New app for grain 'so close to a standard tool for farmers'

The Australian-developed technology, from agriculture start-up, GoMicro, will soon be trialled for assessing grain quality at farmer-producer organisations in India and is already being trialled in Australia.

India's premier agriculture research organisation, the Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) have selected the new app, called Grain Analyser, through the India's agriculture innovation hub and agri-startups incubator, Pusa Krishi, with the aim of rolling the new app out to 20 farmer/producer organisations nationwide.

India, home to more than 100 million farmers, has historically relied on subjective grain quality assessments, often leaving farmers vulnerable to buyer-driven pricing.

The Indian Government has said it is committed to modernising this outdated system to ensure equitable pricing for its farmers through various initiatives to support the digitising of the country's grain industry.

GoMicro said its patent-pending imaging technology will be able to asses wheat, lentil, soy, and coffee.

"We are in the business of democratising quality assessment, turning grain into tradeable digital assets," says the company's founder Dr Sivam Krish, whose business now has has clients in the the EU, US, as well as India and has "been used by PB Agrifood in Australia to assess soy quality for over a year".

GoMicro said it was through the Australian-grown agri-tech and food supply start-up program, Farmers2Founders, that the project got off the ground, which included testing on lentils which Mr Krish said was one of the most difficult crops for which to develop AI tech assessment tools.

"We wanted to prove that it can be done, amid a backdrop of decades-long multimillion-dollar failures in attempting AI-based assessments in Australia," he said.

But that's by far the company's last big challenge.

He said India initially had also proven to be a hard market to crack.

Three years of knocking on doors by Grain Analyser's ceo, Amanpreet Singh, has finally opened the way for the new tech into India's large and complex market, Mr Krish said, where pricing has to be super competitive and services have to accommodate diverse needs of a rapidly evolving market.

"India has prepared us to take on any market," he said.

"AI applications that took decades to build can now be built in a matter of weeks and delivered via phones to reach any market globally."

Mr Singh said the new app would also make it challenging for buyers to exploit sellers.

"Introducing objective AI-based assessments marks a significant departure from the traditional visual inspections and manual processes that have long dominated the Indian grain trade," he said.

Mr Singh said the product was also being trialled by multinationals keen to reduce sourcing risks.

"GoMicro's AI technology will facilitate resolving quality-related trade disputes, enabling both buyers and sellers to assess to the same standards consistently and reliably," he said.

This included a pre-release version that was currently being tested by various players in the grain industry, including Walco grain cleaners from Halbury, SA.

The company's owner, Kurt Walters, said in a tweet there was more work to do, but the technology "is so close to becoming a standard tool for farmers".

Mr Krish said they were currently only doing counts, but would align it with grain standards later on.