Use of technology in agriculture is normally interpreted as technologies that go into on-farm machinery. However, there are many more high-tech applications, involving various sciences, which have come into regular use in agriculture.
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| Drones are used in farming for various reasons |
For example, India has a program called CHAMAN which uses satellite based remote sensing information or geo-informatics to manage crop forecasting. High tech systems, that use overhead Drones, chemistry labs and spectrograph analytics are part of agriculture and are used to manage crops and diagnose soil health. Spread your gaze wide, and you will find almost every possible form of science being applied in the field of agriculture.
The concept of more-crop-per-drop is
driven by smart use of micro-irrigation & fertigation. IT systems
are commonly used to maintain, monitor and communicate agricultural data,
advisories that include weather information and market prices. Countering the
adverse impacts of climate change is done in pockets by deploying enclosed or protected
cultivation. To assist farm level productivity, various machines and
implements are deployed so as to speed up the work and add efficiencies.
Hi-tech goes hand in hand with high
value agriculture. Horticulture demonstrates maximum spread in the use of
high-technologies. Look at the equipment used in poly-houses, poly-tunnels,
green houses; sensors, actuators, logic programmes are used to automatically
control the light, humidity and temperature to very fine precision levels.
To ensure that farmers will reap
exactly what they sow, hi-tech nurseries and TC labs are becoming the
source of many fruit and vegetable planting material. Technology like RIFD or bar-coding
can also be used in building traceability in planting material by
tagging each seedling, plant or packet. Lack of high technology support in
agriculture can lead to major mismanagement which can in turn result in total
loss, rot or very poor productivity.
Obviously all this technology has to bring about sustainability, productivity and socio-economic benefits.
In other words, technology uses are worthwhile only if used in the right or appropriate context. In case of India, most appropriate context for using technology is obvious. We witness depleting resources in form of
availability of water and arable land, urbanisation has effected manpower
availability, economic growth still needs to be more inclusive, and a large
percent of what we produce is lost as dump, before it can ever reach
consumers.
If we are to agree with some commonly
stated figures, that 25-40% of what is harvested is lost to inefficiencies,
then the most urgent requirement of hi-tech science is for the safe custody of
what we produce, from farm-to-consumers. Technologists must aim to bring
about a transformational change - that farm produce must be brought
to gainful end use and thereby reduce wastage. Such wastage is deplorable and an utter loss. This is not waste in the hands of consumers, but loss due to ineffective transfer of value produced to demand.
Wastage is not because we always
produce surplus, but also because we are unable to bridge demand with supply.
For example we recently learnt that tomatoes were thrown in Karnataka while
Delhi faced an acute shortage. In this context, it is mandated that the
majority of investment should be in technologies that develop modern
agricultural markets and scientific agri-logistics.
Since the majority of the high value
produce is perishable, the use of advanced technologies in post-harvest
management or cold-chain. is imperative. In India, cold-chain management
systems are considered a thrust area, key to the second green revolution - which will be an Income Revolution for Farmers.
Post-harvest management allows for
value that was harvested by farmers, to be directly connected to multiple
consumers. When fresh food reaches more consumers, and this happens without any
intermediary change of custody or undergoing transformative processing, then we
can truly say that technology has linked the farmer directly or seamlessly with
the consumer. This is what India needs to aim for, both for the well-being of
its farmers and to provide better quality fresh foods for greater
public good
Good care and handling of what is
produced in agriculture, also mitigates many harmful environmental impacts. In
fact, the carbon sequestration that happens from agriculture is wasted
when we allow the fresh harvest to be wasted.
By focusing on linking farmers fresh
harvest to markets, we promote improved public health, environmental
safeguards and are able to extract the most value from farming.
Where needed or unavoidable, we can also use food processing technologies that
convert the fresh produce into a processed product so as to optimise on what is
left of the field harvest. Another optimising step would be non-food processing
of inedible waste.
However, at ground level, one of the
bottlenecks for adopting technology is the initial cost, especially when the
innovation is new. These costs are in terms of the capital cost as well as the
human capital needed to apply and integrate the technology.
The government
recognises this and the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare supports
every aspect of modern technology. Including farm mechanisation, it
promotes protected cultivation, precision farming, micro-irrigation, soil
health, alternate energy applications, complete cold-chain, street vending
carts and retail units across the entire agricultural production to marketing
phases. Even new innovation and capacity building is supported
where it is considered to be beneficial for the farming community.
The reader is asked to visualise a
modern farm, it is producing off-season crops by manipulating the
surrounding climate, it uses targeted and natural supplements for the soil, has
captive bees and bio-pesticides to aid productivity, has areas using
aero-ponics, hydro-ponics or vertical farms to grow specialised crops, and is
controlling the marketable life span of the produce. Such a farm would
reutilise the post-harvest handling waste by converting it into new food
products or for non-food uses, shares logistics connection with urban clusters
hundreds of miles away, is recharging aquifers in the monsoon sand does not use
sunlight only for photosynthesis but for all its other energy needs while
monitoring all this online on a webpage – this is one of the many possibilities
in the hi-tech future of agriculture.
The future of farming is far
reaching - we see the advent of 3D printing of food items, hybrid plants
and animals, underwater farms, floating farms, even experiments to produce
vegetables on other planets. But we also see agriculture having taken the
back-seat in the last half century. It is a must to reiterate, that for the
next decade, any use of high level technology should have a focused approach
for the inclusion and the betterment of farmers, while protecting our
bio-diversity and nutrition security.
Think of hi-tech agriculture as that
which helps us make the most of our natural resources, which helps counter
climate change, safeguards the value produced, enhances the farmer’s income and
that which makes our civilization sustainable and stronger.
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