Sushil Kumar, Head of Representative Office and Managing Director of Syngenta India, and Feroz Sheikh, CIO of Syngenta Group, announced the launch of India's first Yatra drone, which will cover 10 kilometers, to draw farmers' attention to drone spraying. Yatra will travel to 000 states to train farmers on the use of drones. This was told by the journalist of the portal krishijagran.com Abha Toppo.
Syngenta is the first private company to receive permission from the Central Insecticide Board to use drones to spray its Amistar product in rice fields to protect crops from fungal infections, blast and rot.
Sushil Kumar, Head of Representative Office and Managing Director of Syngenta India, said: “We believe that through partnerships with best-in-class research institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology, we will be able to identify, develop and scale a range of innovative, disruptive transformations in the agricultural sector. Through this partnership with research and academia, we want to attract young talent to agriculture, which will allow farmers around the world to increase crops without compromising the environment,” he added.
The company also announced the unique Biodiversity Sensor Project, the world's first biodiversity monitoring technology that includes a centralized, shared and tracked data repository to improve the accuracy of biodiversity measurements around the world.
In the biodiversity sensor project, Syngenta India is collaborating with IIT Ropar and the Fraunhofer Institute. The early stage of the biodiversity project aims to identify and quantify insects contributing to a healthy agricultural biosphere on and around farms.
Syngenta Group Digital Officer Feroz Sheikh commented: “Ultimately, we hope to expand this technology. Our first prototype has been running since March 2022. Throughout 2022, we will continue to refine and improve a small number of sensor prototypes and continue to develop artificial intelligence. And in 2023, we hope that the first pilot projects of sensor networks will be implemented in selected countries.”
Highlighting Syngenta Group's continued focus on the use of technology in agriculture, he added that "the low-cost state-of-the-art solar-powered motion capture system will rely on AI and machine learning algorithms to detect and quantify all moving species - automatically, autonomously, reliable and in scale.