Weather Based Automated Agro Advisories: An Option to Improve Sustainability in Farming Under Climate and Weather Vagaries

Agriculture is highly vulnerable to climate change and climate variability. It is very difficult to balance the growing interest on sophistication and climate change mitigation options. Now, we are in the stage of bolstering adaptation process to cope up our production with demand. Automated Agro Advisory Service (AAS) is a response farming tool, which helps the farmers to get timely weather based agro advisories to make necessary decision for the next few days of farm operations. The AAS requires past and forecasted weather data of 6 days from the current date for closer spatial scale, high performance computing server, faster internet service, short messaging service (SMS) and web cum mobile application. Different combinations of temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and rainfall quantity have been numbered as weather scenarios. Weather based agro advisory for multiple crops and different stages of crop growth have been developed with the help of technocrats and incorporated in the database. Farmers have to register their mobile number for advisory to their own crop, specific to crop stage. Every day, weather scenario of each block will be developed separately for past and future weather and the AAS module match the scenario, crop, stage, and advisory and send the selected advisory to the farmers’ mobile as SMS. Farmers can change their crops and sowing date through web portal or mobile app. The AAS simplifies the lab to land with ICT tools and helps the farmers to get rid of weather risk and help them to increase productivity of inputs. The AAS empathises the farmers’ need and acts weather smart.