Switch on the pumpset through your mobile

Everything today is just a phone call away and happens over the mobile. Here’s one such mobile that helps Indian farmers control pumps remotely.

Even a farmer can use a mobile to remote control pumps, thanks to Nano Ganesh, a mobile phone based application developed by Ossian Agro Automation.”The farmer can monitor and check availability of the power at the pump, can switch the pump on/off, and acknowledge the on/off status of water pump from any place. All he has to do is pick his mobile phone, punch a few keys and the control is in his hands,” says Santosh Ostwal, CEO, Ossian Agro Automation. Read the rest of this entry »

Startup Aims to Bring Useless Farmland Back to Life

The company is developing crops that tolerate salty soils.

Around the world, a billion acres of agricultural land lay abandoned. In the United States, 15 million acres of cropland falls under this category. Decades of repeated irrigation and declining water quality have made much of this once-productive land too salty to support plant growth. Among the strategies to put this land back to use is to develop crops that can tolerate high-salinity soils. Read the rest of this entry »

A mobile-based agro advisory sys­tem for potato farmers

Bhushan G. Jagyasi, 30, has developed mKRISHI, a mobile-based agro advisory sys­tem for potato farmers.

Bhushan G. Jagyasi, a scientist with the Tata Consultancy Services Innovation Labs in Mumbai, has been engaged in a rich array of research areas in the fields of distributed detection, signal process­ing, wireless sensor networks, and mobile phone-based sensor networks. Read the rest of this entry »

Lost Tribes Used Clever Tricks to Turn Amazon Wasteland to Farms

A vast series of earth mounds on the eastern coast of South America may be living landscape fossils of a forgotten civilization’s agriculture.

People raised the mounds between 1,000 and 700 years ago in order to create cropland in terrain that is flooded for half the year, and parched for the other half. New insect ecosystems formed on the mounds, further enriching the soils and keeping them fertile for centuries, long after their human stewards had vanished. This lost agricultural system could be a model for modern farmers, according to a new study. Read the rest of this entry »

A Solution to Help Farmers

Rikin B. Gandhi, 28, has developed a solution to help farmers adopt better farmer practices through locally produced videos of sustainable agriculture techniques.

Farmers in rural India now have something to smile about, courtesy Rikin Gandhi. An aeronautical and astronautical engineer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., Gandhi is the founder of Digital Green which disseminates targeted agricultural information to farmers at a reasonable cost using participatory video and mediated instruction. Read the rest of this entry »

Remote controlled system for power tillers

Remote Power For the Fields

A bachelor in electronics and communication from Visveswaraiah Technological University, Karnataka, Prajwal Kumar specializes in robotics and automation. He has recently developed a remote controlled system for power tiller. Farmers have to walk along with the power tiller to control its direction. However, now the electronics remote control device can enable the farmers to operate his power tiller without even getting into the field. It ain’t just this. His other inventions include tree-climbing and harvesting robots, paddy field weeding machine, industrial inspections robots, and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Read the rest of this entry »