A group of students from IIT Guwahati, NIT Silchar, and Dibrugarh University in Assam have collaboratively developed a multi-lingual smartphone application named “AgSpeak” for farmers to smartly manage their farms and remotely monitor distress activities.
The application has been developed with the goal of optimizing the in-farm productivity through Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabling the farmers in making decisions and managing farm activities through their smartphone or computer.
Driven by hyper-local crop data coming from satellite and smart IoT devices, AgSpeak considers up to 20 local crop parameters which are key indicators of their health like rainfall, sunlight hours, soil health status, among others, to alert farmers about probable crop threats in advance and suggest best practices to tackle the incoming threat, hence optimizing resources used and maximizing productivity,” Manik Mittal, one of the co-founders at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati said.
“The app along with the internet of things hardware has been tested for the past three months with 500 farmers and two tea estates. Some of the major breakthroughs by the algorithm were a precise prediction of blight in potato and tea mosquito bugs, along with water stress in winter crops.
Another IIT Guwahati student Akash Sharma, said, nearly 250 farmers have already been provided hands-on training in utilizing the full potential of the app.
“However, the user-friendliness and multilingual features of the app make it extremely easy for farmers to use and seldom require training. The mobile app is completely free for general small farmers. There are in-app purchases like soil testing and agro-doctor consultation,” Sharma said.
“Besides this, the IoT devices can be rented on monthly or yearly purposes by commercial farms to further enhance precision farm management. It has been tested with many farmers and its practical utility established,” he added.
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