(Lightly edited for readability)
Speakers: Rob Strey, Philipp Olbrich, Rajeev Ahal, Michael Gomez Selvaraj, Subhra Priyadarshini
00:02 Support announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance
00:26 Subhra Priyadarshini: Hello and welcome to the Nature India podcast. You’ve been listening to this series on the use of mobile phones in various facets of life – and thank you for the great feedback you’ve been giving us. We love hearing from you so keep all the comments and critiques coming – it is always a pleasure to hear from our audience and improve ourselves based on your feedback.
Now, imagine a situation when a worried farmer in a remote village clicking a picture of his infested crop, sending it to a specialist sitting somewhere in the world and getting their advice. Or think of this farmer downloading a met department report or checking market prices of their produce, all this by just using their cell phones.
In this episode of the Nature India podcast series “Our Mobile World”, we are going to talk about how slowly and steadily these hand-held tiny devices are handy for our farmers and are completely changing the face of agriculture, in India. I am your host Subhra Priyadarshini.
Most cellphones are equipped these days with cameras and image processing capabilities that can assist farmers in detecting diseases infesting their crops, in managing pests, or in estimating their yield. Farmers as well as agriculture researchers can capture images of plant samples and use specialized applications to analyze them, also providing valuable feedback for agricultural research.
Let’s talk to Rob Strey about this. Rob is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of a smartphone app called Plantix, and he is speaking to us about how mobile phones are democratising and decentralising knowledge.
2:36 Rob Strey: In the past, we had experts and these experts came to the field visiting a farmer or didn't visit a farmer. And nowadays, all this knowledge is basically stored on a mobile phone. And farmers have 24/7 access to the information that they really need. We facilitate a farmer-to-farmer information sharing. And it's not just within a certain village, but also among greater distances. And I think by doing so we enable a proactive decision making because we have real time data. And that enables farmer to do better resource management, disease prediction, planning, right, and I think it's really a revolution that is going on.
3:12 Subhra Priyadarshini: And farmers in India obviously understand different regional languages, so this data sharing needs to take that into account.
3:20 Rob Strey: Disease identification is a major issue for farmers, not because they do not know exactly what is the disease, but they have a local name for it. And this local name comes in Hindi or Marathi or in Telugu, and it's just describing the symptoms, let's say leaf curl, or fruit rot. But if you enter fruit rot and Telugu into Google, you will end up pretty much nowhere, right? So we saw how cool would it be, if you actually have a deep neural network. You snap an image of an infected plant, we analyze this image and then play back the result in the local language to the farmer explaining that this is, for instance, a fall army worm. And these would be the active ingredients that you can use. And by doing so, throughout the last seven years, we analyzed more than 80 million images for more than 30 million farmers worldwide and give the farmers an immediate feedback telling them hey, these are the preventive measures that you can take next year to avoid this kind of disease. These would be pest or fungus specific crop protection products that you can apply now.
Initially we always recommended some very modern crop protection products that were not available in the market. And then we realized that if you really want to change something, you also have to work together with the retailers. So we also have an application out there for agricultural retailers who are mainly in rural India, where they can order products from us and by doing so we cut out middlemen. We are purchasing the stuff directly from the producers, selling it to the retailers and and giving the recommendation to a farmer saying, hey, there's a retailer just five kilometers from here. And we know he has this very specific product against a cotton pest that you are facing at this very moment.
4:56 Subhra Priyadarshini: Empowering farmers with real-time evidence-backed knowledge they can use at their fingertips must have a great spin off not just for the economy but also for the environment.
5:08 Rob Strey: To give you an example, we had a major outbreak of bacterial blight of rice in Andhra Pradesh two years ago. But bacteria blight of rice looks very similar to Rice plus, rice blast, it's a fungal disease. So these farmers went out and sprayed fungicides on a bacterial infestation that didn't have any effect, right? And so, our information came by saying see guys, this is a bacterial infestation, you do not need to spray any fungicides on it.
5:38 Subhra Priyadarshini: Philipp Olbrich is an advisor at GIZ, the German International Development Cooperation Agency, in India. He works closely with government agencies, research organizations, and universities, and he explains to us how farmers are now identifying crop pests using mobile phones.
5:59 Philipp Olbrich: An early warning system for cotton pests that we roll out in multiple states in India that uses an artificial intelligence model to analyze images taken with smartphones. So the application that you can find in the usual app stores, detects cotton pests, and then provides advice to smallholder cotton farmers on how to best deal with the infestation. The data set is openly available, and also the whole code base is openly available so that it becomes easier for others to to use and to adapt. So cotton farmers, of course, not only work in India, but across the world.
6:37 Subhra Priyadarshini: Let’s go to Rajeev Ahal, Director for natural resource management and agro ecology at GIZ. Rajeev tells us about another kind of farming – aquaculture – and how farmers are using mobile phones for sustainable aquaculture.
6:54 Rajeev Ahal: One of our projects called Safal, is working very closely with small farmers, helping them improve their small homestead tanks to a good quality, the water tanks, and then help them put in natural feed and grow fish. And they keep a record of the investment they've done through what is called farmer's field books. And this is all connected to an app. So they are actually able to monitor the input side that they have put in the expenditures so that they are able to make a good case fo,r you know, loans in the future. And this also helps them to monitor the amount of feed they're giving. And look at also how many of these farmers are actually into sustainable practices. And those are ones that can be better connected to the markets for superior rates. So a lot of innovations and trials going around on many of these aspects on environment, and ecological elements and the livelihoods that are dependent on them.
7:58 Subhra Priyadarshini: Farming apps are changing the way India does agriculture. We spoke to Michael Gomez Selvaraj, a leading digital agriculturist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and International Center of Tropical Agriculture, a bit more about this.
8:19 Michael Gomez Selvaraj: Oh, this is a good question right now, I would say this is an app world, right? Mobile phones are fundamentally transforming the agricultural landscape by democratizing access to information and technology. Farmers can now access real time weather forecasts, disease detection and market trends at the touch of a button. That's the great thing happening right now. And also, this not only empowers them to make data driven decisions, but also introduced precision agriculture. Even the most remote farming community with small holder farmers, you know, the mobile app that utilize machine learning and deep learning and artificial intelligence can help farmers to optimize irrigation schedules, identify the disease and pests through image recognition. That's what my research lab is leading, this can even manage their farm inventory.
9:21 Subhra Priyadarshini: Agriculture has traditionally been a community activity in rural hinterlands – you sow together, you reap together and you market via cooperatives. Mobile phones are helping small holding farmers retain that community aspect of agriculture.
9:40 Michael Gomez Selvaraj: So community building, you know, mobile phones can connect farmers with each other, with experts. You know, several apps are connecting farmers with experts so that they can ask several questions, they can get a pesticide, where they can get a biological control, informing about their disease, asking the questions, right? So that's a great community building I'm seeing from the app development. And also financial services, you know, some apps even offer micro loans and insurance, helping farmers navigate the financial aspect more efficiently.
10:20 Subhra Priyadarshini: Wonderful. Technology is simplifying their businesses and also answers the basic questions of farmers, ranging from concerns over yellowing of groundnut leaves or white-coloured pests on coconut leaves etc. In fact, Michael has focused particularly on the banana farmers with his Tumaini app.
10:43 Michael Gomez Selvaraj: So banana is a major crop, farmers need a lot of support to detect pests and disease. So our lab developed, in collaboration with African and Indian partners, an AI based app to easily detect banana diseases, pests and diseases. If you're a farmer, living in a remote area, you don't have access to the internet. So we develop offline models. You can run our model to get disease detection and also recommendation, in five different languages, like English, Spanish, French, Tamil, and Swahili, the African language. We are also developing a database for the government and scientists. We are mapping the GPS points around the world so that this system can lead us to early warning systems, right? So, if you have a problem in one area, you can alert the farmers: okay, here you have a lot of disease. Fusarium wilt is one of the major diseases, so you can alert the farmers and inform them ahead of time about this disease.
11:51 Subhra Priyadarshini: All these available apps and mobile technology support not just the farmers, but governments too — by recording real-time crop status data with greater accuracy, accountability and authenticity. To give you an example, every year, India’s state governments collect and report data on what farmers have sown in their fields, which requires making thousands of visits to record data on crops sown by individual farmers. There’s a mobile app called e-Peek Pahani that allows farmers to self-report crops sown across different stages in real time. It also allows the crop data to be officially recorded after due diligence.
These Innovative mobile applications perfectly complement and combine various solutions that can relieve farmers of laborious tasks. For them, the mobile phone is their plant doctor, met expert and financial guru all rolled into one.
We will hear more on various aspects of technological advancements in mobile devices that are helping other spheres of life in the upcoming episodes of this series “Our mobile world”. Stay tuned, and give us a listen at your favourite podcast platform. This is Subhra Priyadarshini signing off from the Nature India podcast.
Listen to other episodes in this series:
मोबाइल की दुनिया: विज्ञान शिक्षा और संचार हुआ आसान
Our mobile worrld: Enabling intelligent transport systems
Our mobile world: Enabling precision agriculture
Our mobile world: Tracking biodiversity
Our mobile world: How mobile phones are helping save the planet
Our mobile world: Healthcare on the go
Our mobile world: How the cell phone is changing science and research
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