CIC Holdings introduces ‘Precision Agriculture’ for Lankan farmers

By Zahara Zuhair
CIC Holdings PLC will be introducing ‘Precision Agriculture’ (PA), a smart agriculture concept to SrI Lankan farmers as part of its CSR initiative.

PA or smart farming is a farming management concept based on observing, measuring and responding to inter and intra-field variability 
in crops.

CIC Holdings PLC Consultant/ Senior Research Scientist Manju Gunawardena said that with this system it reduces inputs and increases productivity.
“It reduces fertilizer, workforce, chemical as well less time consumed,” he said.

“It does powerful monitoring of your fields, targeted treatment, early yield prediction, better yield quality, sustainable use of resources,” he said.
How it works is it measures the crop using proprietary hyper spectral imaging camera set on drones or manned aircrafts. It has multispectral cameras and advanced software systems. 
It analyses spectrum of reflected light and identify potential problems of the farmland such as diseases, nutrient deficiencies, weeds, environmental stresses.

Noting that the manual observation is slow, highly variable, costly and destructive, he said that drone observation is extremely fast, low variability, low cost and is non-destructive.
He also said that as manual application is slow costly, and destructive. The drone spray on the other hand is extremely fast, no human exposure, less polluting and it has very less agrochemical use.
He said in order to avoid elephant-man conflicts too drones can be used, equipped with a special light and sound system.

“With a drone, when it’s dark with a thermal camera it could identify if there are any elephants around the field. If there is an elephant it could be seen clearly. If they are coming toward, there is a special system, where there are specific colours and sounds elephants dislike and fear. When the light go closer to them they will not come to the area again. There is a special drone designed for them,” he said.
He said that it also will avoid chemicals being repeated, excessive use of fertiliser as it gets accurate information and afterwards spraying liquids from top. 
He said that at the moment they 
are experimenting on spraying powder as well.

“From a different perspective can be seen through a drone, can see from the sky, a wider area at once,” he said. He also said with targeted weed killing it saves money and the environment.
“We have plans to produce drones in Sri Lanka with other universities. But at the moment we import them,” 
he added.