Connect with:
Thursday / September 5. 2024

logo
mobile-logo
HomePosts Tagged "Cropin Technology"
Agribusiness, Agrotech, Company News, Digital Technologies, India

Sage leverages Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) services to scale its operations in real-time as demand increases, processing massive volumes of data.

Bengaluru based Cropin Technology, the world’s most advanced AI Platform for Food and Agriculture, today announced the launch of Sage, the planet’s first real-time agri-intelligence solution powered by Google Gemini. Cropin Sage converts the world’s agricultural landscape into a proprietary grid-based map with options of 3×3 meters, 10×10 meters, or 5×5 kilometers, delivering data and intelligence with unprecedented scale, accuracy and speed. This enables CPG players, seed manufacturers, food processors, multilateral organizations, financial institutions and governments to make informed decisions based on historical, present, and future data on cultivation practices, crop, irrigation, climate, and soil. Sage enables the Cropin Cloud platform to help agri-food businesses future-proof their production and supply chains.

This innovation from Cropin fuses state-of-the-art technologies such as Generative AI, multi-layered global climate data, a global crop knowledge graph, earth observation data and advanced crop models. This synergy aims to unlock the untapped potential of crop production planning, marking a significant advancement in precision and sustainable agriculture. Beyond analysing historical data on agriculture, crops, and weather patterns, Sage leverages advanced AI tools to forecast future yields. This translates to pinpointing the ideal locations and favourable conditions for growing crops on a global map, helping to build a robust and resilient food system – a previously unimaginable feat. At launch, Cropin’s enterprise customers can deploy Sage across geographic locations, providing intelligence on 13 key crops, including wheat, rice, potato, and maize, which collectively cover almost 80% of the world’s food demand. Cropin plans to build and deploy Sage globally in a phased approach, aligned with enterprise customer requirements and demand.

Google’s Technical Prowess Meets Cropin’s AI-Powered Agri-Intelligence

Cropin Sage is a visually rich and intuitive agriculture data intelligence platform built on Google Cloud. Building and managing such a platform to support global scale is a significant challenge, given that agricultural land spans 4.8 billion hectares worldwide. This vast area is influenced by numerous factors, including weather conditions, soil quality, water availability, socio-political developments, and farmer conditions. Creating a digital twin of all these factors is incredibly complex, contributing to the slower digitization of agriculture compared to other sectors. Over the past decade, Cropin has been developing its global crop knowledge graph to handle these complex datasets effectively.

Sage leverages Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) services to scale its operations in real-time as demand increases, processing massive volumes of data. On top of GKE, Cropin Sage also uses the Gemini Flash 1.5 model to convert user queries to SQL queries, which allows Sage to generate user-friendly, grid-based data in a visually appealing platform. The data is processed by Sage into different grid sizes and aggregated at different temporal frequencies, including yearly, seasonal, monthly, weekly, and daily, based on customer requirements.

“Cropin Sage redefines the landscape of agricultural intelligence, becoming an indispensable tool for navigating uncertainty and championing climate-smart agriculture. By ‘gridifying’ land parcels with proprietary algorithms and integrating layered insights, Sage forecasts crop futures using historical data and the impacts of changing climate and weather on an unprecedented scale. This empowers informed decision-making, securing both business interests and the global food supply chain. Sage is a testament to Cropin’s relentless dedication to transforming global food systems with state-of-the-art AI solutions,” said Krishna Kumar, Founder and CEO of Cropin.

Sage leverages Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) services

Agribusiness, Agrotech, Company News, Digital Technologies, India, Start ups

The first version of akṣara will cover nine crops viz. paddy, wheat, maize, sorghum, barley, cotton, sugarcane, soybean, and millets for 5 countries in the Indian subcontinent.

 Cropin Technology, a global Agtech company enabling intelligent agriculture, announced the launch of ‘akṣara’, the sector’s first purpose-built open-source (Apache 2.0 License and with no restrictions) Micro Language Model (µ-LM) for climate smart agriculture, built on Mistral’s foundation model. ‘Akṣara’ is designed to address the problems faced by the underserved farming communities in the Global South by removing barriers to knowledge and empowering anyone in the agriculture ecosystem to build frugal and scalable AI solutions for the sector. With the goal of democratizing access to digital technologies and modernizing agriculture for the 21st century, Cropin aims to empower agricultural stakeholders, developers, and researchers to tackle global challenges like food security, climate change, resource conservation – water and soil, regenerative agriculture practices amongst others by providing access to contextual, factual and actionable information.

The first version of akṣara will cover nine crops viz. paddy, wheat, maize, sorghum, barley, cotton, sugarcane, soybean, and millets for 5 countries in the Indian subcontinent. These food crops collectively account for a substantial portion of the world’s food requirements and are the staple food for the population in the global south. Developed by Cropin and hosted on Hugging Face, akṣara is a frugal and scalable µ-LM built and fine-tuned on top of the Mistral-7B-v0.2 model. Recognizing the environmental impact of running large language models (LLMs), Cropin has meticulously compressed ‘akṣara’ into 4-bit from 16-bit by using QLoRA or Quantization and Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA). The model seems to be more relevant than GPT-4 Turbo by almost 40% on randomly selected test dataset as measured by the ROUGE or the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation scoring algorithm.The model ensures that the responses are factually relevant and brief while minimizing the compute and storage resource requirement.

It was fine-tuned with more than 5,000 high-quality question-response pairs specific to agriculture and more than 160k tokens in the context. These numbers are expected to increase as we add more crops, geographic locations and use cases. To ensure that the model remains faithful to the question, it is grounded by using techniques like RAG or Retrieval Augmented Generation by cross referencing an authoritative subject matter experts’ knowledge base.

This initiative also demonstrates Cropin’s commitment to sharing knowledge, and ethical and responsible use of AI for agriculture. The Cropin Al team used Google’s People + AI Guidebook and discussions with Google’s Responsible AI team to help guide the model’s design process. The aim was to ensure the model’s alignment with key responsible AI principles, reduce biases, promote the use of AI for sustainable agricultural practices (practices involving biological controls, soil conservation, water conservation, companion planting, preserving beneficial plants and insects), and ensure the equitable distribution of benefits across farming communities in the Global South.

This open-source initiative aims to support agronomists, agri-scientists, field staff, and extension workers and gradually extend the services to farmers in multiple languages, considering the need for local language support. Cropin believes that transforming global food systems requires equipping industry think tanks and researchers with the best decision-making tools and information. This knowledge should then be disseminated at the grassroots level.

Speaking on the announcement, Krishna Kumar, Founder & CEO, Cropin said, “In an era where Large Language Models are reshaping jobs, businesses, and customer interactions, the spotlight is now on industry-specific models trained on niche and comprehensive domain data as the ‘next big thing.’ These models can potentially transform agriculture, paving the way for a new era of tech-driven farming in a sector that has traditionally seen limited technological advancement. Domain-specific AI models for agriculture are expected to attract significant investments, offering a practical and economically viable approach to food systems transformation. Akṣara reinstates our commitment to leading the tech-driven agricultural movement in the years ahead, significantly impacting small-scale farmers’ lives”.

The first version of akṣara will cover

Agribusiness, Agrotech, Company News, Digital Technologies, India, Start ups

New initiative to support Cropin to develop a Food Security Decision Intelligence solution powered by AWS AI technologies, to track crop cultivation, production patterns, and climate change.

Bengaluru based Cropin Technology, a global Agtech leader enabling intelligent agriculture, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) India Private Limited* have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) focused on enabling Cropin to build a solution to address the pressing issue of global hunger and food insecurity. This initiative aims to help Cropin develop core data architecture, analytics, modelling, and simulation components that can aggregate global farmland data and broader climate intelligence within a single solution. The solution will provide decision intelligence to governments, development agencies, and agri-businesses, and help them ensure food security for vulnerable populations. The collaboration reinforces Cropin’s commitment to enabling predictable, traceable, and sustainable global food systems, while supporting food security efforts undertaken by AWS Impact Computing, an initiative which aims to identify potential solutions that can improve the lives of humans, other species, and natural habitats.

As part of this initiative, Cropin will develop workloads that could eventually constitute a Food Security Decision Intelligence solution powered by AWS. The solution would leverage AWS’s advanced computing capabilities, including High Performance Computing (HPC), modeling/simulation, internet of things (IoT), robotics, visual/spatial computing, and generative artificial intelligence (AI). It will combine Cropin’s deep domain expertise in agriculture, earth observation sciences, data science, AI/ML, and deep learning models to provide accurate and granular crop yield intelligence for the most important food crops worldwide, initially focusing on rice, wheat, potato and maize, as they collectively account for more than half of the world’s food requirements.

AI-Enabled Global Food Systems, a Beacon of Hope:

The AI powered solution will integrate satellite imagery with in-situ field images and remote data to improve agricultural analytics through scalable models. These models will provide both micro (plot) and macro (regional/ global) insights and will be further analysed by identifying patterns and anomalies in the production and quality of major crops across global regions. Cropin’s AI, model building, data processing, and reporting will leverage AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies; Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant; Amazon QuickSight, which offers unified business intelligence at hyperscale; and AWS’s HPC infrastructure.

AWS will explore providing technical expertise to Cropin on its advanced computer services (HPC, ML/ Gen AI, IoT, geospatial), as well as industry insights from its agriculture, and sustainability specialists, to power Cropin’s platform. The insights generated through the workloads will be integrated into Cropin’s open-source dashboard. They can be disseminated via a WhatsApp or an SMS-based alerting system for stakeholders, including farmers, field officers, governments, development agencies, and agribusinesses. AWS will further support Cropin by exploring collaboration opportunities with research organisations and academic institutions such as Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI), to drive research and development in food security, climate-resilient agriculture, and food sustainability.

Speaking on the announcement, Krishna Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, Cropin said, “We can analyse and identify changes in cultivation patterns at a country scale, spanning from sowing to harvesting. This includes examining weather parameters, moisture availability, and disease outbreaks at scale to understand their impact on crop health and yield. These insights are crucial for policymakers, enabling them to make informed decisions to combat hunger and ensure food security. Our collaboration with AWS marks a significant step towards building a global real-time decision intelligence solution, which will provide insights into several aspects of food security – agriculture, climate, trade, and supply chain – in one dashboard. This engagement with AWS helps us showcase the use of technology, data, and AI to solve these pressing issues.”

Shalini Kapoor, Director and Chief Technologist, AWS India Private Limited, said, “The world population is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, increasing food production requirements on the arable land available today. At AWS, we are inspired to work with customers to solve the most complex challenges at scale. Our work with Cropin showcases the power of advanced compute capabilities on the cloud to drive social and environmental impact. AWS’s generative AI, simulation, and data analytics technologies can help organisations like Cropin surface actionable and relevant insights from diverse data sets and scale their solution globally to empower decision makers to reduce food insecurity.”

New initiative to support Cropin to develop

Agrotech, Company News, Sustainability

The B Corp movement is a global movement of people using business as a force for good

Cropin Technology, the global Agtech leader enabling intelligent agriculture announced that it has become a Certified B Corporation (B Corp) for its unwavering commitment to social and environmental progress and redefining sustainable food systems worldwide. The certification is the result of a meticulous assessment of Cropin’s decade-long impact on transforming the agriculture landscape, empowering farmers, and reshaping agribusiness models through its cutting-edge Agtech solutions. The B Corp movement is a global movement of people using business as a Force for Good.

As a prominent B Corp in the Agtech industry, Cropin stands among businesses at the forefront of a global shift for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy. The B Corp certification highlights its commitment to excellence across a spectrum of vital areas – governance, employee well-being, community/customer empowerment, environmental impact and a legal commitment to stakeholder governance. It reaffirms Cropin’s substantial strides in making agriculture predictable, traceable, and inherently sustainable, bringing value to all stakeholders in the food systems. This encompasses the empowerment of farmers, contributing to substantial progress in the lives of underserved communities. This certification further underscores Cropin’s significant role in leading the global ‘Ag-intelligence’ movement by;

●      Cropin positively impacts millions worldwide, including women farmers in emerging markets

●      Agri-climate tech solutions deployed  across 103 countries

●      Introduced the world’s first industry cloud for agriculture, driven by a Crop Knowledge Graph encompassing 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties

●      Built intelligence over 200 million acres of farmland

●      Reimagining agriculture through digitalisation, data, and intelligence for agribusinesses, development agencies, and government stakeholders

The B Corp movement is a global