Dr. Parveen Kumar, Dr. Anil Kumar
The father of green revolution and Nobel laureate ‘Norman Borlaug’ had said that in the next 40 years, farmers will have to grow as much food as they have in the last 10,000 years combined. This is because an increasing number of people on the planet will place greater demands on our resources, infrastructure from energy and transportation to basic foods and water needs. As such it will require new innovative solutions to satisfy the increasing demand of population. According to Lance Donny, the founder of startup On Farm systems, an agricultural data company, the history of agriculture can be studied under three phases. Farming 1.0 describes agriculture from ancient times to 1920 when farming was essentially a lot of manual labour with the use of crude traditional methods and a low productivity affair which fed the people but required Seven million small farms and thirty per cent of the population to do it. It was the era usually when our forefathers practiced agriculture. It also focused on land reforms through legislations that led to tenancy reform such as the abolition of the Zamindari system and the intermediaries and the ceiling and consolidation of land holdings. Though the implementation of land reform in India has varied vastly across states, overall, these reforms have impacted 12.4 million tenants on 15.6 million acres of land.
The period of industrial agriculture referred to as Farming 2.0 corresponds to the period from 1920 to 2010 where machines, fertilisers and better seeds helped farmers to produce more with fewer efforts. Farming 2.0 was the era most of our parents operated in; it began when agronomic management practices like supplemental nitrogen and new tools like synthetic pesticides allowed us to take advantage of the dramatically higher yield potential offered by hybrid seed corn. The period of green revolution in India can also be included in Farming 2.0. The defining characteristics of Farming 2.0 were more emphasis on multiple cropping, relatively cheap inputs, increased outreach of the extension services, the spread of irrigation network and the resultant dramatical increase of yield potential. However, the environmental impact of the increased use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides was not taken care of in early to mid phase of Farming 2.0. This miscalculation has already proved too costly for us in terms of human health and loss of biodiversity.
Now, we have entered the Farming age 3. Farming 3.0 is a new era, which is defined by the increased use of technology and innovation in farming, greater professionalism within the farming ecosystem, a growing consideration for the environment and higher-quality farm produce. This is the time when high tech sensors, cloud computing, specialised software and the internet of things are being integrated into farming. In this new age agricultural data has become crucial. The data so gathered is used to help farmers make more efficient use of their resources like land, water and fertiliser. As the availability of weather data to farmers enable them to plan their operations according to weather conditions and make best use of resources available to them. Of course, much of the data gathering is being done by agricultural drones’ satellites and smart farm equipments. Lance Donny, the CEO of Agritech startup On Farm systems highlights the potential of Farming 3.0 as a data rich source to farming that utilises inputs from diverse sources on plants and farm equipments, weather stations and satellite images to make better farming decisions. With cheap sensors now allowing the farming community to connect to and understand the physical world in a way that’s been impossible on such a scale previously. New techniques of augmenting food production like Indoor agriculture through Hydroponics and Aeroponics in green houses and ware houses is now possible. All these make use of the controlled environment conditions because growers are better able to control conditions in a confined space than in the field making. Thus makes them well suited to Farming 3.0 because fewer variables mean a cleaner signal. Farming 3.0 as the democratisation of farming as it promises that some specialised knowledge that commercial farming requires today will be available to all regardless of their farming prowess or economic situation.
Farming 3.0 will bring with it disruption in the present system; in tillage, in equipments and in farming systems and will also provide massive opportunities. Equipment companies will now focus on right-sizing equipment for operations, eliminating unnecessary field operations, and running the numbers on annual cost of use will continue to do quite well. The opportunities will be in different aspects like precision farming, data handling and analysis. The gains in Farming 3.0 will not all come from a person working harder. Many of the gains will come through the embrace and adoption of technology. Farming 3.0 will be driven by economics, environmentalism, the incredible promise of synthetic biology and changing consumer demand, and retailers need to be ready for serious change. The shift to Farming 3.0 represents a movement away from efficiency as the primary focus of nearly all efforts to a new focus on profitability. Efficiency meant doing old things incrementally cheaper each year. In Farming 2.0 the path to greater profitability was almost always through efficiency. As a result, the focus tended to be on input costs such as seeds, nutrients, and crop protection and hard conversion costs like labour, and other operational costs. The new paradigm also represented a change from specialisation to integration. In Farming 2.0 focus was on taking a single task and making all efforts to accomplish it well. Farming 3.0 focuses on the concept of integration of all the relevant technologies into a single package. A number of precision agriculture, crop consulting, and data management firms are already on the cutting edge of helping the farmers truly turn data into dollars. Bill Gates once said that “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” The bottom line is that we may not see Farming 3.0 by 2012, but we might be amazed when we get to 2021 at how much has occurred in ten short years.
Farming 3.0 will be defined by a new generation of progressive farmers, the young innovators, scientists and professionals who seek to balance productivity and economics with social and environmental considerations. This age will feature technological innovations that will increase agricultural output, address growing environmental degradation and connect farmers directly to consumers, thereby delivering agri prosperity and enabling rural India to rise on a scale never before.
(The authors are from Advanced Centre for Rainfed Agriculture (ACRA); SKUAST-J; can be reached at [email protected])
