Artificial Intelligence rescues cotton farmers
Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s tool runs on a basic smartphone to classify and count pests based on images and provides relevant advisory
Hyderabad: Venkatesh, a cotton farmer from Ranga Reddy District of Telangana, didn’t know what pests were infesting his crop not until he caught them in the trap. It was the first time he sprayed anything for these pests. His one-acre plot, which typically yields 10 quintals of cotton, gave out just five in 2019. He wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. It is not until a year later when he used Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s (Wadhwani AI’s) pest management solution did he realise that he had faced an attack by the Pink Bollworm. This season his yield was 13.5 quintals.
Wadhwani AI, an independent not-for-profit research institute focused on developing artificial intelligence (AI)-based applications, is helping thousands of cotton farmers like Venkatesh in Telangana and other States to increase crop yield by early detection of pests and rationalising the pesticide usage.
The organisation has signed an MoU with the Telangana government, which has declared 2020 as the year of AI and is carrying out pilot studies involving 4,000 farmers in Ranga Reddy District and 3,500 farmers in Adilabad District in collaboration with the agriculture department. A dashboard has been provided to the department to see if the crops have infestation and identify severity.
Wadhwani AI lab set up in Mumbai University has been working with various government departments and farmer communities pan-India by addressing major pain points in agriculture besides bringing disruptive use cases in other sectors such as public health, smart cities, financial inclusion and education.
Rajesh Jain, senior director-Programs, Wadhwani AI, told Telangana Today, “We looked at the critical issue of farmer suicides in India and decided to trace a cotton farmer’s journey to identify the challenges in increasing crop yield and doubling income for smallholder farmers.”
In 2017, cotton farmers in States such as Telangana, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh experienced 70 per cent losses, which triggered the need to address problems arising from Pink Bollworm and American Bollworm. The magnitude of the problem was really large.
Smartphone-based solution
An AI tool has been built which runs on a basic smartphone to classify and count pests based on images taken by farmers and agriculture programme workers. As research showed that all the lead farmers and 70 per cent of farmers have access to smartphones, developing a solution that can be easily accessed through the device, became an obvious choice.
Jain added, “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel but wanted to focus on filling the existing gap by mapping the stakeholders’ problems and needs. We studied whether AI is the real solution, and is it affordable and scalable.”
Farmer-friendly initiative
Wadhwani AI has been working with lead farmers in all the major cotton farming States to extend advisory, and help detect early bollworms in the crop.
Farmers using the AI tool take a picture of the moth in the farm, which identifies what the moth is and counts how many moths there are, which further gives advisory based on the moth and count, in the form of a signalling system. ‘Green’ indicates that there is no vulnerability while ‘yellow’ indicates caution suggesting moths are visible, and ‘red’ calling for immediate action.
Having made the tool available in seven Indian languages so far, Wadhwani AI is rolling out an offline app that is voice-based through which a farmer can speak as well as listen to the advisory, aiding those who cannot read or write. This is expected to help the bottom-of-the-pyramid farmers. Pilot studies have shown farmers with red alerts using the advisory have seen 24 per cent economic gain.
There are plans to make the app available in Google Play Store in the next 1-2 years. Feature phone users will also get advisory through SMS in future so that more farmers will get benefited.
Aiming for maximum reach
The research effort of Wadhwani AI won the Google AI Impact Challenge grant in 2019 and has the potential to develop a template that can be replicated in large-scale agriculture programmes, worldwide. This AI solution can be used to provide millions of farmers with timely, localised advice, reducing crop loss and over-use of pesticides by improving the timing of usage.
Wadhwani AI has partnered with Better Cotton Initiative, IDH Cotton Program, Welspun Foundation, Deshpande Foundation, IGS and others to build and test this solution and is presently being used by over 18,000 farmers across Telangana, Maharashtra and Gujarat.
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