Global climate change is creating unexpected and extreme conditions. This poses a serious threat to Indian agriculture as 86.6% of Indian farmers are small and marginal, implementing traditional agricultural practices which are tied to predictable seasonal patterns. With climate deviating from the norm, these agricultural practices are no longer working.

Lay’s partners with 27000 farmers to cultivate chip grade potatoes. The impact of climate change has led to them losing over 20% of their crop, creating supply-chain inefficiencies that are detrimental to farmers, agriculture and business.

This crafted a mission for our sustainable initiative: To help our farmers become climate change resilient, by putting in a system to mitigate risk and create climate-smart agricultural practices that maximize value.

Every year, Indian farmers lose +20% of their crop to climate change. And every year they are left to pick up the pieces after irreplaceable damage has already been done. What they needed was to mitigate risks before the crisis hit.

While we couldn’t change traditional agricultural practices, but we could optimise them to climate change.

So we created ‘Smart Farm’- a real-time monitoring system that uses satellite imagery and remote sensing to create an early warning system.

Partnering with Cropin’-an AgTech platform, and leading satellite agencies, we leveraged the world’s largest agri-knowledge graph and trained the AI with +4 years of intelligence of +3000 hectares of our farms. Converging it with satellite imagery, weather forecast and time, Smart Farm analyzes factors affecting growth at crop, plot and pin code level. The early warnings generated are simplified for farmers as colour codes, and made accessible through smartphones.

To combat climate change farmers need to closely monitor every crop, every single day. But Indian farmlands are fragmented into smaller land parcels spread over large distances of 20 kilometers- making every day monitoring, humanly impossible.

Farmers need to reduce their response time to climate crisis by making land monitoring easy. The pace of climate change didn't allow for trial-and-error based solutions- only data could mitigate unpredictability.

We realised that our long-term partnership with farmers gave us access to unique historical intelligence of yield, soil health, use of fertilizer, pesticides, water and crop diseases- at a farm pixel level- simplifying land monitoring.

Our strategy was simple: use historical data with predictive insights and transform traditional Indian agricultural practices to climate-smart algorithmically-mediated practices.

For our first year, we greenlit Smart Farm with the help of our agronomists in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat- leading states of Lay’s potato production in India.

A simple to understand and easy to use platform, Smart Farm’s colour coding of predictive data ensures farmers are in check of every crop, the level of emergency, and the actionable tasks to abate risks. For instance, the variation in green indicates intake of nitrogen, gradients of yellow signal water stress and uneven-ness of crop indicates disease. It has successfully mitigated various risks including one where the green cover showed healthy crop but data exposed signs of blight disease.

By obtaining real-time data about the crop, soil, and weather condition of the smallest land parcel, our farmers have been able to put in preparatory measures to survive weather anomalies while increasing efficiencies. It has also made Lay’s potato production precise by optimally distributing resources and maximising value.

Smart Farm has strengthened Lay’s supply-chain efficiencies by making our agricultural practices climate change resilient. Within first year of implementation, Smart Farm has:

1. Made farms climate resilient with 92.5% adaptability to climatic events

2. Increased profitability by increasing yield of upto 25%

3. Reduced crop pandemic risk by 80.3%

4. Ensures financial stability of farmers by increasing their income by $55/acre

Enriched with data from diverse farming techniques of India, Smart Farm’s knowledge graph is now being initiated across Lay’s farms in countries like, Pakistan, Egypt and South Africa – where the population of marginal farmers is high.

It also ensures the financial stability of farmers, enables sustainable use of resources, abates crop-pandemics and is a small step towards strengthening the food security of the planet.

Smart Farm also cements our 2030 pledge to scale regenerative farming practices across 7 million acres- equivalent to our entire global agricultural footprint.