In a bid to transform aquaculture like never before, leading Chennai-based Fish and Shrimp farming startup Aquaconnect, founded in 2017, has recently launched ‘Pond Diary’ - a first of its kind feature to help farmers maintain a log of their farm activities on the Aquaconnect application. AI and ML technologies will enable Aquaconnect to decode the collective intelligence and issue a mass advisory to all farmers.
A simple innovation coupled with a smart chatbot will enable 44,000 farmers to manage their farms better.
What is Pond Diary?
The ’Pond Dairy’ feature captures farmers' culture production data including:
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Seeds stocked
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Water quality reports
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Daily feed quantity
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Weekly growth
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Animal signs
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Expense bills
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Farm infrastructure details
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License
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Government records and more
Aquaconnect is dedicated to helping farmers switch from a manual diary to a digital diary.
Why is Pond Diary the need of the hour?
India is the second-largest aquaculture economy but the adoption of technology is very limited. Lack of technology has resulted in lower productivity in farmers and wider diseases in aqua produce. Farmers traditionally keep the log of the activities manually in a notebook. Due to the absence of data capturing systems, farmers suffer from poor maintenance of farm data to unavailability of farm credits & insurance.
Aquaconnect aims to promote sustainable aqua farming among the farming communities and works with 37000+ + farmers in various states of India.
How to use Pond Diary?
Pond Diary is the first step towards capturing pond production data in a simple way and bringing precision in aqua farming with collective intelligence.
It is an open-ended diary platform, wherein the farmers can write anything about their farm in any multimedia format. With their Machine Learning algorithm, Aquaconnect is able to decode the information given by farmers and provide advisory at a mass scale.
The Pond Diary feature has WhatsApp like interface which is very user friendly and familiar with the farmers.
Statement of Founder and CEO of Aquaconnect, Rajamanohar Somasundaram:
“Aqua Farmers are deprived of simple technology tools that can make a big impact on their productivity and efficiency. We are very confident about the launch of the new feature and it helps in solving the woes of the farmers which result in low productivity. We will encourage farmers to adopt the tool and educate them digitally. And we shall be having manual remote intervention in the form of an integrated chatbot.”
“Partial information we can get from the farmer but since it is all self-fed info, we also need automated validation. Our focus is to decode & understand what every farmer writes every day. That is when we are using ML to decode and provide input advisory based on what he has given us. So that is how we aim to provide advisory at a mass scale on our technology.”
Achievements of Aquaconnect
• Aquaconnect is recognized as World Changing Idea 2020 by Fast Company.
• The company is an Innovator at Seafood Innovation Project and Hatch Accelerator, Norwegian Seafood Innovation Cluster.
• Aquaconnect is a platinum winner of the Agriculture insure-tech award at World Bank Group.
Promoting sustainable aquaculture
The data-driven approach helps farmers to adopt sustainable farming practices in every culture operation and improves productivity & better disease management with higher profits. Through this automated advisory, farmers are able to access technical advisory for their pond instantly and more conveniently. This further reduces dependency on technicians for any farm support.
A digital platform like Pond Diary was a much-needed “tool” in the field of aquaculture and it comes at the right time when there is a rise in shrimp farming.
Also, rice farmers are also introducing aquaculture in their fields as part of integrated farming. Pond Diary can smoothen the entire process of aqua farming for farmers.
More features to come…
The company will also introduce interactivity, notification reminders and collaboration to its new feature in the next three months.
The data will also help farmers to access formal finance from banks, have better risk mitigation with insurance and access to market linkage for their harvest produce.
This is not available in the present formal credit system for farmers. Aquaconnect is targeting to reach 4 lakh farmers to realize the benefit of the application.
Indeed, we will soon have “farmers’ diaries”!
