Unpredictable climate change has led to Indian farmers $5.1Bn worth of crop, since agricultural practices traditionally follow predictable seasonal patterns.

Lay’s partners with 27000 farmers in India. While we couldn’t change traditional agricultural practices, our long-term partnership with farmers gave us access to unique historical data- enabling risk mitigation before irreplaceable damage.

Using our historical database, we transformed traditional Indian agricultural practices to climate-smart algorithmic practices by creating ‘Smart Farm’- a real-time monitoring system using satellite imagery and remote sensing to generate early warnings. By successfully digitising its farms, Lay's is empowering farmer’s with predictive intelligence to maximise value.

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.

Kharif, 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.

Every year, Indian farmers lose their crop to climate change, left to pick up the pieces after irreplaceable damage has already been done. What they need were means to mitigate risks before the crisis hit.

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

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, made accessible through smartphones and implemented with the help of our agronomists.

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.

Our challenge: We couldn’t control agricultural seasonality or fragmentation of land. So, how could we transform agri-practices of Indian farmers to make them climate change resilient?

Our strategy was simple: Reducing farmer’s response-time to climate crisis by bringing fragmented land parcels under a bird’s eye view of every single crop.

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 crop to pixel level- simplifying land monitering.

Post the backend data analyses, Smart Farm generates early warnings for farmers by simplifying them as colour codes and shares them on their smartphones on a simple to understand and easy to use app.

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.

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

5. Purpose Driven growth with +10bps increase in brand preference intensity

6. +200Mn Impressions, +128Mn Reach, +100Mn Smart Farm Packs in consumer's hands

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.