Context:

Microsoft signed MoU with the agriculture ministry’s AgriStack in 100 villages in six Indian
states to “develop farmer interface for smart and well-organized agriculture” aimed at
improving efficiency and reducing waste.

Agristack

• The Agristack digital infrastructure will collect details of farmers and their landholdings, what crops they cultivate, the climatic factors at play in specific geographies, and average output, before linking these details to farmers’ individual Aadhaar biometric IDs.
• The database will ally a farmer’s Aadhaar ID with the location of his/her farm holdings while also accounting for their location, size, and dimensions towards determining the level of output that can be expected, and the amount of income that can be derived.
• This data may be available with local governing bodies like Panchayats while GPS technology can be used to further corroborate government data.

Digital technologies in agriculture

• Internet of Things (IoT): world agriculture the disrupting unstructured and structured data to provide insights into food production.
• Data driven farming: by analyzing and correlating information about weather, types of seeds, soil quality, probability of diseases, historical data, etc farmers will make more informed decisions.

• Chatbots: AI-powered chatbots can also be leveraged by the agriculture sector.