Introducing AEROS: Location Intelligence Platform
By: Pranav Kumar Anshu
Tags: Engineering, Maps, GIS, Remote Sensing, Agritech

Overview

DeHaat is bullish on leveraging technology to bring about the next revolution in agriculture. Technology has proved crucial in providing end-to-end solutions & services to farmers as well as other stakeholders in the agri-supply chain (e.g. fertiliser manufacturers, seed producers, output commodity buyers, finance partners etc).

A lot of activities done and processes followed by these different stakeholders are location-sensitive. Agricultural activities on field (e.g. seed variety selection, irrigation planning, chemical application, etc) are immensely impacted by geospatial conditions like soil type, soil nutrients, climatic conditions etc. Agricultural supply chain operations are also impacted by locations based on different crops in different regions, varying terrains and changing weather conditions.

These above activities & processes are not just dependent on geospatial conditions, but they also generate a lot of geospatial data. Supply chain movements of perishable and non-perishable goods, warehouse storage, sales & returns of goods etc. leave digital footprint that give important insights for future decisions. Similarly, farm level events like changing weather conditions, impact of floods & droughts, infestation by diseases etc. provide important datasets for deciding future course of actions on farms.

AEROS & Scout

We have envisaged AEROS as a location intelligence platform that leverages these different geospatial datasets and lets the users get a near-realtime view of activities happening on ground and generate insights, identify trends, and get aid in decision making.

In this article, I would be focusing on one of many products built under AEROS platform — Scout — which is a web application for geospatial visualisation & analysis. It helps the users in discovering spatial relationships & patterns which are otherwise hidden and helps answer questions related to why things happen where and when they do.

Scout brings the power of GIS & location intelligence to different stakeholders in DeHaat in a customized, easy-to-use solution — right from agronomists to the business strategy team to the input & output business partners.

Use cases

1. For agronomists: Farmer advisory & support

Farming is an activity that depends on a lot of factors, many of them outside the control of the farmers — making the activity inherently full of uncertainties. The use of all available data by our agronomists to provide timely advisory for farmers helps decrease the uncertainty.

Agronomists use the solution to visualize and correlate these different factors visually over a map-centric tool to reveal factors & patterns that could not otherwise be identified easily. Advisory generated by agronomists using this tool are critical for farmers in all stages of the crop life cycle — be it irrigation scheduling, spray scheduling, anomaly analysis, land management, harvest planning or yield estimation.

Visualising agricultural index NDVI at farm level thereby identifying healthy & unhealthy crops

2. For business partners

Input suppliers are able to see where and how much their products are being used, soil conditions, weather conditions and crop acreages at different geographies. They are able to better manage their supplies to different geographies based on these geo-temporal trends.

Output buyers are able to visualise crop acreages in different areas, see past crop yields, see flood-inundated areas etc. giving them a deeper understanding of expected outputs, enabling them to optimize their operations.

Visualising product sales trends of an agri-product in different Indian states for past one year

3. For leadership & strategy teams: Business status & strategy

A map-centric dashboard of DeHaat’s supply chain ecosystem — including locations of farms, DeHaat centers & nodes gives a concrete sense of concentration and gap areas.

It also gives a deeper understanding of the historical trends, current business landscape and expectations in the near future. Correlation of business KPIs, demographic parameters and other points of interest are critical in business planning.

Visualising farmer presence (based on color) and correlating it with DeHaat center concentration (based on height) at district level in Bihar state

Way Forward

The use of location intelligence in different aspects of the agri-business ecosystem is a force-multiplier for the impact that DeHaat is making using technology. AEROS constitutes a critical component of a holistic AI-enabled platform that can do predictive analytics and automate a lot of manual efforts.

Further penetration of technology at the farm level will increase in the future. This would include increased farmer access to smartphones, setup of IoT based systems for more intensive data collection & precision farming, use of drones for data collection & spraying of chemicals etc. AEROS platform will continue to evolve and make the best use of all these datasets to keep us ahead of the pack and help us continue leading the revolution in agriculture.