- To educate farmers, the collaboration will make use of meteorological information.
- The information provided by Plugin will be of assistance to farmers.
Sumunnati (Plugin) and Sumunnati have combined to expand the scope of crop insurance implementation that covers small-scale farmers. This partnership is using the blockchain platform to provide weather intelligence. In parallel to all of the above, it is anticipated that the new alliance will expand the variety of current technical services for the agricultural industry.
It is clear that agriculture has a major role to play in creating wealth all over the world. However, particular difficulties continue to have an impact on the sector’s productivity, trapping many smallholders who depend on agriculture in uncertainty and resulting in returns that are below average.
Changes in weather patterns, unexpected production cycles, a lack of actionable weather knowledge, and insufficient mechanisms designed to offset negative consequences throughout the entire agriculture supply chain are just a few of the particular difficulties facing today’s agriculture.
This illustrates how inexact decision making at farm level can be impeded by lack of weather intelligence. This has particular implications on daily decisions made by farmers and supply chains, which are all dependent on forecasts that predict success.
For example, fertilizer may be applied before rainfallstorms if it is not possible to use actionable meteorological information. Reapplying fertilizer may be necessary as a result, raising a farmer’s production costs.
While there are many distinct problems, the development of new technologies—powered by blockchain—offers chances to turn the tide, releasing agricultural wealth, generating jobs, and fostering prosperity.
Plugin–Samunnati Partnership: Weather Intelligence and Crop Insurance
Recently, Plugin & Samunnati partnered to unlock the synergies in weather intelligence via Plugin’s Weather Forecast Node (WFN) project. Through this partnership, Plugin & Samunnati will extend their expertise in implementing the Plugin WFN project across the smallholder farmers’ landscape. Aggregated weather data will be integrated into Plugin’s data lake within the XDC ecosystem helping boost weather intelligence activities.
What’s Plugin’s WFN, and how does it converge with crop Insurance? Well, Plugin’s WFN uses data collected and processed via registered weather stations/hyperlocal sensors placed across the globe. Data collected from these nodes is collected and processed at near-real-time speeds and pushed into Plugin’s data lake. (Note: there’s potential to scale the data lakes significantly by setting up more hyperlocal sensors across the globe.)
Weather data is tagged with coordinates, latitude and longitude thanks to decentralized user interfaces (UI). This helps provide cryptographic proof when uploading the data into Plugin’s blockchain, enabling anyone to verify its provenance when developing smart contracts. Once weather data is recorded on PLI’s blockchain, its provenance information can’t be altered.
What’s more, additional filters are available to help drill down weather data collected by PLI to the granular level— i.e. Search for data on specific countries, states, and cities to see weather data.
PLI regularly inspects the weather station to ensure the accuracy of the recorded data. As well, providers of Plugin WFN’s data are compensated for providing accurate and actionable weather info. The data is optimized, which makes it more useful in decision-making across different industries.
To elaborate, let’s take the case of processing crop insurance claims and how WFN can help. With climate change introducing weather uncertainties—some extreme–, there’s a need for real-time weather data to help validate and verify crop insurance claims. Crop insurance providers are able to verify that specific weather conditions caused the problems with their claims using this near-real time data.
After obtaining the necessary data, crop insurance companies can pay out affected farmers. This ensures continuity in agricultural production. Other areas where crop insurance—supported by WFN— can cover agricultural logistics, hedging in commodity markets, aviation, and government-related policy formulation.
But what other areas does the Plugin-Samunnati cooperation cover? It also included analyzing the availability of crop insurance among smallholder farmers. This was then used to help them deal with unforeseen or weather-related disasters. Unexpected rain, flooding, severe drought are just a few of the weather conditions that were considered.
As well, Plugin has also signed a Memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Samunnati that will see Samunnati onboarded as Master Node Operator on Plugin’s decentralized oracle network. At the moment, consultations on business enablement are ongoing and will soon be directed to members of the community.