Sensing for Precision Farming in India

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects that per capita food consumption in South Asia will increase almost 20% by 2050, from 2300 kcal/person/day in 2005/2007 to 2750 kcal/person/day.[i] With little additional farmland available for cultivation (average annual growth in area used to grow cereals in India decreased by 0.03% in the five years to 2011-2012), it is clear that long-term growth in agricultural output will come from improvements in yield.[ii] Yield intensity of many crops grown in India is well below that of other neighboring countries. For example, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh produced 94%, 57%, and 24% more rice paddy per hectare, respectively, than India in 2010.[iii] This can be attributed to management practices, resource availability, and seed genetics. We maintain that, in order to produce seeds which are better suited to local climates, plant breeders in India (and around the world) would benefit from more detailed information about the in-season performance of their crops. This additional information would allow faster cycles of breeding and speed up seed improvement.

Within the realm of precision agriculture, much work is already ongoing to offer farmers better ways to sense the status of their soil, plants, and fields. Much of that work focuses on the sensing of a static state of the soil or plant. This project proposes that studying the rates of growth or other changes in plant status can offer additional insight in the management of crops. As a start, we are looking at measurement of growth rates of individual plants in the support of plant breeders in India. This offers particular challenges in precision of measurements, because of the very slow growth of plants and the inherent noise in natural systems.