With 500 million smallholder farming households representing the 2.5 billion people who depend on agricultural production for their livelihoods, the global sector has long since proven itself to be worth great economic value. However, there is an immediate need to democratise agriculture and equip farmers with solutions that can aid them in day-to-day requirements, such as improving crop health, increasing yield and profitability, and proactively addressing and managing the risks in produce. According to a 2020 Mckinsey report titled ‘Agriculture’s connected future: how technology can yield new growth’, digitisation and connectivity are two key factors that will galvanise this sleeping giant and unlock even greater economic value in the next decade.
This is what makes Cropin – a global agtech company – such a transformative force in the agritech sector. Founded in 2010, this company has built the world’s first purpose-built industry cloud for agriculture – Cropin Cloud. Through key partnerships with tech giants such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Intel, Cropin has created groundbreaking tech solutions for global agriculture.
AWS has always been committed to helping accelerate innovation and create positive impact through technology, including in domains such as agriculture. Our customers around the globe in agriculture are using advanced capabilities like machine learning (ML) and internet of things (IoT) offered in the cloud, to gain timely insights on a range of factors such as crop diseases, soil conditions, and climate change. Acting on these insights leads to higher crop productivity, a more resilient food supply chain, better preservation of resources, and sustained progress,” said Pankaj Gupta, Leader – Healthcare, Enterprises and Government services, AWS India and South Asia.
Their suite of solutions empowers various stakeholders in the agri-ecocystem to create or adopt digital strategies into their agricultural operations. Today, Cropin has partnered with over 250+ B2B customers and digitised 16 million acres of farmland, improving the livelihoods of more than 7 million farmers.
Tackling the planet’s greatest challenge head-on
Our planet is facing one of the greatest challenges in the history of human civilisation. Estimates suggest that the world population will reach a staggering 10 billion by 2050, which will require food production to double in the next 2-3 decades. However, with the effects of climate change directly impeding the increase of food production and geo-political movements disrupting global and regional food supply chains, the agricultural sector has its work cut out for the coming decades.
The sector has shown that is up for this challenge, worldwide (particularly developed markets like India) have evolved by harnessing the power of tech. Crop genetics and farm mechanisation being some of the most effective innovations in the sector. Despite these advancements, agriculture continues to be the least digitised segment worldwide. Of particular concern in developing countries is the lack of nationwide connectivity, infrastructure, and lack of awareness among the farming community.
Ushering new-age technology into farming with Intel and AWS
Cropin was built on the vision of maximising per acre value for every stakeholder in the agri-value chain. Cropin has leveraged top-of-the-line technology, such as Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), data science, satellite imagery and remote sensing, to combat some of the biggest challenges in the ecosystem. These challenges include helping farmers respond to climate change, reducing crop loss from disease and pest infestations at scale, aiding in building sustainable livelihoods for farming community, deploying climate smart agriculture practices to combat climate change, tracing and monitoring food quality from farm to fork and enabling banks, insurance and financial institutions to assess the lending/crop-insurance opportunity and risk associated with a farmer/plot.
The company’s suite of solutions democratises digitisation and predictive intelligence across all stakeholders in the agri-ecosystem. Arming each stakeholder with the knowledge to make effective decisions on increasing farming efficiency, scaling productivity, proactively dealing with risk, driving sustainability and handling climate change. This has allowed Cropin to be a key player in the global category and transform the lives of farmers worldwide.
Strategic engagements with customers have allowed Cropin’s solutions to branch out to different countries across the globe. Partnerships with agri-businesses, governments, and developmental agencies have enabled Cropin to solve planet-scale challenges . Cropin Cloud is enriched with a deep and wide crop knowledge graph of 500+ crops and 10, 000+ crop varieties in 92 countries.
Cropin was able to build a secure and scalable Intelligent Agriculture Cloud using more than 12 years of experience in the agri industry, along with a geographically agnostic-cloud service provider like AWS. On the collaboration between AWS, Intel and Cropin, Pankaj said “AWS is excited and proud to be collaborating with Cropin and Intel to build the first scalable and secure Intelligent Agriculture Cloud. We are confident that the solution will help Cropin to scale services rapidly to onboard thousands of farmers to the platform, creating new revenue streams for growers who use technology and promoting long-term sustainability strategies”.
Commenting on Intel’s partnership with Cropin, Akanksha Bilani, Regional Alliance Head – Team AWS, APAC & Japan, said, “Technological advances such as AI and cloud computing for weather forecasting, soil fertility evaluation, precision farming, and fertilisers and pesticide information can boost the agricultural economy. Through the collective power of technologies like the 3.1GHz Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform, Intel is collaborating with Cropin and AWS to help the agriculture ecosystem develop new capabilities. Intel and AWS are collaborating to eliminate the uncertainties associated with farming and make it predictable, traceable, and sustainable.”
Success Stories
Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa – The AGRA Project
Agriculture is key to Africa’s economic growth. However, the lack of resilient, flexible, and adaptive agricultural production systems leave the continent vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. Cropin and the Alliance for Green Revolution joined hands for a project that focussed on climate adaptation and resilience. Their efforts have brought much-needed relief to smallholder farmers in Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The project was deployed in 2020 and has, till date, impacted and improved the lives of 3 million smallholder farmers through the scaling of digital solutions, adapting them to suit local conditions and offering farmers advisory services, capacity building training, and knowledge management. You can read about this fascinating case study here.
Flour Milling Association of Nigeria (FMAN) & National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) – Nigeria
This deployment deals with the Geospatial AI for Monitoring Food Production and understanding Socio-political situations on Food Security. In order to grow Nigeria’s wheat value chain, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (in association with Flour Milling Association of Nigeria (FMAN) & National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) – Nigeria) has put in place a program, i.e. – national and systematic data collection on where and how wheat is grown across the country. Cropin leveraged its global crop data, deep agronomy knowledge and AI expertise to deploy a robust and reliable framework to predict and forecast the yield/production of wheat crop for 13 states (northern part) of Nigeria. This project enabled policymakers to streamline wheat production in the country, as Nigeria has the potential to be self-sufficient in this area.
