Cropin in pact with AWS to build a solution to address global hunger, food insecurity

Cropin Technology, a global Agtech leader enabling intelligent agriculture, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) India 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.

Cropin Technology, a global Agtech leader enabling intelligent agriculture, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) India 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, as per a statement released by Cropin on Wednesday.

As part of this initiative, Cropin would 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 would also 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, starting with rice, wheat, potato and maize, as they collectively account for more than half of the world’s food requirements.

According to the company, the AI-powered solution would 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. 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.

Krishna Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, Cropin said, ‘‘We can analyse 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.’‘

The collaboration with AWS marked a significant step towards building a global real-time decision intelligence solution, which would provide insights into several aspects of food security--agriculture, climate, trade, and supply chain--in one dashboard. These insights are crucial for policymakers, enabling them to make informed decisions to combat hunger and ensure food security, he added.

As per estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, some 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 organisations analyse insights emerging from models and simulations of systems as diverse as agriculture, trade, and climate, to develop and test holistic strategies to address food insecurity, said the Cropin communique.