Agritech platform BigHaat has launched a mobile application in Kannada targeting the farming community in Karnataka. This app will enable farmers to interact in their native language and have access to knowledge and solutions, in a simplified manner, for their farming needs.
Shivayogi C Kalasad, Karnataka agriculture secretary, has launched the BigHaat Kannada app in the presence of Sateesh Nukala, CEO and Co-founder of BigHaat.
Kalasad said agriculture in Karnataka provides livelihood to over 13 million farmers. The State has a total of 114.54 lakh hectares of land available for cultivation, which constitutes 64.6 per cent of the total geographical area. This app will help farmers make informed decisions on cultivation, he said.
Farmers community platform
BigHaat said the application serves as a “farmers’ community platform” for them to interact among themselves to democratise knowledge. The user interaction has been kept simple and helps farmers by enabling crop configuration and profiling based on acreage, geolocation, and soil type. It also offers crop advisory in Kannada and an artificial intelligence-based real-time solution with a high impact on risk mitigation, said Nukala. Further, the app also gives product recommendations based on transactional and behavioural data.
“Since 86 per cent of India’s farmers belong to the small and marginal category, communicating with the farmers for their localised needs in their own language helps them in faster decision-making. The app in Kannada was developed to empower the farmers in the state with enriched data, thus fulfilling their pre-harvest to post-harvest needs,”Nukala said.
“While 65 per cent of the land area is under cultivation in the state, the yield has not been at par with neighbouring States. This could be due to various factors, and we feel farmer who has the right information can increase the yield substantially, contributing to the overall per capita yield of the State. BigHaat, with its advanced technology and data insights, can help provide solutions to the farming community in the language of their choice,” Nukala added.