By Sachin Murdeshwar

Mumbai:The Weather Company, an IBM business, the leader in accurate weather forecasting and insights, hosted a first-of-its kind event, ‘The AgriTech Challenge 2018’ with the Agripreneurs Group, Smart Agripost and Graype.in.

Attended by ~200 agripreneurs, researchers, corporates and financiers, this event provided a unique platform to discuss and crowd-produce solutions to resolve issues affecting agripreneurs and farmers in India.

“This is The Weather Company’s humble attempt to involve the stakeholders, innovators and technologists to come together and address some of the challenges in the agritech ecosystem and contribute towards improving crop yield and output. We see ourselves as a facilitator providing hyper-local accurate weather insights to help deliver what farmers and others involved benefit from – to make the best decisions for their business.”, Himanshu Goyal, Sales & Alliances Leader, The Weather Company.

During the event, Himanshu Goyal addressed the audience on how crop production is becoming increasingly complex and the key role agronomists will continue to play in understanding the latest technology and interpreting those insights on the farm. Durjoy Mazumdar, Global Head of Enterprise Sales, IBM Watson Content & IoT, The Weather Company, also provided a bird’s eye view on why weather is such a difficult data-set to predict. Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research & CTO, IBM India spoke about the steady progress the IBM company is making in transforming the agritech sector with new-age technologies including AI & Blockchain.

The panel discussions included various tracks of ideation jams to build a roadmap to a sustainable agritech economy. Ajay Desai, Chief Operating Officer, Rubique; Rajesh Kumar R, Group Head – Credit Policy, Portfolio Management and Risk Analytics, HDFC Bank Ltd; Arindom Datta, Asia Head, Sustainability Banking, Rabobank; Ramesh Ramachandran, Senior Vice President – Strategy and Precision Farming, Mahindra and Mahindra’s Farm Equipment Business; Sagar Kaushik, Chief Operating Officer, United Phosphorous Limited; Raul Rebello, Senior Vice President and Head, Rural Lending, Axis Bank; S Venkatraman, Partner and Head of Mumbai office at Rabobank’s Food and Agribusiness focused Private Equity Fund in India; were also present at the event and provided their expert views on crowd producing solutions to jointly set in motion a roadmap for a sustainable agritech economy in India.