Empowering ryots with agritech
Hyderabad: An IIIT-Hyderabad professor, a serial entrepreneur and a technology expert have come together to advise farmers on improving their yield and in turn, get more profits. Dr Shyamsundar Reddy, Jagan Chitiprolu and Kalyan Enjamoori in 2020 set up Samhitha Crop Care Clinics so as to bridge the gap in the agriculture industry with real-time tracking and crop monitoring facilities.
The two-year-old Hyderabad startup uses niche technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, drones, blockchain and data sciences to collect and analyse real-time data from farms. It provides analysis of soil health, cultivation practices, right harvest system, the health status of the produce and weather patterns, among other things.
“All three of us come from varied backgrounds but have one common goal – to help farmers improve their yield and give them the right deal for their yield. Most of the farmers are small or marginalised and have no access to technology. Through our precision farming advisory platform we prepare a digital layout of the farm and give a number to each tree and then through our Internet of Things (IoT) solution give a digital health analysis of all the trees,” Dr Reddy, co-founder, Samhitha Crop Care Clinics said.
The startup has categorised 50 different tree problems into three different categories – healthy, dead and sick. Depending on the health status of the tree, they provide analysis on what can be done to improve sick trees and which are dead and need to be removed. The platform chalks out plans for individual trees and/or the total farm.
Currently, the startup is working with citrus farmers in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and has already helped 800 farmers having a total of 400 acres optimise their production. It is working with farmers in Nalgonda by providing them with drones to identify drainage systems and soil moisture. The AgriTech startup has a one-of-a-kind Digital Tree Health Audit System (DTHAS) that deploys homemade telemetry devices on the fields to capture soil moisture, temperature and pH, weather and wind speed, and direction.
Going ahead, it plans to also support farmers in marketing their produce and in the last three months, it has trained agents and identified top merchants and designed a mechanism to modernise the mandi system. “We are also talking to banks to provide loans to farmers and many have already shown interest,” Dr Reddy says.
The startup only works with crops that have a net revenue of Rs 1 lakh and in the near future it will be expanding its offering to crops such as pomegranate, chillies and mangoes. Dr Reddy has spent almost 10 years researching and developing the precision farming mechanism and the company is looking to raise $15 million in the near future.
