Smart farms, greener fields — beating drought in Tamil Nadu - video Dailymotion

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As India faces soaring heat and drought, farmers are turning to smart farming. Puspavathi manages her 40-acre farm with just a smartphone, which helps her to conserve water and boost crops.

Transcript

00:00This summer, India faced extreme heat waves that made most parts of the country feel unbearable.

00:07Tamil Nadu was no exception. In some places, heat waves reached almost 43 degrees Celsius.

00:18These extreme conditions depleted the groundwater, leading to water scarcity and crop failures.

00:25A challenge for many farmers, but some, like Pushpavati, who uses smart farming, manage

00:30to cope with the heat better than others.

00:34I manage our 40-acre farm all by myself. Smart farming has helped my yield as well as water

00:40management. Wherever I am, I can operate the motor systems from my mobile phone via the

00:45internet and control the water supply.

00:50Pushpavati is proud that even though she has no higher education, she is able to manage

00:54such a large farm on her own.

01:05We can turn the motor on and off with this app. So everything is right here. Of my 40

01:11acres, 25 acres have coconut farms and 5 acres are areca nut.

01:21I have three bore wells and two wells, spread across three different parts of the field.

01:26It was hard for labourers to manage the water supply, so I shifted to automated farming.

01:39This is the smart farming setup. There are two filters on the main line. During power

01:45cuts, this prevents the water from entering the tank. This is the flow meter and we have

01:56a valve connection here. The water gets supplied as a mixture of manure and water. Here you

02:02can see that.

02:09We have faced three droughts as farmers and they were a big challenge for us. But now,

02:15even during droughts, we have limited water, but it's never so scarce that we have no supply.

02:27This is the dried water bed of the river Pushpavati used to depend on. It ran dry this year and

02:33if she had not changed her techniques, the fields would not have looked nearly as green.

02:38But with her new smart farming, the water in the well is continuously monitored by a

02:42sensor and crops are watered only to the extent they need to be.

02:49The idea for the application came from a company in Coimbatore. Since 2005, they have been

02:55working on water management automation systems.

03:00To address the worsening drought conditions in Tamil Nadu, they developed an app that

03:04brings their software expertise directly onto the fields, making it accessible for everyone.

03:10More than 5000 farmers are using this app now.

03:18This is homegrown technology behind the software used by thousands of farmers like Pushpavati.

03:23It doesn't matter whether a farmer is educated, uneducated, skilled or not. This is a user

03:29friendly app.

03:33A single touch is all it takes to operate and control the system. Anyone can use the

03:38app. Big fields are a problem because of labour shortages, so automated farming can

03:43be very useful in that case.

03:52Labour shortages and a lack of skilled workers are problems across the state as more people

03:56move away from farming. We visited another farmer using his smart agriculture to tackle

04:01these issues.

04:07If we supply water manually, there is always a risk of overwatering one area while leaving

04:12another short. For example, if we plan to supply 400,000 litres to 4 acres of land,

04:18we might end up with 100,000 litres of excess water in one section, while the other side

04:23of the farm suffers.

04:26Our entire crop would collapse, but with automation, we can monitor and track the irrigation flow

04:31across the farm, so there is no fear of wasting water. In my opinion, no one should give up

04:36farming. Instead, we should embrace modern technology and equipment to improve our farms.

04:49Tamil Nadu has around 6 million hectares of agricultural land, but the future of many

04:53of these fields is now threatened as droughts worsen. The smart farmers like Pushpavathi

04:59feel better prepared for them.

Smart farms, greener fields — beating drought in Tamil Nadu

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