Long Way To Go
Dancing Crow Farm, near Seattle, US, finds a special mention in gatesnotes.com, the personal blog of Bill Gates, the founder of information technology (IT) behemoth Microsoft. The farm is a pilot site for FarmBeats, a key research project of Microsoft which strives to make data driven precision agriculture affordable for even the poorest farmers. What Gates considers "remarkable" about Dancing Crow is that the team of researchers at FarmBeat, led by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Ranveer Chandra, utilises unused TV spectrum or airwaves to transmit data from sensors installed at various locations of the farm and digitally analyses those to offer crop advisory. Unlike most farm data systems, which require expensive transmitters to connect, this one is low cost and helps collect and analyse weather conditions, temperature, pH, moisture level of soil, and other parameters, using low cost sensors, drones, and vision and machine learning algorithms. The result: up to 30 per cent less water needed for irrigation, 44 per cent less lime to
