Innovator Spotlight: FarmGuide

Founded by IIT Alumni, we are a 3-year old company with experienced 60+ tech professionals from IITs/NITs. We have built in-house Agri platform, under which, we monitor over 12Cr farms and 30+ crops every week through our image processing algorithms and have a dedicated information service which has benefitted over 26 lakh farmers to consume crop advisory, insurance, and loan advisory, mandi prices, and several other value-added information.  

FarmGuide started its journey in collaboration with Department of Agriculture, Government of Rajasthan creating E-Governance module in close collaboration with administration and currently working with DoA, Government of India for the development of National crop insurance portal running all across India for implementation of Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana. Our platform is used by over 1.6 lakh Bank branches across the country for short term crop loan based Interest Subvention scheme implementation. 

FarmGuide being a research-based agri-tech start-up is developing its image-processing based FarmEngine to address information asymmetry in agriculture. Vision is to utilize satellite images, image processing, data algorithms and machine learning for FARM Profile, CROP Profile, Weather Forecast, crop identification, yield estimation and to validate agriculture census which will help in better management decisions. 

FarmEngine has mapped coordinates of individual farms & calculate the area of farms by computing pixel-scale mapping along with NDVI & MNDWI values on 21 lac sqkm in India (True colour, time series, 70 cm). This helped for segmentation of individual farms and active agricultural area estimation using time series indices. FarmGuide has integrated in-house developed crop fingerprinting algorithms& Machine Learning pipeline within FarmEngine to converge Farm with Crop. FarmEngine provides Farm segment, farm area, current crop and crop history in last 3 years, Historical RGB high resolution imagery of 5-7 years, Digital elevation of the farm (Slope), Farm Rating relative to nearby farms, Soil moisture, Soil composition (Sand, Silt, Clay ratio), Nearest Soil Health Card point data (pH, OC, NPK, micro-nutrients) as per government conducted soil survey, Farm Rating relative to nearby farms, Irrigated/Rainfed, Connectivity with the road, railway, banks, market/mandi, water source (canal, river), seed/mc/fertilizer dealer. It also includes the attempt to deduce farm rating, land classification, crop-detection, and remote sensing-based cropping frequency from the primary set.

FarmGuide enables companies to map the farmer consumers with a farm on an easy to use GIS platform which has auto segmented farm boundaries. It enables companies from BFSI, Agri-input, Procurement sector to profile areas, monitor farms and conduct targeted marketing of their product/service to the right set of farmers. It has also successfully extracted tags (roadway, land usage, railway, waterway, elevation) using OSM & DEM. It replaces the hassles of ground visit and also enriches the experience of the farmer to see his farm details without a visit to him. All this information and leads are made available through FarmGuide dashboard which serves as a one-stop solution for the companies helping them in monitoring. The system brings along real-time business insights and crop patterns which can also be downloaded from the dashboard itself. Through in-house data analytics FarmGuide can identify a suitable location for the dealer network establishment and can predict the quantity of product to be sold in the market in nearby geography. This will help to ensure the timely delivery of the product and avid wastage in transportation.