The AI Layer Powering India’s Farms |
The AI Layer Powering India’s Farms
From PepsiCo's potato fields to grain warehouses to IIT Ropar's research labs, AI is quietly building the infrastructure that Indian agriculture never had before.
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AI detects a farmer’s field has been irrigated and automatically shuts off the tubewell. A PepsiCo field agent, sitting hundreds of kilometres away, spots a stressed patch on their dashboard, traces it to a grid of faulty sprinklers and informs the farmer. A grain trader in Punjab scans a wheat sample with a computer vision device and gets a quality report without a lab in sight. This isn’t a glimpse of the future. It’s already happening, as AI becomes part of everyday farming.
India’s agritech story has long been about digitising fragmented parts of farming, from crop monitoring and procurement to storage and advisory services. AI has started to connect those pieces. Instead of simply collecting farm data, it is enabling decisions that can improve yields, reduce losses, lower input costs, and make markets more transparent.
Today, India’s agritech landscape runs on thousands of startups, from DeHaat and Ninjacart on the supply chain side to Fasal and AgNext on farm intelligence. Each startup is solving a different piece of the puzzle. The hardest part, however, has always been making technology work across smallholder farms, fragmented supply chains and unpredictable weather. Today, AI is helping bridge that gap.
We spoke with Cropin on the supply chain, Arya.ag on post-harvest, and drew on a Sansad TV podcast conversation with ANNAM.AI, a government-backed Centre of Excellence (CoE) for AI in Agriculture at IIT Ropar, to understand how AI is becoming the intelligence layer for modern agriculture. Let’s uncover what it means in this edition of The AI Shift.
Enterprise AI Has Learnt To See Nuances
The most interesting applications in agriculture solve problems that previously had no solution outside human intuition. For instance, take PepsiCo’s partnership with Cropin, a farm intelligence platform. The beverage giant works with 27,000 Indian farmers to grow potatoes for Lay’s. Managing that many smallholder relationships across different agro-climatic zones, with unpredictable weather and disease cycles, is a procurement nightmare.
Cropin’s AI/ML models, trained on four........