Fish and shrimp farming startup Aquaconnect has launched “Pond Diary”, a first of its kind feature to help farmers in maintaining a log of their farm activities on the Aquaconnect application.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies will enable Aquaconnect to decode the collective intelligence and issue a mass advisory to all farmers. A simple innovation coupled with a smart chatbot will enable 44,000 farmers to manage their farms better.
The “Pond Dairy” feature captures farmers’ culture production data starting from seeds stocked, water quality reports, daily feed quantity, weekly growth, animal signs, expense bills, farm infrastructure details, license, government records and more. Pond Diary is the first step towards capturing pond production data in a simple way and bringing precision in aqua farming with collective intelligence.
The Pond Diary feature has a WhatsApp like interface, which is very user friendly and familiar with the farmers.
“Aqua Farmers are deprived of simple technology tools that can make a big impact on their productivity and efficiency. We are very confident about the launch of the new feature, and it helps in solving the woes of the farmers which result in low productivity. We will encourage farmers to adopt the tool and educate them digitally. And we shall be having manual remote intervention in the form of an integrated chatbot,” Rajamanohar Somasundaram, Founder and CEO, Aquaconnect.
The data-driven approach helps farmers to adopt sustainable farming practices in every culture operation and improves productivity and better disease management with higher profits. Through this automated advisory, farmers are able to access technical advisory for their pond instantly and more conveniently which further reduces dependency on technicians for any farm support, he said.
The company will also introduce interactivity, notification reminders and collaboration to its new feature in the next three months. The data will also help farmers to access formal finance from banks, have better risk mitigation with insurance and access to market linkage for their harvest produce.