Cropin unveils Sage: AI-powered agri-intelligence for global agriculture

Cropin's Sage aims to revolutionise agriculture by enabling seed manufacturers, food processors and govt to make informed decisions based on real-time data on cultivation practices, climate, soil etc

Despite their critical role in human civilization, agriculture and food systems often lack robust digital infrastructure. Historically, stakeholders rarely had access to the kind of agri-intelligence needed to make informed decisions.

Here comes Cropin Technology: a global agtech company that is addressing this gap by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). The firm on Wednesday announced the launch of Sage, the real-time agri-intelligence solution powered by Google Gemini. 

Cropin Sage converts the world’s agricultural landscape into a proprietary grid-based map with options of 3x3 meters, 10x10 meters, or 5x5 kilometres. The firm said this delivers data and intelligence with unprecedented scale, accuracy and speed. 

This enables consumer packaged goods (CPG) players, seed manufacturers, food processors, multilateral organisations, financial institutions and governments to make informed decisions. They can do this based on historical, present, and future data on cultivation practices, crops, irrigation, climate, and soil.

“By ‘gridifying’ land parcels with proprietary algorithms and integrating layered insights, Sage forecasts crop futures using historical data and the impacts of changing climate and weather on an unprecedented scale,” said Krishna Kumar, founder and chief executive of Cropin. “This empowers informed decision-making, securing both business interests and the global food supply chain,” said Kumar.

Revolutionising crop production planning

This innovation from Cropin fuses technologies such as Generative AI, multi-layered global climate data, a global crop knowledge graph, earth observation data and advanced crop models. The synergy aims to unlock the untapped potential of crop production planning. 

Beyond analysing historical data on agriculture, crops, and weather patterns, Sage leverages advanced AI tools to forecast future yields. This translates to pinpointing the ideal locations and favourable conditions for growing crops on a global map. 

At launch, Cropin’s enterprise customers can deploy Sage across geographic locations, providing intelligence on 13 key crops. These include wheat, rice, potato, and maize, which collectively cover almost 80 per cent of the world’s food demand. 

One of the biggest hurdles facing agri-food sectors today is a lack of transparent visibility into the global agricultural landscape. Sage tackles this challenge by introducing a dynamic on-demand global food and agriculture cultivation map for regions and crops of interest. By condensing months of data processing and analysis into seconds, Sage transforms complex information into actionable insights. This is done with an intuitive user interface featuring charts, data, graphs, and infographics using GenAI capabilities.

The company said that building and managing such a platform to support global scale is a significant challenge, given that agricultural land spans 4.8 billion hectares worldwide. This vast area is influenced by numerous factors, including weather conditions, soil quality, water availability, socio-political developments, and farmer conditions.

Addressing global agricultural challenges

Global food systems are facing significant challenges. There are many adverse factors severely impacting farmers’ ability to produce enough food. This is evident with the cocoa crisis affecting chocolate makers. Cropin said its Sage platform serves as a powerful shield against these threats by empowering the global food systems with the necessary intelligence to navigate these challenges.

For example, if a crop underperforms in a given season and this trend is likely to continue, Sage provides comprehensive insights. These help agronomists to address the issues in almost real-time. Such prompt decision-making enables chocolate and other food manufacturers to take corrective measures and secure their supply chains.

Also, shortages of staple crops and cereals such as wheat, rice, maize, and potatoes pose a more severe threat. The Covid-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions, and harvest shortages have already caused supply disruptions in these commodities. This has served as a warning that dependence on certain regions for staple crops is risky.

Europe, for instance, cannot rely on just a few regions for its wheat supply, nor can the world depend solely on Asia for rice.  Cropin said Sage provides the necessary intelligence for countries and agri-food stakeholders to build robust domestic cultivation. This helps safeguard food security for their citizens.

Founded in 2010, Cropin has reportedly digitised 30 million acres of farmlands, impacting over seven million farmers worldwide. Its knowledge graph spans 350 crops and 10,000 varieties in 103 countries. This helps in providing predictive intelligence for over 200 million acres of farmland globally.