OCTOBER 20198IN MY OPINIONBy Randhir Chauhan, MD, NetafimWith more than 20 years of experience in the micro-irrigation sector, Randhir has handled cross-functional profiles of sales, marketing & operations for Netafim.angesh is sipping morning tea in his home in Maha-rashtra's sugarcane belt, while a farm instrument installed on the field is cog-nizant of the soil moisture, weather trends, and recent rainfall and gives consistent data on his smartphone. Mangesh just opens his phone, checks the data and feeds a new ir-rigation schedule and moves on. A satellite is taking images of Mangesh's crops for pest prediction & yield es-timation and feeds the data back to Mangesh, input companies, prospec-tive buyers, credit organizations and relevant stakeholders. For many, this may still seem to be a scene from a science fiction movie set in 2118 and not something that in reality is happening in 2018. This is the ef-fect of digitalization combined with artificial intelligence.Is precision agriculture combined with advanced data analytics ready to transform the 10,000-year-old sector in the next 10 years? The an-swer to the question is already show-ing results in the field with the use of precision agriculture and digital technologies and as with all the tech-nological development, every 10-year block is becoming better than the previous one with newer and ad-vanced technologies. Commercially, the market is growing at a breakneck pace. A recent report pegged the artificial intelligence (AI) in agricul-ture market value at $432.2 million in 2016 and which is expected to be valued at $2,628.5 million by 2025, at a CAGR of 22.5 percent during the forecast period.AI, Not Just Artificial, but Advanced IntelligenceIn 1990s, India, an average farmer took a decision on farming, irrigation and pest control-based on available resource and limited observable data. In just 20 years, the average farmer is now moving towards effective products and resources to get more productivity from the similar or even lesser available resources and wealth of data to make informed decisions. It is often said that `Data is the new oil of the economy', and the same has been helping in agricultural transfor-mation across the world.Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology of low-cost prediction and discovery. It exploits the new re-source of the digital age (the precious data) to identify patterns and make predictions. In countries like India that lack required human capital in fields like agricultural science and lower coverage of adequate informa-tion, AI presents an opportunity to THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION: BEYOND PRECISIONMRandhir Chauhan, MD
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