Rethink: digitally connected smart agriculture: a systems approach

Abstract increased. Also overall farmer livelihoods have not significantly improved as evident from a large number of people still living below the poverty line, in predominantly agricultural countries in developing world. Furthermore, some of the technologies, processes and policies used to optimize the food production, mainly agrochemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers and some of the Government subsidy schemes, have been negatively impacted the economic and environmental sustainability and, health and safety of humans. Thus, it has become necessary to rethink how agriculture is practised and managed at scale to address the above mentioned challenges. The past outcomes have taught us that we need a systems approach rather than individual solutions to achieve economically and environmentally sustainable food production system that also uplift farmer livelihoods and empower societies. We found the root cause for above long term unsatisfactory outcomes is a multi-level coordination failure. The base level being not having a coordinated approach to provide timely access to information for all stakeholders in the agriculture domain for optimal decision making followed by poor market linkages, uncoordinated input supply and logistics and availability of effective credit facilities. We have developed Digital Knowledge Agribusiness Ecosystem (DKAE) platform to address these challenges. It provides an effective approach to provide actionable cultivation and market information to farmers, through farmer actions to generate situational knowledge, which then can be used to effectively coordinate input and output supply chains as well as better mitigate risks in agri-lending. This platform is now being trialled at scale in India and Sri Lanka in partnership with many agriculture and technology universities, government agencies and research institutions as well as private sector organisations.