Farmers reap rich benefits from weather SMSes

8 Jul, 2008, 0008 hrs IST,Sachin Dave, ET Bureau

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MUMBAI: Tarsem Singh, 41, a farmer at Dhaipai village in Punjab, may not look like his counterpart in Canada or the USA. But when it comes to using technology, he can twirl his moustache for the fact that he is using technology which many farmers in developed countries could only dream of; Singh gets SMSes on accurate weather prediction specific to his town. Many farmers in Punjab and West Bengal are receiving messages on their cell phones about weather information specific to towns and districts, and by December these could be availed by farmers throughout India. Offered by a Kanpur-based company Ingen Technologies, the service updates farmers on temperature, humidity and rainfall with additional parameters such as atmospheric pressure, solar radiation, wind speed and soil moisture. The system is approved and certified by the Indian Meteorological Department. The company is also learnt to be offering its services to a major soft drink company, which can better predict demand for its beverages based on these predictions and analytics software. “For farmers we provide agro-advisory services that include advice on sowing times, disease outbreaks and frost forecast, through SMS. On other hand, we have designed a decision support tool for utility companies and FMCGs, and have already supplied to some and are in talks with some other players,” says Akhil Aggarwal, head, business development and new products at Ingen Technologies.  So far, the company has installed 55 weather stations of which 29 weather stations have been bound by confidentiality, as the clients (mostly companies) using it wish to guard this as trade secret. The company is a sister concern of Weather Risk Management Services, a $50-million company, which is supported by IDBI and the Ford Foundation. The company is coming out with a weather trading platform along with MCX. Ingen Technologies is not the only one which is tapping the opportunities by providing services to farmers. Recently Infosys Technologies had also partnered with ACDI/VOCA, a non-profit international development organisation that promotes broad-based economic growth, to develop an Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled application that would improve efficiencies in the agro supply chain in India. The solution minimises inventory requirements, reduces waste and allows retailers and farmers to be better integrated. It also gives the organised retail sector access to a reliable small holder production base, and thereby decreases farm-to-market losses, currently estimated at 30% to 40% on certain products. The application also tackles supply chain management from profiling of farmer clusters to crop planning, scheduling, tracking, and forecasting.