Cropin, Amazon Web Services to build tech solution to address global food security
Agtech player Cropin Technology and Amazon Web Services (AWS) India Pvt Ltd have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) focused on enabling Cropin to build a solution to address the issue of global hunger and food insecurity.
This initiative aims to help Cropin develop core data architecture, analytics, modelling, 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, Cropin said in a statement.
As part of this initiative, Cropin will 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), modelling/simulation, internet of things (IoT), robotics, visual/spatial computing, and generative artificial intelligence (AI).
It will 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, initially focusing on rice, wheat, potato and maize, as they collectively account for more than half of the world’s food requirements.
The AI-powered solution will 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 analysed by identifying patterns and anomalies in the production and quality of major crops across global regions. Cropin’s AI, model building, data processing, and reporting will leverage AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies; Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant; Amazon QuickSight, which offers unified business intelligence at hyperscale; and AWS’s HPC infrastructure.
Krishna Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO, Cropin, said, “We can analyze 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. These insights are crucial for policymakers, enabling them to make informed decisions to combat hunger and ensure food security. Our collaboration with AWS marks a significant step towards building a global real-time decision intelligence solution, which will provide insights into several aspects of food security – agriculture, climate, trade, and supply chain – in one dashboard. This engagement with AWS helps us showcase the use of technology, data, and AI to solve these pressing issues.”
Shalini Kapoor, Director and Chief Technologist, AWS India Private Limited, said, “The world population is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, increasing food production requirements on the arable land available today. At AWS, we are inspired to work with customers to solve the most complex challenges at scale. Our work with Cropin showcases the power of advanced compute capabilities on the cloud to drive social and environmental impact. AWS’s generative AI, simulation, and data analytics technologies can help organisations like Cropin surface actionable and relevant insights from diverse data sets, and scale their solution globally to empower decision makers to reduce food insecurity.”