As a child, Ranveer Chandra spent a lot of time in the lush green fields of Bhagalpur in Bihar where his grandparents lived. Along with his siblings, Chandra would make a ritualistic annual trip to his grandparents' home, albeit a bit grudgingly as the village didn't offer a lot of entertainment to the Chandra siblings back then. However, it allowed him to see firsthand how hard life was in rural India. "Specifically, I saw how challenging it was to sustain a livelihood on agriculture. I've witnessed farmers till their land using bullock carts and use flood irrigation for their fields. There had to be a way to better manage these practices using technology," he says. 

Chandra went on to complete his BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, and has been working with Microsoft for more than 15 years. Currently based in Seattle, Chandra is the Chief Scientist at Microsoft Azure Global and leads research on Azure Farmbeats, an industry-specific cloud platform built on top of Azure to enable actionable insights from data through which one can aggregate farm data, fuse datasets with drones, sensors and satellites, build AI/ML models and develop customised agriculture solutions. 

"Azure Farmbeats is the kind of product that is in line with Microsoft's vision to improve lives using technology. This solution is specifically intended to help farmers across the world improve crop productivity, enhance their yield and manage their farms more competently." 

Research to Product and Beyond 

Farmbeats, which originated in Microsoft Research in 2015 was moved to the product pipeline in 2018. While in research, it was an end-to-end platform but since 2018, Microsoft has struck partnerships with various entities across the world to facilitate the greater use of the solution. 

Notable partnerships include the United States Department of Agriculture, Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia, The Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), which is a $500mn Non Bank Financial Institution owned by the Nigerian central bank. And more recently, and the Minnesota-based Land O'Lakes - a member owned agricultural cooperative focused on the dairy industry. These partnerships help Microsoft reach the growers directly in a mass-based manner, says Chandra. 

Farmbeats provides a range of features that include a satellite-based maps of farms, drone imagery, intelligently placed sensors on farms, satellite imagery of the farm - this helps track farm conditions, assess farm health, monitor soil moisture levels and develop farm health advisories. To supplement these features, Microsoft works with a range of partners like Davis for weather monitoring devices, DJI for drone assistance and EarthSense for sensor-based devices to gather data from fields among others. 

Harnessing TV Spectrum & Drones 

While a slew of partnerships with technology solutions addresses a significant part of the suite of solutions offered, Farmbeats has been hailed for pioneering the innovative use of technologies to augment the transmission of data. For instance, TV white space. White spaces are basically ununsed TV broadcast spectrum - those of you growing up in the 80s and 90s would have seen several TV channels just running blank with white fuzz. What Farmbeats did was to harness this unused spectrum to transmit data in remote areas - where internet penetration is still very challenging and would not permit largescale data downloads and transmission. 

Another innovative workaround was the installation of sensors that are solar powered and placed strategically every 10 meters in the ground. Using one's smartphone (which has a WiFi chip) with its camera facing down, attached to either a drone or a helium balloon, a farmer can merely walk around the area of his farm, while his phone collects data along the way and creates an aerial map. This can be transmitted through the TV white spectrum where an edge device pieces together all this information to make a data map of the farm. 

This solution was implemented in an apple farm about 45 kms outside Seattle at a farm called Dancing Crow Farm. It helped the farmer Sean Stratman use 30% less water for irrigation and 44% less lime to control soil pH. In addition, information about the soil temperature and moisture helped him time the planting of seeds. Since the farm was located right by a river, Stratman would face the challenge of flooding but through the aerial imaging capabilities delivered by Farmbeats helped him understand flooding patterns and plan his harvest accordingly. 

While working with CSIRO, Chandra said that a country like Australia has distinctly different challenges compared to the US. "Sustainability and water usage are among the top priorities for growers in Australia, presumably due changes in their surroundings triggered by events like bushfires. A lot of work is being done on mechanistic models for this market, in addition to a lot of AI-based research for farming. 

The India Market - Challenges, Opportunities & Innovation 

Chandra is enthused about the India market for agri innovation. While he admits that data collection and management in this sector isn't as robust as developed nations like Australia and USA, but therein lies an exciting opportunity to make a difference. "We are very excited about the Indian agritech sector, where a lot of innovation is already happening. A lot of data is being generated but mainly through third parties like FPOs and weather satellites. The data has to become more granular in nature to make a ground level impact. We ultimately want to build tech solutions that make a sizeable impact on the ecosystem."

Recently, Microsoft launched a support scheme for Indian agritech startups to help them build industry specific solutions and scale with access to deeptech. One of the many offerings include access for startups to the Azure FarmBeats. 

Chandra believes that there are a wide range of problem statements, and they have merely skimmed the surface with FarmBeats. "Carbon sequestering from the soil, water usage and sustainability are some of the major challenges I can see getting addressed effectively through technology. We still have a long way to go in truly revolutionising agriculture with technology."