More than 1.5 farmers in Maharashtra and Gujarat are using Cotton Doctor, an Android and web-based Decision Support System (DSS) – and have started reaping benefits.
The WWF India partnered with a public sector enterprise called Gujarat Green Revolution Company Ltd (GGRC) in Gujarat and Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), Keshavraj Agro Producer Company Ltd in Jalna to operationalize the DSS with cotton farmers.
The app has been developed by an agri-tech company called Weather Risk Management Services Ltd.
To date, around 19.5 million cotton advisories and forecast information have been generated and provided to cotton farmers.
The app, developed in 2017-18, was made fully operational in 2018-19 and has now gained popularity.
Cotton growers can save their farm details by drawing their farm on top of the GIS interface of the DSS (Geo fencing). Once done, requisite information is generated through satellite imageries which are processed for broadcasting of agro advisories.
The real time alerts are based on state of the art weather forecasts, remote sensing, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques ,which are peer reviewed, WWF India officials told DH.
The Cotton Doctor DSS also hosts an interactive diagnosis platform called Live Cotton. This collects user supplied information - text, photographs, video - about any problems in cotton which will be directly received and addressed by back end cotton experts. “Currently in the Covid-19 situation when field training is restricted, the system hosts live streaming sessions of training programs conducted by subject matter specialists to reach out to the farmers,” the official said.