If the
best brains in best MBA colleges are busy solving problems of those who
actually do not have any problem, they do not deserve to be called the best.
The great American economist Thorstein Veblen had once referred to the leisure
class. At Ishan Institute of Management & Technology, one of the best MBA
colleges in Delhi, we take pride in using business academic to solve or at
least resolve to solve the issues of that impact people, planet and profits.
Problems of the leisure class may be made to wait for a while.
India
has for ages now been a predominantly agrarian economy. The agricultural sector
is the backbone of the economy and is plagued with the weight of many issues
that ail the community of farmers, agricultural crop production, food inflation
levels and the quality of livestock. The last two years in particular have not
been too sympathetic towards the agricultural sector and the rise in the number
of farmer suicides substantiate that things are not that rosy. The data offered
by Food & Agriculture Organization assert that by the year 2050, more than
9.6 billion people shall inhabit the planet and food production shall have to
be increased by 70% by 2050 to sustain this population. An emerging discipline
that combines technology and management in order to streamline agricultural
operations is precision agriculture or smart farming.
What is Smart Farming?
In top
MBA colleges we refer to the phenomenon of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity). The concept of VUCA is as much applicable to
agriculture as it is to corporate strategy and board rooms. It is in the
context of VUCA that smart farming evolves. Smart farming is the streamlining
of agricultural operations, planning and scheduling by means of integration of
big data, predictive analytics and IoT (internet of things). It is an attempt
to use software and information technology enabled services to reduce VUCA in
agriculture and thus create a responsive supply chain.
The
vagaries of nature, cyclical excess production and price fluctuations can be
reduced if not completely obliterated using the concept of smart farming. The
use of IoT coupled with GPS and Big data can lead to better measurement of
metrics of parameters like rainfall, temperature, humidity, snowfall, frost,
pest control and irrigation requirements. It is possible to create smart farms
by implanting sensors in the crop fields to collect, analyze and then interpret
data on major threats. These sensors work through GPS to centralize data from
various sources on the field and process the information to produce insights
based on predictive modelling. Thus it shall be possible to control animal
activity leading to destruction of crops at night, pest growth and under or
over-irrigation. In fact the use of big data can lead to the adoption of a risk
management strategy in planning and scheduling of agricultural operations by
having forecasts on rainfall, humidity, snowfall and frost for the next
financial quarter. This data that is collected on the fields can then be relayed
to smart watches and wearable wrist gears of farmers to initiate preventive
action that is proactive and save farmers of the financial losses. Intelligent
farms that can communicate information to farmers can in this way reduce the
occurrence of crop failures and mitigate the operating risks associated with
farming.
Smart Animal Farming
A
subset of the practice of smart farming is smart animal husbandry and smart
animal framing. By using sensors that measure physiological metrics like body
temperature, tissues resistivity, pulse and others it is possible to take
better care of the health of the livestock that is used for agriculture and
livestock activities like production of milk. Bovine cattle can thus be cared
for and used with sensitivity for better productivity on the farm and off it.
The
biggest merit is that this data can be easily channelized from the farms and
animal husbandry warehouses across different individuals positioned at
different levels in the supply chain through smart watches, affordable Android
mobile apps and be used to make a visible impact on how decision making is
undertake in Bharat. Smart farming and smart animal husbandry creates a
decision support system (DSS) for farmers to predict, sustain, profit and
de-risk agricultural operations.
Literature Review on Smart
Farming
There are some case studies and literature
available on such initiatives that have been undertaken in different countries
across the world. Recently the government in Malaysia has announced a national
level IoT plan with an ambitious goal to increase farm productivity by 20% in
the next five years. The project is expected to generate US$ 320 million of GDP
for the Malaysian economy. The European Union has sponsored several projects on
the topic during the Seventh Framework Program during Horizon 2020. At Ishan
Institute of Management & Technology, one of the best MBA colleges in Delhi
NCR we recommend a pilot study that may be conducted in India by offering
research grants to start –up firms mushrooming from tech schools and business
schools under the Digital India campaign. It is time that we Indians stop
leaving our agriculture at the mercy of nature.