Digitising Agriculture

RAN MAIDAN, President & CEO of Netafim, a global leader in smart irrigation solutions, asserts that farmers can now control their fields remotely from the palm of their hands using their mobile phones. Agriculture is getting more and more digital, and its future lies in leveraging real-time analytics and automated systems.

By 2050, the world’s population will near 10 billion people. Most of the addition will be in developing countries like India, where the improvement in quality of life is also driving an increase of per capita food consumption. As a result, to feed the world we will need to produce 50 per cent more food than we do today, while arable land and water resources are limited and scarce. At the same time, current practices in agriculture, which consume 70 per cent of the global water withdrawal (and 91 per cent in India), are mostly inefficient. An example is the still vastly used flood irrigation method, which wastes water and generates unoptimised yields. To address these challenges, the world will need to adopt smart technologies and learn how to better utilise its resources to grow more with less.

India is one of the most water-challenged countries in the world, with 16 per cent of the world’s population and access to only 4 per cent of the world’s water resources. With more than 90 per cent of the fresh water withdrawals going to agriculture, and following the erratic monsoon and farmer’s traditional use of inefficient flood irrigation – including for growing water-hungry crops like paddy, cotton and sugarcane – groundwater levels have fallen over the years. The water scarcity, decreasing cultivable land, and lower productivity are adding to the woes of the agricultural community in India, and emphasise the need for a change in the sector.

Drip irrigation is a technology that delivers to each plant the amount of water and fertilisers that it needs, when it needs and where it needs them. Thus, it enables farmers to double their yields while using only 50 per cent of the water required with traditional irrigation methods, and at the same time increases the efficiency of other farm inputs like fertilisers, pesticides, labour, etc.