The Workshop

Sustainable agriculture helps find a balance between the volume of food production and proper maintenance of the ecosystem. It also promotes the economic stability of the farmers while agriculture continues to be the largest source of earning of the world population, with nearly 40% of its population relying on agriculture for their hand to mouth. Increased practice of sustainable agriculture is capable of meeting our food and textile needs, without compromising the needs of the current or future generations through the preservation of the ecosystem.  This style of farming aims to produce food without the rampant use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

Artificial Intelligence based technologies have already started to shape agricultural practices in India. Some of the Indian farmers having a large volume of cultivable lands are now getting inclined to adopt smart farming strategies powered by AI enabled sophisticated technologies, autonomous tractors fitted with GPS and various other sensors including digital cameras to plant crops, apply fertilizers, spray pesticides, manage the weeds, determine the need for irrigation, predict the yield etc. in more efficient ways than ever before. ICRISAT headquartered in Hyderabad, India, is collaborating with the software giant Microsoft to enable Indian farmers to harness the power of AI to increase agricultural yields while maintaining environmental sustainability. Tech giant IBM is now providing Indian farmers and its agritech startups the opportunity to use its weather monitoring tools developed by its subsidiary, The Weather Company, free-of-cost to support smallholders and supply chain-focused startups with decision-making. In the near future, there may not be enough people to put their labour towards harvesting the required enormous volume of food and a robotic solution may hold the key to a sustainable food future that will benefit both the producers and its consumers. Harvest CROO Robotics established a few years back has developed a robot that helps farmers to pick and pack their crops. On the other hand, PEAT, a Berlin-based agricultural tech farm has developed a deep learning based application, called Plantix which is capable of detecting potential defects and nutrient deficiencies in the soil in some efficient way.

According to the World Health Organization (15th July 2019) about 820 million people did not have enough to eat in 2018, which was 811 million in the previous year, this makes it the third year of increase in a row. The second Goal of UNDP is “No Hunger” and some of the targets set under this goal are: by 2030, double the agricultural productivity and income of small-scale food producers, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flood and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality.  And here comes the importance of AI assisted sustainable smart agriculture. Data-driven approaches integrating AI and machine learning with big data technologies and high-performance computing could drive agricultural productivity while minimising its environmental impact. Keeping this in mind the workshop will focus on the relevance of AI assisted smart Agriculture, tools and techniques needed for that. The workshop will discuss some of the advanced applications of AI in agriculture. It will also emphasize on how an agricultural ecosystem can be developed so that the benefits of AI can reach small farmers.

Organizers

This workshop is being organized by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML), Indian Statistical Institute.