Ag Tech Talk Podcast: Managing the Farm with Digital Agriculture and Cloud Technology
1 March 2023 –—
Having one’s head in the clouds is usually not considered a good thing. Though managing farm operations just might be. Cropin Cloud is digitizing agriculture through the cloud with a suite of applications, access to powerful, ready-to-use data sources, and AI-powered agri-intelligence into an integrated, easy-to-use platform to accelerate digital agriculture transformation across the agri-ecosystem. The company’s solution is currently used in more than 90 countries to manage 500 crops and over 10,000 crop varieties on large and small farms. The company has digitized more than 16 million acres. In this podcast, we talk with Sujit Janardanan, Cropin’s Chief Marketing Officer about the company’s plans to digitize one-third of the crop land on the planet by 2025 and the role of “thinking” technology and how it can be used to mitigate agriculture’s many challenges.
Podcast Transcript:
AgriBusiness Global: Welcome to Ag Tech Talk. I am Dan Jacobs, senior editor with Agribusiness Global. We’re talking with Sujit Janardanan, Chief Marketing Officer for Cropin, and we’ll let him tell you a little bit about that in just a moment. It’s billed on their website as the world’s first intelligent agricultural cloud. Cropin is a global ag ecosystem intelligence provider. The suite of products enables stakeholders and the agricultural ecosystem, including financial service providers to adopt and drive digital strategy across their agricultural operations. Welcome.
Sujit Jardanan: Thank you, Dan, and thank you for having me here as part of your initial set of podcasts. It’s an honor, and it’ll be a pleasure to share my views and thoughts as representative of Cropin on what we are up to as far as the agricultural ecosystem is concerned, and enabling this ecosystem is concerned. So, looking forward to this chat.
ABG: Great. Thanks for being here, so I’ll just jump into my questions. So, (your website says) agriculture has unfailing tools. The tools have been around for a long time. But does it have thinking technology?
SJ: Yeah. And this has been one of the questions that’s been really defining our way forward at Cropin. In fact, there are a bunch of other questions. And I’m sure you would have seen some of those questions up front and center on our website because that’s pretty much defined. How we thought of what will be the next big step that digital technologies will have to take to truly enable this industry. So, when you look at agriculture, it’s one of the oldest industries, but the least digitized.
In fact, all the tools that today get applied within the agriculture sector on the farm, your document mechanization at scale. You’re talking about, the basic rudimentary tools … they first to get things done, the irrigation systems. They all have been active and then the only thing that’s changed drastically, and I think that’s forcing a every player in this ecosystem to look at, “How can we truly enable this ecosystem of technology is the scale of the problem that we are staring at?”
The complexity that we are facing today, some geopolitical issues, climate change. That is real, and we can clearly see the impact of that. And those are really forcing us to figure out, “Hey, can we truly enable all that’s been at play within the agricultural ecosystem with technology that can help you think, decide and act better?”
ABG: Technology is definitely finding its way into agriculture at an amazing pace. In various places around the world, it’s doing different things. It’s one thing to have the technology. It’s another thing to know what to do with it, and how to interpret the data that’s coming in. On your website. You talk about that as not just technology, but also wisdom. Does this new technology have some thought behind it.
SJ: Absolutely it has. And point number one the way we’ve been thinking of the future, of what technology should be for the sector is … Point number one: It has to be an ecosystem play. I, at this point in time, when I see the entire technology ecosystem within agriculture, you got thousands of point solutions being built, some by the enterprises, businesses who are operating in this field. And then a bunch of active providers who are building point solutions to solve bits and pieces of the puzzle. You have several other actors and players who are also trying to build digital technologies, which are solving point problems.
The challenge, though, is what we call as technology sprawl. And at the end of the day, we are just making it more complex instead of simplifying it. The way I think of this is when, if you build an ecosystem platform where the entire ecosystems, knowledge, and information can come together to help make intelligent decisions for every actor and player – that’s when true values derived out of technology. A simple example, and I think it’s probably easy to wrap our heads around what the future could look like for agriculture, is the banking system or the Stock Exchange system.
We know when a certain event happens somewhere, what’s going to be the supposed impact on other parts of the entire ecosystem because they are connected. There is real time, flow of data, real time, flow of information, easy accessibility, because data and intelligence is democratized. When you talk about financial services largely I’m sure there’ be a lot more to do even on that front. Or take the flight booking system globally – the flight management system which runs on a radio. So, these are classic examples, of how, when an ecosystem platform is created that runs as the backbone, and that is free flow of data and information and easy accessibility, the intelligence that results out of it is when true wisdom starts playing out, and you’re able to really drive greater value for every single stakeholder in the value chain.
ABG: Very good. So, you mentioned in your first answer agriculture being one of the oldest industries if not the oldest. So, it’s got a long history. As we’re bringing technology into it and learning how to use it properly, are there some lessons we can learn that you’ve already learned that can be applied.
SJ: There are tons of lessons. That’s the beauty of deployed technology where you’re able to digitize at scale, collect tons of data points, as in trillions of data points, as in today, because of the conversions of technologies that is possible, and cloud being at the core of all of it. We can actually collect and analyze and churn greater bytes of data.
And I think that’s how we can actually make use of all the historical information that I’m sure every single ecosystem player right from the farmer to agri businesses, to governments to development agencies, et cetera, who can work to build a more robust agriculture ecosystem. And they can bring that to play. But that said, that’s still historical data. And we all know one thing for sure, and that’s the future is unpredictable on multiple fronts. We are talking about geopolitical issues driving how supply chains of food are going to be operated in this world.
There’s huge unpredictability, as far as climate change is concerned. And there is also a huge amount of pressure on the farming ecosystem, which is farming communities, et cetera because they are not able to build sustainable livelihoods, especially when you come to the small world of farmers and the marginalized farmer communities as soon as you go to uh the emerging markets across the world.
And all of this is the perfect storm uh that drives greater need and demand for all that historical data and intelligence to really be put to play, probably predictive intelligence models that can help us get a little better at making decisions. And why we may not be able to eliminate all of these risk factors that I just called out, we can definitely mitigate a lot of those risks and be better prepared to manage what we are staring at as far as feeding this planet is concerned.
ABG: Oh, very good. You sort of answered my next question for me. And you know, talking about everything from the regulatory issues that the companies are facing, climate change. Obviously, we’ve seen a lot of supply chain disruption over the last couple of years — Covid. We just had a huge hurricane here in the United States — Hurricane Ian (late September 2022) certainly affecting some of the ports down south, even if it’s only for a few days. But the technology that you have available that you’re offering in the cloud. You think this can really help mitigate some of those challenges.
SJ: Better prepared for sure and take actions that can help us cut down the impact. A lot and I’ll I’m probably repeating this, but our planet is staring at some of the biggest challenges in the history of human civilization. Climate change, extreme weather events, geopolitical conflicts and economic downturns have been disrupting the agri-food ecosystem. Now, a lot of these are not new for us as the human race. But what is definitely more complex and challenging is the growing number of mouths that we need to feed, the challenges in terms of the kind of nutrition that we need to provide, and it is it is adding to the whole complexity as far as the challenges concerned. Now many countries worldwide are facing the threat of growing food insecurity, reversing the gains that were attained over the last few decades. We need to act quickly and responsibly to succeed along with other measures. We need to have innovative and intelligent solutions for food, feed, and fiber, and it is necessary to make significant investments to maintain current use and increase production and full quality.
I’ll share a couple of examples that probably help understand these better. How can we tackle the impact of climate change and agriculture. While we cannot control natural disasters overnight, we can certainly prepare our farmers and the agri-food value chain providers and address them in a better way.
Technology enabled climate-smart agriculture practices have a crucial role to play. Now, starting with crop selection, we (need to) choose the right time for sowing and harvesting, managing water scarcity, adopting the right farming practices. Agri-tech is enabling the farming community to address the adverse impacts. Soil conditions, water resource availability, and weather conditions are constantly monitored using these technologies. Helping farmers to choose climate, resilient crops during extreme weather conditions, leveraging climate-smart agri-tech solutions, farmers can also identify over-irrigated or under-irrigated regions, and take effective measures to manage optimal irrigation schedules resulting in higher yield and quality while reducing costs. With the best use of climate-smart agriculture countries can address and even reverse the adverse impacts of climate change.
An important point to note is, globally, agriculture is probably the only sector that can be a net-zero carbon emission or carbon offsetting sector. And that is important.
Another example is the ongoing fertilizer crisis across multiple regions. The industry doesn’t have an immediate solution to address the shortage. In the short term, one can leverage technology to manage the optimal use of fertilizers depending on the crops, climatic zones, and soil type.
This will help us mitigate the risk of fertilizer shortage to some extent. A core challenge that plagues the sector is a lack of visibility across the full value chain from cultivation to harvesting the supply chain until the product reaches the end consumer.
Today, with the Cropin Cloud, we aim to possibly solve this, and technology can help the sector to better manage the shortages, take timely corrective actions, and optimize resources being deployed within the sector.
ABG: That’s a powerful tool that hopefully people will be able to utilize. So, a lot of this data is coming in. You mentioned there are sensors, satellites – all kinds of data that gets pulled together. We talked a little bit about this – having the data and knowing what to do with it are two very separate issues. And there’s also the issue of who owns the data. Those are issues that are being worked out. And then, of course, there’s having the ability to be sort of universal, and have all the different sensors feed into the same system, so everything works together. I guess as opposed to companies’ (proprietary) systems that don’t talk to each other. How does the cloud part of that all work? I guess I’m asking like three different questions here. I’m going to have to rephrase that.
SJ: But that’s a great question. Yes, I agree on the fact that having data and knowing what to do with it – the ease of use and being able to consume it to actually making the right decision and taking the right actions – is definitely a challenge that we need to address and get better and better. I was speaking at another event organized by IFA (International Fertilizer Association). One of the questions I got from the audience was about how there’s so many digital tools out there, and we expect a grower or a farmer to learn how to adopt and use all of them, to make sense of how to really leverage it for what they’re doing on their farms, et cetera, and it is a real problem.
When we come to emerging economies like India, Southeast Asia, Africa, et cetera you’re talking about uh a farming community that is still learning how to access digital technologies leave aside actually leveraging it to the fullest. So, there is a huge cap in terms of digital empowerment that also has to be bridged. With that point not all goals worldwide are aware of the benefits of data in the daily operations irrespective of what size, what region are they from.
Even if they are aware they may not know how to leverage it, and Cropin Cloud helps them to leverage data without any investments or technical knowhow to process it. And that is critical, because our model is a B2B model (Business-to-Business), which enables farmers to leverage data with zero investments that are as our customers, which are the businesses that we work with, the development agencies that we work with, the governments that we work with would bear the cost and also the cost of not just the technology, but also how it gets deployed and is enabled for the farmers the growers to truly leverage.
Now, a critical challenge for the agriculture industry has been the effective management of the volume and variety of the relevant farming management and advisory data sources on and off the field. Here’s where the data hub layer of Cropin Cloud addresses this by structuring agri-data to a (format) which enables you to interface with all agri-data sources – such as in-field, farm management applications, IoT devices, drones, mechanization data from farming equipment, remote sensing satellite information and weather advisory sources.
Now, these are all sources that are available and probably are made available to multiple applications. Our goal is, can we eliminate those multiple applications and give a standard single interface to growers and farmers that our customers work with where they can get access to all of this to make better informed decisions. This can actually help cut down data engineering efforts by up to 80% for the businesses organizations that we work with.
And this is specifically important. If they have to build similar data integrations for intelligent insights on their own. So, we are helping them actually drive faster innovation to market and deliver greater value to the farmers and growers that they work with as part of their business network.
We also monitor and analyze multiple high-quality data points during the crop lifecycle, such as soil data, harvest quality and quantity, plot data, pest and disease incidents, irrigation details, fertilization and chemical input details, sowing data, seed (information). Artificial intelligence, enabled by weather parameters, satellite data, and various agronomic data records are observations during different crop stages.
Now, we use these trillions of data sets and pipelines to build powerful AI algorithms, to unlock predictive intelligence and actionable insights that can truly transform agriculture and benefit each and every stakeholder in the agriculture ecosystem.
You can imagine the power of such massive data sets to help businesses and farmers to make effective decisions that increase efficiency, scale productivity and profitability, and enhance sustainability.
Most importantly our platform enables growers to leverage the full benefits of data without having any technical know-how. We (offer) that part along with the businesses and governments that we work with.
ABG: Very good. What else do we need to know?
The point is. We clearly realize that every player in this ecosystem is going to be at different stages of transformation. In terms of understanding digital, and how all digital technologies can converge, adopting digital, and truly deploying digital (solutions to) deliver value for themselves.
Here’s where the way we’ve built Cropin Cloud comes to play. We have clearly thought of this as a platform that gives the power of choice to the users – in this case agri-businesses, governments, or development agencies that we work with on various projects and programs,
Based on where they are, in their transformation journey, or where the projects are, where the programs are, they can choose where to start. For example, if we are talking about starting a net new program on the African continent, where the primary goal is, can we digitize as much of the farm lands and farmer data available across the African continent and bring that together to really build a powerful data ecosystem platform that then gives the growers of the farming communities in Africa to leverage that information, to be able to get better power to buy inputs that they require or marketing cages to sell, they produce and get better value. So that’s probably a starting point there. As soon as we come to mature markets like North America or Europe, in which case we are talking about (places where) digitization has largely been well adopted, however, now it’s about consolidating a lot of that digitization application, ecosystem being able to add more data sources to build better decision-making analytical modules and use predictive intelligence to get better at forecasting what the tomorrow could look like.
It could be estimating yield. It could be forecasting disease or pest infestation, getting ahead of any kind of weather forecast, and hence changes that need to be implemented in terms of advisories as far as input is concerned. It could be problems like those that need to be solved.
In some cases, we are talking about markets like India, Southeast Asia, where the important problem to solve is really the communication and information flow between the stakeholders, like governments and the farmers on the field. That’s where communication applications and engagement applications like Cropin Trace come into play and help bridge that particular gap.
So, in closing the important part is the power of choice lies with the stakeholder user in the ecosystem. As far as Cropin Cloud is concerned. They can pick and choose … how to work the best for them, based on where they are in this journey today.
Today our solutions are actually deployed across ninety-two countries. These solutions today directly manage over five hundred crops and over ten thousand properties across large and small world of farming. We have been able to digitize over sixty million acres of farmland across the globe. It’s still a very small number. When you look at the overall cultural land on this planet uh our goal is, to digitize one-third of the planet by 2025. That’s a goal. We already touched the livelihoods of over 7 million farmers, and that number keeps on growing.
We have millions of data sets. Our data points keep on getting aggregated on a platform every single month.
The solutions really need to be scalable, not just in terms of the scale of operations, but more importantly, the customizability or the configurability. That is an important value proposition without which digital technologies will not go as far as adoption is concerned, and I think that’s been a core uh value proposition tenant that we have kept at the center of all our solutions is scalability and configurability. The second most important part is usability. And I think that’s where being able to cater to growers from across the globe with respect to what languages speak because it supports multi-line legal communications and information on our applications, so that you can communicate with your (partners) in a language that they are most comfortable with going beyond just using the internet and mobile, but using short message services (texting) as well as calls as modes of communication or of transmitting information in parts of the world where internet connectivity is still a challenge. You’re ensuring that the applications and solution you’re building are as user friendly as possible. And it should not need you to be what I call as a digital “first citizen” of this planet.
ABG: So how do people access it is? It can be done on a an iPhone, a smartphone, a computer, or an iPad?
Yes, so depending on which application of solution you’re using. You can choose an Android or an Apple phone. You could access it by a tablet or on desktops. So, it’s available to all. And when it’s about just disseminating information, you can choose SMS WhatsApp integration. You can communicate via apps or notifications, or just plain, good or recorded calls that can transmit information.
ABG: Okay. The other question I want to ask you: You talk about the entire value chain? So obviously it’s something that growers can use. How does a distribution company, or how does a manufacturer, how do they fit in? How do they access the data. Does everybody see the same data?
SJ: So, great question. The premise with which we are building the cloud platform is that we want to democratize access to data.
But at the same time, when we’re working with enterprise businesses in this sector, we do realize that they need complete control over who accesses what data, for what purpose, and keep it very contextual to the user and we enable that.
There’s a huge amount of customization and configurability available for any business that adopts any of our solutions in terms of data access, user control access, information flow access, workflow management access – all of those. These are components that are highly configured, so controls in your hands as a customer. And that is important.
We do believe that the more you democratize data, and the more you enable decision making at every single point of your value chain, and more importantly, along the front lines, is when we will be able to derive or create maximum value within this ecosystem. So, I think it’s going to be a collaborative effort with some of our customers as they chart out this digital transformation journey.
It is a new way of doing things within this industry. Despite all the effort, and despite all the investments that we’ve been making over the last few decades, we still are the least digitized sector when we compare with the other industries like retail health tech all of them. So, we got a long way to go. Where we’re probably behind the curve is the fact that we don’t have to deal with all of the legacy that they had to be with because they kept on adopting technologies, and then they had to keep on dropping those technologies and make it for new ones.
We have that benefit that we can start a fresh with all the new technologies that are available to us, and the power and bring the power of all of that to really add value for us.
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