Google-enabled app helping small farmers in India

New Delhi, Sep 2 Nearly 70 per cent of small farmers -- those cultivating fewer than three acres -- in India often find their crops damaged by unforeseen weather and pests. To bridge this knowledge gap, Pune-based agritech startup AgroStar has a multi-lingual mobile app on Google Cloud Platform that is helping boost crop yields and encourage sustainable practices for small farmers in the country. Launched as an on-premise, e-commerce platform selling farm tools in 2008, the firm turned to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to expand its offerings. The firm now uses Cloud-based analytics and is deploying machine learning (ML) models to provide timely advice in five languages -- from seed optimization, crop rotation and soil nutrition to pest control and commodity price forecasting to small farmers. "Moving to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) reduced our time to deployment including migrations. Now, we are able to do all the deployment during the day on Kubernetes clusters provided by Google," Pritesh Gudge, AgroStar, software engineer, told .