“In 2017, over 100,000 hectares of farmland in Odisha were hit by pests. Crops were completely destroyed, and farmers were committing suicide,” recalls Rishikesh Amit Nayak. Being from a farmer family in Bhubaneswar, Nayak empathised with the distressed farmers. “I was in class 9 at the time and was developing a keen interest in technology. I realised that while the issues farmers face are researched, there are no actual solutions to prevent them,” he says.
Thus began Nayak’s tryst with agri-technology. In 2018, Nayak, who is currently a student of mechanical engineering at the Vellore Institute of Technology in Tamil Nadu, rolled out Kishan Know to help farmers detect microbial pest attacks through thermal imaging. Kishan Know was initially a device-based solution. “I gave farmers a miniature thermal camera with a microprocessor and asked them to take it around their farm twice a day. All the data would be collected and sent to a server, from where image recognition and deep learning models would help detect abnormalities. The idea was to check for changes in maximum temperature of plant leaves, which would indicate the presence of microbial pests such as bacteria and virus,” he explains. Researchers from the Odisha Institute of Agriculture and Technology helped validate the data being analysed.
“This way, farmers could be warned of an impending attack in just 12 hours,” he says.
Using this technology, farmers from several parts of Odisha have been able to reduce the scale of crop losses. For instance, in 2019, Deepak Kumar Sethi from Padmapur village of Jagatsinghpur district was warned by Kishan Know of a pest attack. “I would not have noticed the pests until 10-15 days later, and by then I would have lost almost the entire crop,” he says. Sethi was initially hesitant to use the technology, but says that the results were so accurate that he is now in awe of it. “As a farmer, I know how to mitigate pest attacks, but not how to predict them. Kishan Know is filling that gap,” he says.
While the system worked to quickly warn farmers, it was not affordable. Hence Nayak decided to change strategy to a software-based solution using satellite imagery. Nayak partnered with Intel to roll out this solution in 2021. “First, I went to farmers and collected information on their land area and its coordinates, the crops they sow, their irrigation patterns, among other things. This land was then monitored using satellite images, along with updates every two days from farmers on crop health to see early signs of pest or disease emergence,” explains Nayak. This version, he says, is more affordable for farmers at Rs 82 per month per acre (1 acre is 0.4 hectares).
Over the past three years, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nayak has been focusing on the forecast of plant diseases. “The effort is to deploy high altitude balloons to measure wind, rising temperature and heat direction, which play a role in disease spread. But this solution is still being developed. Once it is ready, I will release Kishan Know for a wider market,” he says. Nayak has also now expanded to other technological domains, and is working on solutions that may help the education sector.
This was first published in the 1-15 December, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth