How Cropin Cloud is solving critical challenges for farming companies
A 2022 survey lists supply chain disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, and climate change as being among the most pressing challenges in agriculture. Interestingly, these challenges have remained a priority for several years. So, what is different now, and why should you care? The answer lies in the approach. Considering the rise of Agriculture 4.0, digital advancement could be the missing piece of the puzzle.
That is why Cropin, a pioneer in the sector, developed Cropin Cloud to solve everyday problems in farm management that consume enormous time and human effort. Cropin Cloud leverages remote sensing data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms to solve the eight most critical challenges haunting farming companies.
1. Overwhelming record-keeping
In addition to cash and accrual records, farming companies need to maintain the following:
- Accuracy to prevent tax penalties
- Crop price/volume adjustments
- Farming activity records
- Budget and inventory statements
These tasks are time-consuming and complex, with ample room for human error and data loss.
Solution
Cropin Cloud helps store and organize information across farms. It helps with efficient collection and storage of data on cost, labor, Agri-input resource usage details, and also maintains production/work schedules. It guarantees a secure and easy-to-access environment for farm records. The software also monitors farm activities and tracks expenses and budget. Cropin Cloud centralizes farm operations, manages crop production, and enables optimization, all of which improve the overall efficiency of the farm.
2. Farm and farmer profile digitalization
Digitalization of agriculture accelerates business transformation and builds reliable farm and farmer profiles, enabling farming companies to address issues related to contracting, production management, market and finance access, supply chain management, etc.
Solution
Cropin Cloud’s integrated portfolio of mobile apps and web solutions solves multiple farm digitalization problems:
- Cropin Grow is a one-stop solution for farm overview, agent tasks monitoring, data-driven insights to support decision-making, and dynamic data configuration.
- Cropin Connect is a multi-channel, multi-lingual farmer engagement solution. It supports in-field activity records and seamless stakeholder communication.
- Cropin Trace is a scalable farm-to-fork traceability solution that prevents counterfeiting and ensures produce quality throughout the supply chain via its patented QR code labeling.
- Cropin Data Hub integrates external data sources like historic records, remote sensing satellite information, and mechanization data from farming equipment and other solutions in use by the enterprise for additional context. These inputs are used to develop agricultural analytics models to offer data-driven insights and advisories.
3. Site selection
Limited land resources make farm identification one of the biggest challenges in the pre-sowing stage. Delays in identifying, shortlisting, and securing arable land could have a domino effect on growing cycles and meeting that year's target yield.
Solution
Smart platforms such as Cropin Cloud help with the swift identification of suitable sites, offering speed and intelligent cost optimization via:
- Location and crop-agnostic artificial intelligence (AI) models
- The most extensive Agri-knowledge graph for users
- Intelligence at a crop, plot, and PIN code level
- Satellite imagery and cloud computing for site selection decisions
4. Contracting
Agribusinesses that work with contract farmers globally need a standard solution for monitoring various farmlands producing multiple crops. The objective is to adopt standard processes globally across farms and farmers, eliminating tedious paperwork and human labor. In addition, a robust digital platform can empower smallholder farmers by leveraging agricultural technology like farm automation for remote monitoring, irrigation systems, and AI for extending advisories.
Solution
Cropin Cloud creates a universal template with editable fields that can be used across regions that cultivate various crops, to record and update contract details. It eases data storage and retrieval, thereby simplifying the entire contracting process. Digitizing contract processes with Cropin Cloud automates the entire process from farmer verification to contract signing, enhances transparency, speed, and scalability. What is more, the contract is secure and always accessible.
5. Farm monitoring
Checking vegetation indices and identifying problems that need human intervention are among the common essentials to efficient farm management. However, the absence of advanced monitoring solutions can complicate matters.
Solution
Cropin Cloud enables digitalization to minimize human effort for data collection. In doing so, it solves problems related to the lack of visibility of farming activities and field staff and plugs data loss. Simultaneously, Cropin’s satellite-based remote monitoring is one of the best precision agriculture technologies that generates field images for expert analytics – and correspondingly, more precise farm management. It enables farmers and farming companies to:
- Observe the crop growth stage
- Assess plant health and development
- Detect growth deviations and track their consequences
6. Farmer engagement
Farmer engagement is crucial to knowledge-sharing and improving overall agriculture practices. However, businesses could thrive if farming companies have a streamlined platform to encourage such engagement.
Solution
Cropin Cloud’s integrated communication systems powered by Cropin Connect enables:
- System-generated events and on-demand two-way communication (between processes and personnel working both in the field and beyond the confines of a farm)
- Farmer-agronomist communications and knowledge dissemination of Package of Practices (PoP)
- Data-driven insights that support decision-making
7. Reliable data-driven insights
Farming companies often need help choosing a digitalization partner whose insights are relevant and reliable to identify factors that make a difference in data collection and processing. They need partners who can integrate data from various assets, including ones developed by them and are in use.
Solution
Cropin Cloud can serve as an ideal partner, as it leverages 22 AI contextual deep-learning models to solve diverse challenges during day-to-day operations. It combines insights from these models with other datasets to provide business inputs as required, thereby promising a transparent and agile solution.
8. Harvest management
Several studies have identified a lack of reliable data and standardized methods for estimating post-harvest losses (PHL) as barriers to developing sustainable mitigation options and policies to reduce PHL.
Solution
Cropin Cloud’s data-driven and AI-powered smart farming solutions can help schedule harvest dates and provide accurate yield estimates using AI/ML models. This can be used to manage logistics to collect produce, plan harvest batches, and grade them. It keeps post-harvest losses to a minimum while ensuring compliance and transparency. The platform improves coordination among farmers by streamlining farm operations, logistics, warehousing, distribution, and packaging.
Furthermore, the Cropin Cloud platform has pre-built advanced data frameworks designed to solve problems related to information on yield irregularity and its management. This can drive immediate and proactive error correction and ensure better supply chain management with end-to-end traceability.
The bottom line
Cropin Cloud brings significant benefits to farming companies, culminating in better harvest management and stakeholder engagement. It significantly improves operational efficiency, eliminating the challenges arising from conventional agri-business approaches. For example, precise insights for farm management can help overcome productivity challenges by optimizing the tracking, managing, and monitoring of farm data. Cropin Cloud enables farmer engagement and shares Package of Practices (PoP) and alerts with farmers. All this can help control the negative impacts of agriculture on climate change.
