Predicting attacks

“In 2017, over 100,000 hectares of farmland in Odisha were attacked by pests. Crops were completely destroyed and farmers committed suicide,” recalls Rishikesh Amit Nayak. Nayak comes from a farming family in Bhubaneswar and felt compassion for the desperate farmers. “I was in 9th grade then and developed a keen interest in technology. I realised that while the problems faced by farmers are being studied, there are no real solutions to prevent them,” he says.

This is how Nayak’s affair with agritech began. In 2018, Nayak, who is currently studying mechanical engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology in Tamil Nadu, launched Kishan Know to help farmers detect microbial pest infestations through thermal imaging. Kishan Know was initially a device-based solution. “I gave farmers a miniature thermal camera with a microprocessor and asked them to walk around their farm twice a day with it. All the data was to be collected and sent to a server, from where image recognition and deep learning models would help detect anomalies. The idea was to look for changes in the maximum temperature of plant leaves that would indicate the presence of microbial pests like bacteria and viruses,” he explains. Researchers from the Odisha Institute of Agriculture and Technology helped validate the data analyzed.

“In this way, farmers could be warned of an impending attack within just 12 hours,” he says.

With the help of this technology, farmers in several parts of Odisha have been able to reduce the extent of crop losses. For example, Deepak Kumar Sethi of Padmapur village in Jagatsinghpur district was warned of a pest infestation by Kishan Know in 2019. “I would have noticed the pests only 10-15 days later and by then I would have lost almost the entire crop,” he says. Sethi was initially hesitant to use the technology but says the results were so accurate that he is now in awe of it. “As a farmer, I know how to control pest infestation but not how to predict it. Kishan Know fills that gap,” he says.

While the system alerted farmers quickly, it was not affordable. So Nayak decided to change strategy and use a software-based solution using satellite imagery. In collaboration with Intel, Nayak launched this solution in 2021. “First, I went to the farmers and collected information about their land area and its coordinates, the crops they grew, their irrigation patterns and more. The land was then monitored using satellite imagery and every two days we received updates from the farmers on the health of the crops to detect early signs of pests or diseases,” explains Nayak. This version is more affordable for the farmers at Rs 82 per month per acre (1 acre is 0.4 hectares).

For the past three years, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Nayak has focused on predicting crop diseases. “The goal is to use high-altitude balloons to measure wind, rising temperatures and heat direction, which play a role in the spread of diseases. But this solution is still under development. Once it is ready, I will release Kishan Know to a wider market,” he says. Nayak has now expanded into other technological areas as well, working on solutions that could help the education sector.

This was first published in the print edition of 1-15 December 2023 of Down to earth