Abstract

Abstract

Agriculture in India, unlike the west, continues to be done at a small scale by individuals or small cooperatives. With globalization, growing input cost and rising labour cost, farmers are being continuously challenged and taxed like never before. This situation has given birth to a new generation of farmers who have embraced technology rather than fearing it. These farmers have, very ingeniously, added technology to their arsenal to overcome the challenges that the environment (social, political, economic) seem to throw at them; there by catapulting India into the next “green” revolution. This abstract and the proposed presentation is about one such initiative that was spearheaded by a small scale “IT enabled” farmer to maximize the returns from his coconut farm using precision agriculture techniques and GIS. Precision agriculture hinges on spatially enabled information system to seamlessly store, retrieve and analyze data. The aim was to minimize field input, maximize micro-localized farming thereby resulting in higher crop yield. GIS is one of the best tools to support precision agriculture and an open source implementation of the same the cheapest. This lead to the development of “Coconut GIS” – an open source GIS implementation using Quantum GIS and PostgreSQL. The application is specifically aimed at supporting precision agriculture for coconut farms yet scalable/generic enough to support other micro-farming scenarios. The objective of Coconut GIS is to capture various temporal data (Soil Composition, Fertilization Information, Climatic Conditions etc.) that affect the productivity of the coconut trees and to perform analysis over them to generate reports and thematic maps that will improve efficiency thereby maximizing production.