For some of the people involved, this one feels personal.
Click2Cloud is based in the US and its other clients include giant US agribusinesses, Middle Eastern governments and Southeast Asian plantation companies. CEO Prashant Mishra grew up near Nagpur, a district in Maharashtra that has witnessed a high number of farmer suicides.
“We are giving the small farmers the data, tools and intelligence which we give the big shots,” Mishra said. Besides Maharashtra, Click2Cloud is working to deploy the solution with state governments of Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh for multiple crops.
Ranveer Chandra, chief technology officer of Agri-Food at Microsoft headquarters who started the FarmBeats project back in 2015 and helped launch Baramati’s “Farm of the Future” in 2024, spent holidays as a boy at his grandparents’ farm in Bihar, northeastern India.
“In the past, farmers have suffered from a digital divide,” Chandra said. “If we don’t do it right, we will have an AI divide. Rich farmers become richer, poor farmers get poorer.”
Attaining peak sucrose
In mid-2024, about 200 farmers around Baramati planted test plots of about an acre each, each paying a one-off soil-testing and training fee of 10,000 INR (US $117) to ADT Baramati to be part of the trial. The Trust kicked in 75,000 INR (US $882) in hardware and other costs per farmer.
Jagtap and his son, Tejas, 28, check their Agripilot.ai app every day for alerts. Tejas has a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and lives on the family farm with his wife.
The Jagtaps noticed improvements early on. For example, each sapling produced 10 or more tillers– the shoots that develop into stalks– compared to five or six previously.
Another local farmer, Seema Chavan, 54, planted sugarcane on one-and-a-half acres in August. Her remaining two-and-a-half acres is still farmed the conventional way.
She said she used to fertilize everywhere whether it was needed or not, and water everywhere, to the point that it degraded soil quality.
Now she checks on her farm from her mobile phone every day.
Interviewed at ADT Baramati’s campus, she quickly tapped various icons on the Agripilot.ai app, pulling up satellite maps of her farm showing varying shades of green – to indicate if there is vegetation stress in any areas. That way, she can irrigate, fertilize or spray pesticides only in specific areas, which is better for the sugar cane and also for her purse.
An alert on December 2 warned of risk of Brown Rust, a plant disease, and urged spraying with fungicide. A December 15 alert noted a lot of weeds and urged weeding. Chavan, who lives 15 miles from her farm, calls in the alerts to farm workers when she isn’t there in person.
During the rainy season, she received alerts not to water the crops. Neighboring farmers advised her to water anyway. “I took the risk,” she said, and desisted. Her sugar canes continued to thrive.
The final goal is to predict the best time to harvest, around October 2025. The Agripilot.ai app predicts peak sugar based on a combination of random testing on the local farm, as well as historical data from other farms and from sugar processors. That peak period lasts just 20 days, said Mishra of Click2Cloud, after which sugar levels start falling.
Historically, farmers have been paid by the weight of their sugar cane, but what sugar factories care more about is sucrose content. Said Mishra: “We help with the entire planning around that.”
Researchers say the app will get more accurate as more farmers use it and the AI is better able to analyze data patterns. For now, agronomists at ADT Baramati are reviewing the AI-generated alerts before they are sent out.
In the last six months, between 10 and 20 percent of the recommendations were edited for accuracy, Phatake said. By the time this crop cycle is over in late 2025, he said, the system should be mature enough to require minimal human intervention.
The next disruption
If AI can help make farming in India more sustainable, maybe fewer young people will leave for the big cities.
“The youth will be attracted to farming,” said Aditya Vilas Bhagat, 28, another local farmer who has planted a test sugar cane plot. “We are facing that problem.”
Bhagat has a bachelor of science in agriculture and a postgraduate diploma in agriculture business management and returned to help oversee his family’s 160 acres of sugar cane in the nearby village of Korhale Bhudra. AI is just the latest technology the farm has adopted – after drip irrigation pipes, solar panels for power and drones for spraying fertilizer and pesticide.
For proponents of AI in farming, this is just the start.
“India is ready for this next disruption,” said Microsoft’s Chandra. “Think of the next wave beyond the Green Revolution. We are at the cusp of the next big disruption in agriculture with AI and data. India is early but it is ready.”
Top image: Suresh Jagtap, a farmer in Nimbut, Maharashtra checks on the health of his sugarcane crop via a mobile app. Behind him is a weather station. Photo by Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft.