India: Leveraging Data Science to Improve Agronomy

By Analytics India Magazine

India’s agriculture sector contributes only 14-15% towards the country’s GDP however it consumes 40-45% of total employment, writes Anil Kumar Sharma at Analytics India Magazine. Almost half of the agricultural land depends on rainfall. There is a great opportunity to leverage data science technologies to analyze the agriculture landscape, grain demand, explore past data, gain insights, and define formal models that may be used by farmers to make decisions about crop selection, soil management, and planning logistics.

The world population will rise to 10 billion by 2050 and considering the current agricultural sector scenario we are going to face approximately 56% gap between food demand and supply. Considering that arable land size is limited and won’t increase due to high urbanization, there is an urgent need to increase grain production rate (i.e., tons per hectare to address this gap). The use of data science with aid of IoT products in the agriculture sector can definitely help in making informed decisions at various stages in the agriculture life cycle to improve yield like situation predication, task recommendation, automation, etc.

Agriculture land in India is getting fragmented over the past decades while food demand is growing at a higher rate with population rise. Traditional agricultural methods should be augmented with information communication technologies to better manage existing resources and tasks to maximize revenue.

Continue reading at Analytics India Magazine.