CultYvate: More Crop per Drop

Mallesh TM ,   CEO

Mallesh TM, CEO

Improper watering and nutrition management are two of the most pivotal cause for poor quality and lower productivity of crops. A farmer, on an average has to consider 10 - 12 parameters before deciding the precise watering and nutrient management to get the best yield. When the timely decision is made in a scientific way, the crops can give higher yield with lesser input. Countries like Israel and Netherlands have proven the same by enabling their farmers to leverage on technology to get higher and better yield. The picture is different in India. In India, 70 – 80 percent of the crop is cultivated based on rain or flood irrigation. As a result, the yield is very low and pest/disease occurrences are higher, leading to loss of revenue to farmers. For instance, it requires close to 2.2 Crore litres of water per year per acre to grow sugarcane with flood irrigation with an average yield of 40 - 45 tons per acre. When the same is grown using smart irrigation, the water consumption goes down by close to 50 percent and the yield increases by 100 percent. These are figures from the Jaggery Park, Sugar cane Research Institute, Mandya, Karnataka. Those farmers who have adopted drip irrigation have to manually control the flow of water OR use timer/volume based systems, which is a step improvement over flood irrigation, but without unlocking the potential of precise irrigation. The question remains, ‘How to provide precise watering for the crop, based on the daily crop water needs without any manual intervention?’ cultYvate’s Smart Irrigation answers this question in its entirety. cultYvate has pioneered the deployment of the latest IoT technology in India in terms of integrating wireless soil moisture sensors, smart valves, flow meters using LORAWAN framework at an affordable cost to price sensitive Indian farmers.

Agriculture industry in India is fairly disorganized, given the emphasis that has always been on improving the seed variety or adding more nutrient or control the pest and diseases using dangerous pest and disease controllers and improve productivity. Mallesh TM, CEO, cultYvate explains that while some or all of these have given some encouraging results for short time, the same have failed to sustain the results over long period of time. The reason being all these solutions were not integrated. cultYvate is focused on the precision irrigation aspect of Precision agriculture that includes data collection, analysis and taking action in real time. “We have seen some great results, where farmers
are able to grow the crops using less water, lesser pest /disease instances, while getting higher quality yield. Some of our Banana growing farmers have registered a revenue increase of close to 24 percent while the profits have increased by close to 40 percent due to timely watering and nutrient management, based on real time monitoring and controlling”, informs Mallesh.

"Cultyvate is focused on the precision irrigation aspect of precision agriculture that includes data collection, analysis and taking action in real time"

Watering in a Smart Manner
cultYvate’s smart irrigation takes into account the typical Indian challenges of not having power during day time, small land holding, price sensitive uneducated farmers etc. The wireless LORAWAN based solution offered by cultYvate is easy to install and can manage without any human intervention at all. By practice, farmers water once in 10 - 12 days with flood irrigation and once a week with drip irrigation. This gap increases the crop stress resulting in lower quality and yield. This agritech expert’s smart irrigation has adopted multiple innovative techniques such as Pulse Irrigation (PI) OR Partial Root Dry (PRD), where watering is done ensuring that the plant stress is at optimum level.This worked exceptionally well for crops such as Grapes and Pomegranate requiring precise watering which keeps varying throughout the season and at times also requires creating artificial stress, by reducing the water.

cultYvate started off with an objective to provide state of the art technology in irrigation management at affordable cost where Indian farmers find it value for money. Though cultYvate got a headstart in offering LORAWAN in rural India, there were challenges that got tagged along. While the cultYvate team addressed the technical challenges, convincing the farmers about the need of this technology became an equally serious concern. Many farmers felt that watering is a simple activity that they have been doing for generations and there is nothing new for them to learn or implement. The cultYvate team had to conduct multiple workshops, bring irrigation experts, set-up demo plots, and make the farmer understand how they can grow more using less water by measuring the water flow for a crop season in their farm land. “Banana, Grape and Pomegranate farmers have appreciated the utility of our smart irrigation. Sugarcane farmers were completely shocked to know that they were consuming close to 2.2 Crore litres of water per acre per year and were getting 40 tons of yield”, adds the CEO. With cultYvate’s smart irrigation system, the farmers were able to grow close to 105 tons of sugarcane, while using only 1.2 core liners of water. Few farmers were happy as they not only got the higher yield, but can grow the crop in extended area, which were unusable due to water shortage.
Solving Real Problems
Currently, cultYvate is working for a corporate client, where the chloride level in the crop was very high. This company has been engaged with farmers for the past 70 years and the farmers were using flood irrigation as a means of watering the crop. As a standard practice, the watering was happening once in 15 days. After a due review of the process, it was revealed that watering once a week is leading to higher crop stress and accumulation of chloride which was impacting the quality and the shelf life. The company decided to work with the farmers and government and implemented the drip irrigation. While the water saving was evident, the farmers found it hard to water every day and hence resorted to watering once in 5 days with the drip irrigation system. As a result, the chloride accumulation reduced a bit, but not too much. With cultYvate’s smart irrigation, the farmers are able to do watering daily and even more than once a day, depending upon the soil type.

Pomegranate is a hardy crop and does very well when precise watering is done and artificial stress is created at different stages of the crop’s growing stages. Farmers were finding it difficult to understand the precise water requirement. Even if they did, it would be difficult to maintain the same, given the irregularity of the power supply. As a result, farmers were keeping the valves open and the pump switched ON. As a result, the plants would get either short or excess water depending upon duration of the electric power. With cultYvate’s smart irrigation system, farmers are not at all worried about watering, as the system would check the water requirement, presence of power and open the valves for specific durations. Most farmers using the system have appreciated it as they are able to sleep though the night and also need not stay at the farm just to ensure the watering.

The Road Ahead
cultYvate envisages providing smart irrigation solution to every farmer having a borewell and land of any size. Working towards this vision, the company is investing on building very low cost IoT and AI based solutions that are easy to install and use. Besides, AI and ML are deployed so that the learning from one farmer can be taken to others who are growing similar crop, in similar soil type and agro climatic zone. cultYvate is working with farmers at the bottom of the pyramid in producing food using lesser water, less pest/disease controllers and nutrients. When these farmers save water, it benefits the environment and allows other fellow farmers to use the saved water for their livelihood. When lesser pest/disease controllers are used, farmers get to work in healthy environment and at the same time consumers get safer food with lesser chemicals. More importantly, farmers make higher revenue and higher profit.