Centre inks 5 deals for digital agriculture push

Context

The ministry of agriculture signed agreements with five firms to push a project to harness big data from the farm sector for a digitised platform known as “Agri Stack”.

What is Digital Agriculture?

• Digital agriculture is the use of digital technology to integrate agricultural production from the paddock to the consumer. 
• These technologies can provide the agricultural industry with tools and information to make more informed decisions and improve productivity.

The project

• The agri-stack will aid precise targeting of subsidies, services and policies.
• Under the programme, each farmer of the country would be assigned an FID, or a farmers’ ID, linked to land records to uniquely identify them.
• India has 140 million operational farm-land holdings. 
• The database will connect seemingly simple data points: the number of occupational farmers who avail of subsidies, how much land they own, what they grow and which agro-climatic zones they fall in. 
• These data points will be triangulated by software-driven intelligence that will throw up a far more illuminating picture of the rural and agricultural economy.