Food Tech News

Bengaluru, June 4, 2024: Cropin Technology, a global Agtech leader enabling intelligent agriculture, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) India Private Limited* have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) focused on enabling Cropin to build a solution to address the pressing issue of global hunger and food insecurity. This initiative aims to help Cropin develop core data architecture, analytics, modeling, and simulation components that can aggregate global farmland data and broader climate intelligence within a single solution. The solution will provide decision intelligence to governments, development agencies, and agri-businesses, and help them ensure food security for vulnerable populations. The collaboration reinforces Cropin’s commitment to enabling predictable, traceable, and sustainable global food systems, while supporting food security efforts undertaken by AWS Impact Computing, an initiative which aims to identify potential solutions that can improve the lives of humans, other species, and natural habitats.

Recent estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reveal a stark reality: between 691 and 783 million people faced hunger in 2022, reversing decades of progress. This figure represents an alarming increase of 122 million people compared to 2019, before the pandemic. While technology alone cannot solve hunger, it is a crucial tool for strategic decision making. It enables governments and organizations analyze insights emerging from models and simulations of systems as diverse as agriculture, trade, and climate, in order to develop and test holistic strategies to address food insecurity.

As part of this initiative, Cropin will develop workloads that could eventually constitute a Food Security Decision Intelligence solution powered by AWS. The solution would leverage AWS's advanced computing capabilities, including High Performance Computing (HPC), modeling/simulation, internet of things (IoT), robotics, visual/spatial computing, and generative artificial intelligence (AI). It will combine Cropin's deep domain expertise in agriculture, earth observation sciences, data science, AI/ML, and deep learning models to provide accurate and granular crop yield intelligence for the most important food crops worldwide, initially focusing on rice, wheat, potato and maize, as they collectively account for more than half of the world's food requirements.

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The AI powered solution will integrate satellite imagery with in-situ field images and remote data to improve agricultural analytics through scalable models. These models will provide both micro (plot) and macro (regional/ global) insights and will be further analyzed by identifying patterns and anomalies in the production and quality of major crops across global regions. Cropin's AI, model building, data processing, and reporting will leverage AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies; Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant; Amazon QuickSight, which offers unified business intelligence at hyperscale; and AWS’s HPC infrastructure.

AWS will explore providing technical expertise to Cropin on its advanced compute services (HPC, ML/ Gen AI, IoT, geospatial), as well as industry insights from its agriculture, and sustainability specialists, to power Cropin’s platform. The insights generated through the workloads will be integrated into Cropin’s open-source dashboard. They can be disseminated via a WhatsApp or an SMS-based alerting system for stakeholders, including farmers, field officers, governments, development agencies, and agribusinesses. AWS will further support Cropin by exploring collaboration opportunities with research organisations and academic institutions such as Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI), to drive research and development in food security, climate-resilient agriculture, and food sustainability.

Speaking on the announcement, Krishna Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, Cropin said, “We can analyze and identify changes in cultivation patterns at a country scale, spanning from sowing to harvesting. This includes examining weather parameters, moisture availability, and disease outbreaks at scale to understand their impact on crop health and yield. These insights are crucial for policymakers, enabling them to make informed decisions to combat hunger and ensure food security. Our collaboration with AWS marks a significant step towards building a global real-time decision intelligence solution, which will provide insights into several aspects of food security - agriculture, climate, trade, and supply chain - in one dashboard. This engagement with AWS helps us showcase the use of technology, data, and AI to solve these pressing issues.”

Shalini Kapoor, Director and Chief Technologist, AWS India Private Limited, said, “The world population is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 20501, increasing food production requirements on the arable land available today. At AWS, we are inspired to work with customers to solve the most complex challenges at scale. Our work with Cropin showcases the power of advanced compute capabilities on the cloud to drive social and environmental impact. AWS’s generative AI, simulation, and data analytics technologies can help organisations like Cropin surface actionable and relevant insights from diverse data sets, and scale their solution globally to empower decision makers to reduce food insecurity.”

Source: https://www.cropin.com/