agriculture till date? Just one reason, farmers are not comfortable with computers. And since there's no market for such a technology, IT industry never bothered to consider that field for making any software. Countries like USA and Australia use software in their day to day farming activity. It helps them choose the right crop for their field, track the growth and accounting after harvesting. Clearly such technology is useless for Indian agriculture scenario because most farmers in India cannot effectively use it and only a few would be willing to invest in such a tool. So can computer technology really help Indian agriculture? And my answer is a big yes. It has a bigger role to play in Indian agriculture than in any other countries.

 Indian agriculture systems has a symbiosis between farmers and agriculture scientists. Scientists need input from farmers about their experience, to come up with new strategies for farmers. If we can somehow avail all the necessary data to scientist, they can for sure come up with better strategies. And if we can aid in their strategy planning by providing tools to do that, scientists will be able to compare different strategies. Having leveraged the scientists to come up various farming strategies, the next obvious step is to enforce these strategies through farmers by letting them choose the one which suits their land the best.

Imagine a software, which can predict the soil fertility of a land after harvesting a particular crop, provided we have the soil fertility information of the land and the crop to be harvested now. You can ask me what good would such a software do? Well if you can predict the fertility of the soil after a particular crop harvest, it lets you decide what's the other crops can be cultivated later and helps decide the best crop rotation policy. This would guarantee the highest yield all the time. Now the question is should this tool be given to the farmers or the scientist? 

We are not in an ideal world where everyone is a computer wizard. In such a non-ideal world, What good would it bring if given to farmers? How many farmers are out there who can efficiently use such a tool? How to make a software that is so easy to use even for farmers? 

On the other hand, if we give this tool to scientist or government officials, they can help farmers choose the best crop for their lands. Scientist can easily iterate through variety of crops and study its effect on soil. Breakthrough in finding better crop rotation strategies will happen faster. Government involvement will ease the process of communicating the information to the farmers.

Does such a tool exist? Unfortunately not. But a group of young engineers, proposed the same idea in 2008 for a competition called Imagine cup organized by Microsoft. I was one of the them and we named the software as AgriSoft. Due to lack of time we did not complete the software and soon after that everyone went on to pursue different career path. Its been more than 4 years and still the idea is fresh and untouched. So here I am trying to resume the work and accomplish the task which we failed to do four years back. I will be capturing my thoughts about the product here on this blog.

Find more information about AgriSoft below.

A video which captures the idea of AgriSoft.

EcoPal's AgriSoft

A blog covering Imagine Cup 2008 Finals 

http://www.lakshmansrikanth.com/2008/05/imagine-cup-india-sdi-national-finals.html

Low crop yield per hectare

The last post describes the basic problem with Indian agriculture which is low yield per hectare. Lets take a closer look at this issue. The data from the world bank shows that China and USA had a similar crop yield per hectare in 1995. Though US had significantly more arable land than China, its yield per hectare was just a little above China. During 1995-2009 , as the data shows USA increased their yield per hectare by around 55% whereas China could manage only 17% increase in its yield per hectare. On the other India though managed 21% increase in yield from 1995 to 2009, it doesn't make a huge difference because we have only increased our crop yield by an average of 3.6% per year in the last 50 years, compared to 7.3% increase per year by China. Yet another interesting comparison can be made with Australia who has even lesser arable land than China but still manages to produce yield as close as India's.

By combining statistics about the available arable area, yield per hectare and total production, we can easily find out the percentage of land that's effectively being used for cultivation. In 1961, India produced 87 metric tonnes of cereals using 156 million hectare of cultivatable land with an yield of 947 Kg per hectare, which means only 60% of the total cultivatable land has been used. Applying the same calculation for the year 2009 shows that, we have used only about 61% of the arable land to produce 248 metric tonnes of cereals. This can attributed towards the Indian monsoon system. But 60% of our arable land accounts to more than 90% of China's total cultivatable land. Clearly its not the monsoons which failed us.

The following questions would naturally occur in your mind at this point.

1. What was the reason behind USA's drastic improvement of yield per hectare after 1995?

2. How did China manage 7.3% per year increase in yield?

What could be the reason for our low crop yield per hectare?

Should we blame it on the fertility of the Indian soil or question the knowledge of Indian farmers about right fertilizers for their crop? Should we blame it on the weather for not supporting the crop growth or question the crop selection for a land?

It is evident that there's a huge gap between the farmers knowledge and the new advances in the agricultural science. Do you think filling this gap by some means, would increase our overall crop productivity?

GRAPHS 

What's wrong with Indian Agriculture ?

Agriculutre is the oldest known occupation of Indians. Agriculture is also the main occupation of the rural India even these days. Statistics say that India has the second largest arable land area and the largest irrigated crop area in the world. India also has the largest number of farmers. We boast as the largest producer of various crops and fruits but are we really the  best when in comes to farming? Lets compare our agricultural standards with that of Chinese.   As of 2009, India had a total of  157.9 million hectare of total arable land whereas china had only 109.9 million hectare. Another interesting fact about China is that in 1982 China possessed just about 97.75 million hectare of arable land and they increased it to  120.8 million hectare by 1986. 

Now you must be thinking that having more place to cultivate crops means higher yield. But according to the statistics, China produced 93% more cereals than India in 2009. That should post a big question in our minds, what have been doing in the name of farming in India. How did China manage 93% greater cereal production with 42% less arable land area? 

The answer lies in their yield per hectare. China managed to produce 117% more yield per hectare of cereals than India in 2009. 

Clearly, we have some catching up to do in our most famous occupation. We might be the world's top producers of various crops but clearly we are not the most efficient. So what is wrong with the Indian agricultural methods? 

That's puzzle we need to solve to increase the food production to feed the ever growing population. Its an open question to anyone who is reading this post.