Preparations underway for Digital agriculture: K Devdutta
Source: Chronicle News Service

Imphal, April 08 2025: Global climate and environmental change are posing serious challenges to crops and vegetable plantation but Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help in a big way towards successful harvest of crops and vegetables.

Accordingly, the Government of India has started preparation for taking up nationwide Digital agriculture to bring significant change in agriculture and allied sectors of the country in near future, stated director (horticulture & soil conservation) K Devdutta.

In an exclusive interview, K Devdutta told The People's Chronicle that plantation of horticultural crops in the state faces numerous challenges due to various factors like lack of proper irrigation, inadequate moisture content in soil and fluctuating weather brought by climate change.

In addition to this, key components of soil like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium could not be determined without laboratory tests by scientists.

However, AI could easily determine requirements of plants nowadays and help in precision farming.

According to K Devdutta, irrigation is important for plants as it is directly related with maintaining moisture contents of soil.

As AI could predict rainfall and weather pattern, farmer could plan their activities in advance, he said while maintaining that weather forecast is very important for farmers.

Due to various factors, huge quantities of harvested crops are wasted in the country every year.

Similarly, around 40 percent of harvested horticultural crops in Manipur go waste every year with some of the factors attributed to untimely harvesting, using non-conventional means and violent shaking of taller plants resulting in damage to the fruit from dropping on the hard surface.

Crops harvested in these manners have short shelf life, he cautioned.

However, with the help of AI exact stage of crops could be determined and machines are available nowadays to detect whether the crops are ripe for harvesting.

Apart from this, crops could be harvested nowadays without any damage and such properly harvested crops could keep for a long time with proper packaging after sorting and grading with the AI generated robotic machines, he added.

According to K Devdutta, green pigment or chlorophyll in leaves of plants produce glucose through photosynthesis process with the help of sunlight and plants survive with self-produced glucose.

A plant will not be healthy in case of less chlorophyll and such plants will be growth deficient.

However, AI could easily determine chlorophyll contents of plants as also other requisite nutrients of plants like calcium, iron, zinc, etc.

If found to have insufficient nutrients, requisite nutrients of the particular plant could be sourced through drip irrigation, aerial spray or other mechanisms.

Marketing is another challenge generally faced by the farmers after harvesting their crops.

Farmers get less profit from selling their crops if there happen to be abundant availability of crops in the market.

However, farmer could do market analysis with the help of AI and IOT (Internet of Things) and harvest the crops when demands are high in market.

This will help farmers in earning commensurate profit, K Devdutta said and stressed the need for giving advice to farmers in this regard so as to get more profit from selling their harvested crops.

Noting that farmers usually detect diseases in advanced stages, he explained that plant diseases could be easily detected nowadays using drones fitted with RGB or 3D programme trained software and accordingly take up control management.

K Devdutta further informed The People's Chronicle that the Government of India will soon take up Digital agriculture throughout the country and this programme will incorporate many support schemes for the welfare of farmers.

Under this programme, guidelines for utilisation of AI beginning from precision farming to farm mechanisation will be formulated.

As such, Digital agriculture will help in producing quality crops even in a small state like Manipur and will surely help in improving economy of the state, K Devdutta hoped.

(This article is being published as part of the 5th Scientific Journalism Programme on 'Artificial Intelligence and its uses' under the Public Relations and Media Management (PRMM) Cell of Central Agricultural University, Imphal) .

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