Samhitha Crop Care Clinics, a precision farming advisory startup has introduced tree audits through the newly launched Citrus App for increasing the yield of citrus orchards. Earlier this year, a pilot project with the help of the Telangana Government increased 30 per cent yield for citrus farmers. The app will make monitoring more easy and effective tree audits. Farmers can identify the problems as well as forecast the general health of the trees for better yield management. Jagan Chitiprolu, CMD, Samhita Crop Care Clinics shares his views on precision farming in India with AgroSpectrum
What is the concept of Digital Tree Health Audit System (DTHAS) by Samhitha Crop Care Clinics? How will it help farmers to increase yield?
Digital Tree Health Audit System (DTHAS) is a unique method of recording, analysing and interpreting citrus tree data with the help of Samhitha Citron App. In this system, individual citrus trees are tagged indicating the serial numbers. Information regarding trees will be entered into the Citron App in different formats like text, image, audio and video. Digital Tree Health Audits give precise information of different problems affecting the trees in three categories viz. severely affected, moderately affected and slightly affected. Virtual maps can be generated based on the query depicting problems or a combination of problems along with their spatial distribution. History of individual trees will be built systematically with periodic audits at specified intervals such as quarterly, half-yearly or annually. The actual numbers of trees present in the orchard will be known.
This has the following categories:
No trees (Dead/Removed)
Slightly Sick
Moderately Sick
Severely Sick
This can give the initial picture of the Health Status of the orchard.
How Samhitha Crop Care Clinics is using IoT & AI technologies for Citrus orchards management?
A digital blueprint of the entire field is first created in Citron App; followed by a soil and water profiling exercise to understand the true nature of the field. Ground truth data is also captured through the telemetry devices which continuously monitor the field for soil moisture, soil temperature, EC and Soil pH values. The field personnel then capture high-resolution images and videos of every tree.
Samhitha’s proprietary computer vision algorithms built into the app enable faster data collection, as pests and disease detection and classification is done during the data collection stage itself. Samhitha’s AI algorithms then combine and analyse the remote sensing data and Ground truth data against a plausible more than 500 advisory solution available in Samhitha’s knowledge base.
What is a Citron App? How will it benefit farmers?
Citron App is a one-stop solution for farmers, advisors and experts for data collection, analysis and advisory. Through the app, soil, weather and plant data are monitored and analysed in real-time and through expert advisory, the resources in the agricultural field are optimised.
With DTHAS, via Citron app,
- Treatment can be limited to affected trees instead of treating the entire orchard.
- Healthy trees will be given special care to improve their productivity.
- Specific trees can be verified at any point to cross-check the data entered.
- History of individual trees will be known to assess their performance.
What is the status of precision farming in India?
Precision farming, at the first look, appears to be not for developing countries where the farmers lack capital, landholding is small and farming is still done by traditional means. However, there is a huge potential for improving agricultural production in India.
In India, agriculture supports the livelihood of over 60 per cent of the population, where 82 per cent of farmers are small or marginalised, and contributes to over 18 per cent of GDP. They have limited access to high-end technology, crop experts, and markets. Samhitha was conceptualised with a singular goal – offer precision farming advisory to farmers. We empower the agriculture experts on the ground with insights, who in turn, guide the farmers – this guidance usually starts from seed selection to planting, irrigation to fertilisers, and harvesting to soil quality
The two most critical challenges in Precision Advisory are On-Time advisory delivery and advisory at the most granular level, i.e., at an individual tree level. Samhitha provides precision advisory by relying on two types of data sets – remote sensing data and ground truth data. We capture remote sensing data through spectral imagery enabled drones and local weather stations installed in the fields. Samhitha overcomes these challenges by relying on Samhitha’s citrus knowledge base in combination with innovation in IoT & AI technologies.
Dipti Barve
dipti.barve@mmactiv.com
