Ministers release app to help farmers tackle pest diseases

The app and a portal providing geo-based agriculture information were launched by Tamil Nadu Revenue and Disaster Management and IT Minister RB Udhayakumar and Agriculture Minister R Doraikannu at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) here on Tuesday in which more than 100 farmers from Vedaranyam and a dozen corporate volunteers participated.

The app called PANNAI (Pest- disease Advance Notification and Need-based Agriculture Information) has been developed by MSSRF with the support of Oracle CSR and technical inputs from Tamil Nadu Agriculture University (TNAU).

It provides advance information on pest-diseases to enable farmers to protect their crops.

Advisories, market information and farm-specific weather advisories were also available, something that is usually available only at district level.

It also uses integrated information from the Uzhavan app of the Tamil Nadu government.

Estimates showed that farmers in the region could lose up to 40 per cent of their crop to pest-disease attacks.

The project is being rolled out in six villages, reaching around 3,000 farmers in the Vedaranyam block of Nagapattinam district and indirectly benefiting around 10,000 farmers.

As a unique feature, it contains farm-level digitized land records and has automatic weather stations installed as part of the project.