Developing cutting-edge technology for climate-sensitive agriculture

This three-part series reports the advances in agricultural technology in India. Part 1 discusses the emerging technologies in the pre-sowing stage. Part 2 and Part 3 throw light on the technologies in use in the crop growth stage and the post-harvest stage.

Farmers in India are always responding to the weather. However, predicting rainfall and weather events has become a challenge in recent times. With the country’s population likely to touch the 1.7 billion mark by 2050 and the food demand expected to rise, farming needs to become less climate-dependent and more cutting edge.

Agricultural technology, abbreviated as agritech, aims to solve agricultural challenges such as low productivity, climate-resilience, soil infertility, low farm incomes, credit and insurance, fragmented supply chains, post-harvest losses and more. For some researchers and startups, the solutions begin even before the seeds are sown in the field.

Engineering climate-resilient seeds

Present day rice is a product of domestication of wild rice by our ancestors. But the crop faces various environmental stresses due to a changing climate. While both rice and millets evolved from the same grass family millions of years ago, millets can now withstand harsher temperatures and require lesser water than rice. What traits have the millets gained, that rice has lost? This is what the researchers at The Millet Lab, University of Hyderabad are trying to understand.

“Crops today face multiple stressors which lead to heavy agricultural losses. Biotic stressors such as diseases (fungal, viral, bacteria) and abiotic stressors such as drought, heat, salinity, impact crop growth and yield,” explains M Muthamilarasan, Assistant Professor, The Millet Lab. A biotechnology innovation called gene-editing, manipulates the existing genes of a crop’s seed to make them withstand these stressors and become climate-resilient.

Regarding the apprehension about the safety of gene-edited and genetically modified crops, Muthamilarasan comments, “In the case of gene editing, we are not introducing any new gene as in the process for genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We are carefully editing the existing genes to make them climate-resilient and they are foreign-DNA free.”

“We have a responsibility to communicate this correctly as gene editing allows us to collectively bring some traits that make the crop climate-resilient or pest-resilient. If we are able to modify seeds with the help of biotechnology, we can foresee a future with a better variety of crops which have high productivity,” Manasi Mishra, Associate Professor, Biosciences and Technology at MIT World Peace University, tells Mongabay-India.

Biotechnology researchers say there’s a need for speed to introduce gene-edited seeds in the market. “Breeding new seeds takes time; it takes years to develop. We need to expedite the research and develop seeds that are resilient against multiple stressors because a seed that is drought-resilient may not be able to fight pests,” Muthamilarasan adds.

Several institutions are working on developing gene-edited crops to improve productivity and nutritional security, but they are not commercialised yet. India’s Guidelines for the Safety Assessment of Genome Edited Plants, from the Department of Biotechnology, makes it clear that the gene-edited plants require proper appraisal of biosafety concerns to make it safe for the environment and humans. It also outlines the roles and responsibilities of regulatory committees in the risk assessments of genome-edited plants.

Mishra meanwhile calls for more collaboration in the scientific community. She writes in a policy brief about advancing the cooperation among G20 countries for agricultural biotechnology, “The G20 should prioritise technological cooperation to enhance agricultural productivity in developing and low-income countries…Knowledge-sharing, technological collaboration, and technological innovations in these sectors, as well as capacity building in the scientific community and academia should be prioritised.”

Ethical and safety considerations in fortifying seeds to be resistant to climate change and pests, still persist, but Muthamilarasan is hopeful about the future of gene-editing. “Albeit one thing the gene-edited seeds can’t do, is to improve the soil. The fertiliser consumption is increasing and the land under agriculture is not increasing. It is making the soil infertile and poor,” he worries.

What if farmers can learn the health status of their soil, which directly impacts crop yield, before they even sow?

Rapid soil testing

Agritech startup Krishitantra has come up with a rapid soil testing machine called Krishi-RASTAA, a joint initiative with Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Indian Institute of Rice Research (IIRR). A farmer can simply collect soil sample from their field, take it to the nearest Krishi-RASTAA centre and get a soil health card in 30 minutes.

“Soil testing labs require infrastructure, skilled personnel to handle chemicals and capital expenditure to construct the building. So, we miniaturised the whole thing into a small cubic-feet-equipment. We brought in advanced technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and made the process data-driven and efficient,” explains Sandeep Kondaji, CEO and founder of Krishitantra.

The soil health card assesses 12 parameters which includes pH, nitrogen, organic carbon, sulphur and more. It also contains recommendations to the farmer on how to improve the soil condition. “This information enables farmers to make informed decisions regarding irrigation, and other agronomic practices, well in advance, ultimately leading to enhanced crop yield,” Kondaji shares.

AI-powered soil testing systems can continuously monitor key soil parameters and provide real-time insights, which can help farmers implement soil management strategies before they sow a crop, he explained.

Satellites spot

Another real-time agritech solution that banks and insurance companies with exposure to agriculture are embracing, is satellite data. On what basis can banks lend money to farmers if they don’t have a credit score? Startups like SatSure are making this decision easy.

“For banks to understand how much loan to sanction, they need to learn about the income generating potential of the farmer which is difficult to assess beforehand without knowing details about the farm history or the land’s productivity. That’s where our tech comes in,” begins Hiren Doshi, General Manager at SatSure, a deep tech, decision intelligence company.

SatSure uses satellite data to generate a report for the farm, which helps banks in making agriculture loan decisions. The technology is live in about 15-20 banks in India – a mix of private, public and cooperative banks, says Doshi.

He explains the process in detail, “Once we know which plot the farmer owns, a report is generated with 38 different parameters for the banks to consume, which answers questions about the crop grown, land under irrigation, yield, climatic-risks, income potential, etc. This is aggregated in the form of an easy to consume score called SatScore. Agricultural loan processing used to take a lot of time but now with this science-based, objective report, the banks can quickly process loans.”

Satellite data also helps insurance companies process compensation for agricultural losses after diseases or extreme weather events. “We help them assess those claims by analysing the extent of crop damage,” Doshi adds.

State governments are also interested in using satellite data to understand the extent of crop damage before they declare a disaster, request insurance companies for payouts and to develop effective agricultural policies. The scientific report helps governments declare relief measures for affected areas too.

To scale-up satellite technology, Doshi believes that states must improve their digital infrastructure. “Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Haryana have access to digital land records. Hence, it’s easier to operate there. Also, the government’s support in publicly acknowledging the use of satellite data in decision-making, will help public sector and cooperative banks adopt the technology much faster.”

An uneven adoption

While researchers, startups, educational institutions and government departments are continually refining agricultural technologies to optimise climate-smart agriculture, the adoption of these technologies is uneven in India. A segment of farmers is not represented in this agritech boom. “It (the adoption) is often influenced by numerous factors such as agricultural practices, local agritech challenges, economic conditions, technological infrastructure, and state agricultural and food security policies/initiatives,” Purushottam Kaushik, Head, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, tells Mongabay-India. “India has diverse agroclimatic zones, each with unique crop suitability and dominance, so certainly, agritech solutions vary with respect to crops as well,” he continues.

Kaushik is a part of Telangana’s AI for Agriculture Innovation initiative, a public-private partnership (PPP) to scale agritech services in India. He believes that an enabling ecosystem through public-private partnerships is essential to drive the agricultural process in a sustainable and just manner.

In conversation with Mongabay-India, Srikanth Rupavatharam, Head, Innovations Hub, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics (ICRISAT) says, “The question is not about how receptive farmers are to new technologies. Farmers are very intelligent they are adopting technologies fast. Now, it’s about how people come together to negotiate higher output prices for production and lower input processes…And the last mile connectivity of these technologies is different for different states. In some parts of India, connectivity to phone networks is an issue which needs to be improved.”

The gender gap in access to technology is another challenge. A 2023 report from a telecom non-profit GSMA states that even today, women in India, especially in rural areas, are less likely than men to use a mobile phone with key services such as internet or mobile money.

Read more: Scientists sequence chickpea genome which could inform crop improvement efforts

Banner image: Researcher scholars from the University of Hyderabad measure the plant height of foxtail millet. Photo from the Repository of Tomato Genomics Resources, UoH.