Technological Intercropping with the Cloud, IoT, and Big Data in Indian Organic Agriculture
[Abstract] The Himalayan challenges encompassing Indian agriculture at present is the deterioration of soi1l quality, the decrease in quantity and quality of farm produce, the indiscriminate use of agrochemicals and synthetic fertilizers, unattractive price remuneration for producers, exiguous water availability for irrigation, poor post harvest practices, and unpredictable weather conditions. Corollaries to these appalling situations include growers who are further prone to distress sales, inaccessibility to formal credit, insufficient market intelligence, detachment from mainstream commercial supply chains, bleak information networks, counterfeit agri inputs, and mediocre crop management practices. When it comes to organic agriculture, there are many hard challenges, as the protocols are much more stringent and unforgiving. Today, organic agriculture should undergo a paradigm shift from being only traditional to being organic smart agriculture (OSA) in which the technological intercropping (TI) is present with various information and communication technologies (ICTs) and digital technologies, like IoT, cloud computing and big data analytics. This would play a key role in maneuvering desirable information and tools, leading to better decision making and risk management. Making the organic agriculture smart would involve using the latest high yielding agricultural technologies coupled up with the value based technological interventions for improving agricultural productivity and sustainability, all the while remaining globally competitive and environment friendly. However, given the technological complexities and asymmetry in information networks, small and marginal farmers may not be able to comprehend or come on this platform single handedly; therefore, the role of farmer based organizations like farmer producer organizations (FPOs) farmer clubs, NGOs operating in rural areas, SHGs, rural formal credit institutions (RFCI) including micro finance institutions (MFIs) crop insurance service providers, panchayat bodies, post offices, certification bodies, etc. will be absolutely critical to strategize and execute the entire game plan. The author envisions a CONSORTIUM DRIVEN MULTIPLE STAKEHOLDER MODEL (CDMSM) for providing these analytics services to the rural diaspora in a customized manner. The idea is to utilize the existing infrastructure available in rural/rural town areas by technologically upgrading them for reaching out to the organic small and marginal farmers. Hence, this would be a cost effective and faster means to educate and coach the organic grower community. Further, the rural unemployed youths can be trained to act as infopreneurs, and they can be employed with the above mentioned stakeholder bodies for installation of sensors and proper dissemination of information. Again, the possibility of carbon credit can be worked out, as well as once the technological intercropping takes a concrete shape as the data and information collected integrated with the upgraded infrastructure can be used to do the carbon audit, credit/debit, and trade.