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.

Combating climate change needs swift, precise action- requiring close monitoring of every crop, every single day. But Indian farmlands are fragmented into land parcels spread over distances of 20 kilometers- making every day monitoring, humanly impossible.

Instead of picking up pieces after irreplaceable damage, what farmers need is to mitigate risks before climate-crisis by simplifying land monitoring.

Climate change pace didn’t allow for trial-and-error based solutions.

Only data could mitigate unpredictability- this is when realized that our long-term partnership with farmers gave us access to unique historical data- at a crop to pixel level!

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

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

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

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

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 and the level of emergency they need to address. For instance, the variation in green indicates intake of nitrogen, gradients of yellow signals water stress and uneven-ness of crop indicates signs of disease. Successfully mitigating various risks including one where while the green cover showed a healthy crop but data exposed signs of blight diseases acts as a predictive third eye.

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 and increase efficiencies of yield per acre of land. 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.

Karif, Rabi and Zaid are the three classifications of crops that India largely follows. Rabi crops are known as winter crops, Kharif crops are known as monsoon crops and

Zaid crops are summer season crops, sometimes even sown in-between.

This is how for decades farmer's would decide on which crop to sow. However, the un-seasonality has made this traditional knowledge of farming irrelevant.