Cognitive Agtech framework: A step towards farmers’ prosperity: IBM

Here comes the opportunity – from farm to fork – of digitalization of this complex value chain, which many of the start-ups are trying to tap into. It’s quite obvious though that solving the challenges as stated above is non-trivial – not only because of the socio-political reasons, but also because Agriculture is a very complex subject and needs to be addressed holistically than in pockets. That’s what we at IBM realized last year and came up with a ‘Cognitive Agribusiness’ framework. I call it a ‘bold’ step because this framework brings together the big data from on-field sensors, aerial drones, remote sensing satellites and weather sources together to generate actionable insights for the farmers, agronomists and several other stakeholders in the Agribusiness value chain to address the challenges of this industry.

This framework dwells on a 3-layered architecture, wherein, the bottommost layer is a data lake in cloud where IBM’s Watson IoT Platform ingests and aggregates data from specialized IoT/local sensors, remote sensing and weather sources; the second layer above that is the Artificial Intelligence or analytics layer where the data underneath is used to derive valuable insights such as ‘Crop vigor analysis (High Definition corrected NDVI)’, ‘Pest/Disease Prediction Maps’, ‘Soil Moisture Insights’ and so on , and the topmost layer is application layer which consumes these analytic insights into full-fledged applications such as Precision Farming, Irrigation Management, Farm Management etc.

Through this framework, we not only demonstrated the technological benefits, but also established the business value such as yield improvement, input optimization and pest/disease management, which we accomplished while working with our partnering clients in India and globally. On top of that, the value and need for this framework was further reinforced with IBM winning one of the most prestigious industry awards – Aegis Graham Bell Awards, where my team and I competed against several great innovations from large enterprises as well as growing start-ups. I hope to scale up these successful pilots into much bigger initiatives, which would then become probably the biggest contribution in fulfilling the dream of farmers’ prosperity in India.