Hyderabad: Use of geospatial tech in farming stressed

Hyderabad: Dr Tessy Thomas, DG (Aeronautical Systems), DRDO inaugurated the two-day national conference on geospatial technologies in agriculture organised at ICAR-National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM) here on Thursday.

The meet was jointly organised by the Association for Management of Agricultural Research and Agripreneurship (AMARA), Hyderabad and ICAR-NAARM.

Tessy Thomas has lucidly elaborated the importance of various agricultural revolutions that were responsible for raise in the agriculture production in India and stressed on the need for shifting from traditional farming to technology driven agriculture including the use of GIS tools, precision farming, use of satellite imagery, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence for smart agriculture to ensure food security for the increasing global population.

Dr Ch Srinivasa Rao, Director, NAARM and President, AMARA stressed the need for common working groups with specialists from space technology and agriculture technology towards achieving the common goal of increasing the agriculture production by applying the various GIS tools in the field of agriculture and emphasised that both agriculture and space technologies should go hand in hand. During the inaugural programme, Book of Abstracts and Practical manual for GIS were released by the chief guest.

Earlier Dr D Thammi Raju, General Secretary, AMARA narrated the genesis of Association for Management of Agricultural Research and Agripreneurship (AMARA), a nascent organisation, with a vision to provide an integrated and inclusive platform supporting knowledge driven agricultural development in bringing prosperity through nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship in agriculture.

The conference is expected to bring key recommendations related to crop estimation, yield modelling, precision farming, remote sensing, cloud computing, wireless and mobile GIS for agricultural field work besides the application of GIS techniques in decision making.

The conference is organised by Dr P D Sreekanth and Dr M Balakrishanan, Principal Scientists of the Academy.