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Thursday, March 17, 2016

We, the People of Best MBA Colleges Stand by Smart Farming

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.