Karnataka Government Partners With CropIn For Data Driven Farming

The Department of Agriculture, Karnataka has entered into a partnership with Bengaluru-based agritech startup Cropln Technology Solutions. The partnership aims to start a programme that can help farmers create more value for their crops and foster their socio-economic development.

The project further looks to bridge across 20 districts of Karnataka, assisting 4.15 lakh farmers and covering 3.4 lakh acres of land.

It will assist Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) and farm managers to advise farmers in following the right package of practices across crops such as paddy, millets, gram and groundnut.

Synergy Between CropIn And Government of Karnataka

Karnataka is the home to highest number of agritech startups in India but agriculture sector’s contribution to the GDP of the state has been declining. The region of Karnataka has been targeted by drought and harsh weather conditions in the past five years.

In order to combat the situation, the Government of Karnataka will leverage Cropln’s farm management technology solutions to help farmers grow the right crops and adopt smart-farming techniques and practices.

The Government, along with the focus on increasing per acre yield quantity, is further aiming to help farmers get optimal value for their yield.

The programme will include Machine learning and AI to help FPOs get insightful data points for making decisions and guiding farmers. The tools provided under this solution will also help farmer organisations to bring consistency, dependability, and sustainability to the agriculture.

Commenting on the recent development, Krishna Kumar, CEO, CropIn, said, “As an Indian Agtech startup, we feel a deep responsibility towards the well-being of the farmer community. This collaboration with Karnataka Government gives us an opportunity to educate, enable and empower farmers.

Earlier, in 2017, CropIn had also formed a similar tie-up with the Department of Horticulture (DOH) in  Andhra Pradesh to digitise farms under two Farmer Producer Organizations (FPO) in the districts of Chittoor and Krishna.

More about CropIn Technology Solutions

Launched in 2010 by Krishna Kumar, CropIn is basically a Farm Management-Monitoring-Traceability (agriculture data and analytics) business solution provider.

It provides SaaS-based service to agri-businesses in India and abroad, enabling partners to analyse, interpret and gain real-time insight on crops and farms so as to be able to take corrective measures on time.

The company currently claims to be working with over 135 clients and 1.6 Mn farmers across 20 countries.

As Krishna Kumar explained, the CropIn team has identified that the agriculture sector has minimal and outdated technological/digital intervention. The company thus intends to help agribusinesses make informed, data-driven decisions – with technologies such as Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Geo-tagging and Satellite monitoring to interconnect all the stakeholders at different levels of the agriculture ecosystem.

“Our ultimate goal is to enable traceability of food and boost the per acre yield value for agribusinesses and farmers through our offerings,” says Krishna Kumar, Founder, CropIn Technologies.

According to Inc42 DataLabs report, around $36 Mn was invested in 15 agritech startups in 2017. Out of these, Pune-based agritech startup AgroStar raised the highest funding of $10 Mn led by Accel India in March 2017.

Also, IBEF report suggests that country’s Gross Value Added (GVA) from the sector is estimated to have grown at 3% in FY18, thus opening a number of opportunities for the agritech startups in near future.

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