Two Google teams, AnthroKrishi and Google Partner Innovation, are embarking on leveraging AI to advance agricultural sustainability, starting in India.
Agriculture is critical for India. The country has the second-largest arable land area in the world, and roughly half of its population depends on agriculture for its livelihood. As a leading rice, wheat, cotton, sugar, and dairy producer, India’s agricultural system is indispensable to India and the rest of the world. However, India’s agricultural system faces significant obstacles. Climate change disrupts India’s agricultural systems, and unsustainable farming practices exacerbate climate change by generating significant greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, and deforestation. Without change, global food and environmental systems are at risk.
AI can help detect field boundaries and bodies of water to enable sustainable farming practices, improve crop yields, and support India’s 1.4 billion people and the rest of the world. Landscape comprehension using AI can use satellite imagery and machine learning to delineate field boundaries, the fundamental agriculture unit and a prerequisite for generating meaningful insights. With field segments established, the model can determine the acreage of farm fields, forest and woodland areas and identify irrigation structures such as farm wells and dug ponds to develop drought-preparedness tools.
In addition, AI use can help in ‘landscape monitoring’, providing a more comprehensive picture of a field’s current status and performance, such as crop type, field size, distance to water, and the date of a crop’s most recent sowing or harvest, water availability and drought management strategies. With more information on farm performance, agricultural loans can become more accessible, and state governments can scale their support for multiple farming districts.
Google anticipate addressing these issues on a global scale through the deployment of AI and other cutting-edge technologies.
