As India faces soaring heat and drought, farmers are turning to smart farming. Puspavathi manages her 40-acre farm with just a smartphone, which helps her to conserve water and boost crops.
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00:00This summer, India faced extreme heat waves that made most parts of the country feel unbearable.
00:07Tamil Nadu was no exception. In some places, heat waves reached almost 43 degrees Celsius.
00:18These extreme conditions depleted the groundwater, leading to water scarcity and crop failures.
00:25A challenge for many farmers, but some, like Pushpavati, who uses smart farming, manage
00:30to cope with the heat better than others.
00:34I manage our 40-acre farm all by myself. Smart farming has helped my yield as well as water
00:40management. Wherever I am, I can operate the motor systems from my mobile phone via the
00:45internet and control the water supply.
00:50Pushpavati is proud that even though she has no higher education, she is able to manage
00:54such a large farm on her own.
01:05We can turn the motor on and off with this app. So everything is right here. Of my 40
01:11acres, 25 acres have coconut farms and 5 acres are areca nut.
01:21I have three bore wells and two wells, spread across three different parts of the field.
01:26It was hard for labourers to manage the water supply, so I shifted to automated farming.
01:39This is the smart farming setup. There are two filters on the main line. During power
01:45cuts, this prevents the water from entering the tank. This is the flow meter and we have
01:56a valve connection here. The water gets supplied as a mixture of manure and water. Here you
02:02can see that.
02:09We have faced three droughts as farmers and they were a big challenge for us. But now,
02:15even during droughts, we have limited water, but it's never so scarce that we have no supply.
02:27This is the dried water bed of the river Pushpavati used to depend on. It ran dry this year and
02:33if she had not changed her techniques, the fields would not have looked nearly as green.
02:38But with her new smart farming, the water in the well is continuously monitored by a
02:42sensor and crops are watered only to the extent they need to be.
02:49The idea for the application came from a company in Coimbatore. Since 2005, they have been
02:55working on water management automation systems.
03:00To address the worsening drought conditions in Tamil Nadu, they developed an app that
03:04brings their software expertise directly onto the fields, making it accessible for everyone.
03:10More than 5000 farmers are using this app now.
03:18This is homegrown technology behind the software used by thousands of farmers like Pushpavati.
03:23It doesn't matter whether a farmer is educated, uneducated, skilled or not. This is a user
03:29friendly app.
03:33A single touch is all it takes to operate and control the system. Anyone can use the
03:38app. Big fields are a problem because of labour shortages, so automated farming can
03:43be very useful in that case.
03:52Labour shortages and a lack of skilled workers are problems across the state as more people
03:56move away from farming. We visited another farmer using his smart agriculture to tackle
04:01these issues.
04:07If we supply water manually, there is always a risk of overwatering one area while leaving
04:12another short. For example, if we plan to supply 400,000 litres to 4 acres of land,
04:18we might end up with 100,000 litres of excess water in one section, while the other side
04:23of the farm suffers.
04:26Our entire crop would collapse, but with automation, we can monitor and track the irrigation flow
04:31across the farm, so there is no fear of wasting water. In my opinion, no one should give up
04:36farming. Instead, we should embrace modern technology and equipment to improve our farms.
04:49Tamil Nadu has around 6 million hectares of agricultural land, but the future of many
04:53of these fields is now threatened as droughts worsen. The smart farmers like Pushpavathi
04:59feel better prepared for them.