In a major development in the agriculture sector, Maharashtra’s Baramati farmers rose to achieve around 25 per cent reduction in fertilizer use in the backdrop of the use of AI technology powered by Microsoft’s project Farm Vibes.

In a video clip that Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, shared twice on X, Seema Chavan, 56, a farmer from Swami Chincholi village in Baramati Taluka, in Maharashtra’s Pune district explains about her experience of using AI in her sugarcane farming. “My cost of farming has come down by at least 30 per cent and the yield is up by 30 to 40 per cent. I use AI on 1.5 acres of my farm. But from next year, I will bring my entire field under the AI,” she said reflecting on what the future of farming could look like, aided by AI.

The Agricultural Development Trust (ADT) of Baramati in Maharashtra has been effectively using the technology to improve crop yields, reduce crop time as well as post-harvest losses, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said.

With a select group of farmers in the drought-prone region, who signed up for Microsoft’s Project Farm Vibes, ADT has been using AI-driven solutions for cropping, which include irrigation, fertiliser use.

According to Nadella, the AI has helped improve crop yields by 40 per cent and reduce fertilizer use by 25 per cent.

The ADT, a farmers’ organisation founded by former Maharashtra chief minister Sharad Pawar, is expanding this AI-driven experiment from 1,000 farmers to 50,000 farmers.

Farm Vibes uses satellite data, IoT sensors, drones, and AI algorithms to generate actionable insights for farmers.

“Microsoft’s Farm Vibes uses a sensor fusion technology to integrate real-time data on soil moisture, temperature, pH levels and humidity collected from drones, satellites, and soil sensors to offer data-driven recommendations for farmers to act upon,” Nadella said.

ADT Baramati was set up in the 1970s to help farmers in the drought-prone region adopt modern farming methods. Today, it has an active outreach field force and its researchers collaborate with institutions around the world. Its field agronomists have introduced local farmers to – among many other things – drip irrigation, which uses far less water than the traditional flooding of fields, soil-less farming, modern grafting methods and artificial insemination with foreign bulls and local cows to raise milk yields.

Some 1.6 million local farmers are beneficiaries of ADT Baramati. The Trust hosts an annual farmers’ festival called Krushik at its 150-acre campus where new techniques are introduced, attended by more than 200,000 farmers from around India.

Project FarmVibes.ai, an open-source research project from Microsoft Research, builds on FarmBeats to analyze the data, along with historical crop data, to provide insights – covering everything from whether crops are getting enough water to whether a farm has a pest infestation, what kind and how to get rid of it.