Bengaluru-based agtech firm Cropin has built the world’s first agriculture intelligence cloud (Agcloud) which can provide data generated for over a decade and guide stakeholders in the agriculture sector to get better crop yield and quality.

“We will formally launch Agcloud next month. It can help manage 488 crops in 56 countries spanning 10,000 varieties,” said Cropin Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and co-founder Krishna Kumar.

Multiple applications

The Agcould will have details of farmers’ location and the crops they cultivate. It  include applications that can solve various agricultural problems, mainly with regard to digital transformation. Details of growers can digitised and based on which agronomy programme can be run for crop selection and best practices for adoption for farmers. 

“You can alert diseases 15 days in advance and track risks like weather to update the farmer to meet the crop quality and yield,” he said. 

It is a comprehensive solution and if any enterprise is looking for exporting to Europe by growing food in Asia or Africa it can provide traceability and compliance norms by building the track interest solutions. ”It has multiple application for farmers, scientists, agronomists, managers and senior people, so that the whole industry can work together to solve problem,” Kumar said.

Data hub

Cropin has created a data hub where a lot of pipeline has been built. It has helped solve many complex problems, health risks and yield. Kumar said it is a pipeline where artificial intelligence-based models can be built. 

This can help make every farm productive, by ensuring profitability for them as well as sustainability by controlling excess use of pesticides and fertilisers. It would have details of 500 million farmers and provide resources on how to reach them. 

“You need this platform to reach all these farmers. Farmers can be registered on this. We are B2B and work with enterprises such as Pepsi, McCain Foods, ITC and Syngenta,” he said 

Cropin also works with governments such as Punjab, Jharkhand and Meghalaya on climate-smart agriculture or traceability for exports or advisory or seed programme.

“We work with the Prime Minister’s Fasal Bhima Yojana to give them yield benchmark based on artificial intelligence capability so that details of crops village-wise are recorded . Earlier, it was done manually. We are offering deep-tech solutions, including tracking commodities,” the Cropin CEO said. 

AI Lab

It is in this background that the agricultural intelligence platform Agcloud is being launched where the industry could come and collaborate. “They can come collaborate and build . They can extend it since it is a vast subject,” Kumar said 

Cropin, which is operating in 56 countries including the US, Europe and Brazil, serves 7 million farmers growing crops on 16 million acres. This provides it the breadth and depth to provide a world crop knowledge graph. “This can provide comparison like how potato grows in India versus Europe versus Africa. This can help build a predictable lab,” he said.

It was for this that Cropin came up with Cropin AI lab last month in which it will partner with governments, universities and enterprises. “We want to accelerate the pace of agricultural technology to reach out to farmers in faraway areas.” the Cropin CEO said.

Crop prediction

Cropin AI Lab deals with three issues—agri sciences,  building capability for earth observation and AI research. “We have been successful in rolling out these models in 12 countries covering 32 crops. In Nigeria, we predicted the wheat crop by saying how many farmers have planted it and the yield. We did a similar thing for paddy in Bangladesh,” Kumar said. 

In India, Cropin tracks 30 crops predicting farms pixel by pixel. Over the next three years, it wants to compute one-third of the planet data in the world and provide crop intelligence on that. “We have built the capability to layer the intelligence like which crop, yield expected, and what pest will attack. That’s our vision perspective,” he said. 

The tracking covers almost all major crops in the world such as plantation crops, mango, citrus, soyabean, cotton, pulses and all field crops.  “Our idea is to cover 1,000 crops and 20,000 varieties. Since our platform is crop agnostic it can be deployed anywhere in the world,” he said. 

Cropin has predicted the sugarcane yield for a South India-based sugar firm besides corn in the US. “These have been tested and commercially rolled out. We have got paid, means our accuracy is paying well,” Kumar said. 

Tracking commodities

Cropin is planning to track commodities as it works with traders, who are seeking monthly intelligence. “We want to track commodities and provide intelligence on how a crop will perform and what position a trader has to take. We will provide these intelligence inputs on a monthly basis,” the firm’s CEO said. 

Cropin’s AI system can help predict the yield in the middle of the season besides providing details such as likelihood of a disease striking the crop or water stress or weather pattern or chances of pest attack. “There are a bunch of parameters on the model of the architecture we have built using thousands of permutations and combinations to predict the crop,” Kumar said. 

The  AI can also look at the data of the past three years that can be useful for banks to underwrite loans or decide on the quantum of loan. “It can forecast harvest and income of a crop and banks can avail of it,” he said.  

The agtech firm is working with over 100 enterprises in 56 countries. In India, besides Punjab, Meghalaya and Chattisgarh, Cropin has worked with Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, besides, with the Centre in the Prime Minister Fasal Bhima Yojana. 

Under Alliance for a Great Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Bengaluru-based firm is operating in 7 countries managing three million farms to help improve the growers livelihood using technology. 

Recently at CoP26 meet at Glasgow, it was given the opportunity to work with farmers in Africa on climate resilience, while it has also been picked up to work in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh by the Asia Disaster Preparedness Centre to support farmers on smart practices. 

Cropin, which is part of the Agristack being developed by the Centre, has a seed firm as a client which is operating in 32 countries. The firm, launched in 2010 and the first to talk about data in agriculture, has subsidiaries in Europe and the US. It is more of a business-to-business firm in trying to tackle various challenges faced by farmers.