Sri Lanka’s farming goes hi tech with a Russian firm’s assistance
Sri Lanka enters into ‘exact farming technology’ exploring the potential between space and agriculture to ensure local farmers get maximum possible benefits utilising modern space technology for the first time in the agri industry, Agriculture Ministry officials revealed.
‘Exact Farming’ is a platform jointly developed by SupremeSAT and Silicon Valley’s Exact Farming Inc (a Russian firm) to offer high quality, most frequent processes of satellite imagery to the farmer community of Sri Lanka through the Ministry of Agriculture.
President Maithripala Sirisena launches the website
The Ministry has introduced the exact farming techniques in Sri Lanka under the ‘Wasa Visa Nethi Ratak’– a mission to make Sri Lanka free of poisonous agro-chemicals and thereby free of poisoned or polluted food including rice, vegetables and fruits.
President Maithripala Sirisena launched the ‘exact farming technology’ at a three-day exhibition and sale held at the BMICH in Colombo this week
The ministry will be able to receive ‘exact’ information of agrarian lands in the country and will also be directly linked with every farmer in Sri Lanka, Minister Duminda Dissanayake told the gathering at the opening ceremony of the exhibition.
“This will take the Sri Lankan agriculture to greater heights since globally accepted advanced benefits such as mapping, crop insurance, weather forecasting, harvest monitoring, seed/fertiliser/pesticide usage monitoring/distribution, harvest related warehousing/export/import planning, farmer pension portal, etc can now be made available to Sri Lanka,” he added.
An image from space allows farmers to analyze soil layers up to several metres deep and when machines put fertilizer in the soil, agricultural technology works according to an image from space and ruts are opened where they need to be opened.
‘Exact Farming’ will strive to make every Sri Lankan farmer to be fully equipped with all information relating to his crop cultivation starting from knowing where his land is to the weather, soil, cultivation, harvest data of that land at his fingertips.
All the crop cultivation information will be provided through a mobile application using satellite technology, he revealed.
The Minister took personal interest to ensure the implementation of this project is fast tracked so that the Sri Lankan farmers too enjoy the greater assistance of space technology without any further delay, a senior official of the ministry told the Business Times.
This platform will create new value for farmers by supporting day-¬to-¬day agriculture decision with information from sensors, satellites and weather models. Sri Lanka will become a gateway of introducing the services of Exact Farming Inc a Russian firm whose founder is Mikhail Kokorich, a Russian millionaire who also owns Russia’s only private satellite manufacturing company.
The Ministry of Agriculture also launched “Astrocrop” global farming platform in Sri Lanka with the President being the first user.
The platform connects millions of farmers in Sri Lanka under one platform which will be managed by the ministry.
For the first time in Sri Lanka, The ministry has now taken the steps to create precise mapping of all the farm land in Sri Lanka and to have a platform which include all the necessary data with regard to the farmer’s and their respective lands owned by them.