Plugin Educates Farmers on Technology with Meteorology

• The project utilizes the latest weather information to help farmers.
• Plugin's data will guide farmers and provide agricultural advice.

The partnership between Plugin (PLI) and Sumunnati has expanded the area of crop insurance that includes small-scale farmers. The blockchain platform is being used by the alliance to apply weather intelligence. In addition, parallel to the above, it is expected that this alliance will expand the range of contemporary technical services available to the farm industry.

Agriculture is an essential component of economic growth, and it has a significant impact on wealth creation around the world. Still, certain problems in the sector have a negative effect on its productivity, trapping many farmers in poverty and leading to low returns.

The particular difficulties facing today's agriculture include changes in weather patterns, unexpected production cycles, a lack of actionable weather knowledge and inadequate mechanisms to offset the negative consequences throughout the entire supply chain.

The inability of farmers to make informed decisions due to the lack of actionable weather intelligence hampers their ability to make precise choices. The many daily decisions that they and the supply chain have to make rely on accurate forecasts, which are not available in sufficient detail.

Fertilizer can be applied inappropriately if meteorological information is not used. For example, following a rainstorm, fertilizer may be applied without taking into account the latest weather forecast. Reapplication of fertilizer may be necessary as a result, which will increase production costs for farmers.

While there are many different problems, the development of new technologies—powered by blockchain—can provide opportunities to turn things around, freeing agricultural wealth, creating jobs, and fostering prosperity.

Plugin & Samunnati recently joined forces to unlock the synergies in weather intelligence through Plugin's Weather Forecast Node (WFN) project. Through this partnership, Plugin & Samunnati will extend their abilities in applying the Plugin WFN system across the smallholder farmers' landscape. The aggregated weather data will be integrated into Plugin's data lake within XDC ecosystem that will boost weather intelligence activities.

Plugin's WFN is a method of detecting weather patterns using data collected by the registered weather stations and hyperlocal sensors placed around the globe. The data from these nodes is collected and processed in near-real-time speeds, then pushed into Plugin's data lake.

Thanks to decentralized user interfaces (UI) in applications, weather data comes tagged with latitude and longitude coordinates. This enables anyone to verify the origin of data when developing smart contracts, after it is uploaded into Plugin's blockchain. Once recorded on PLI's blockchain, the provenance information can't be changed.

In addition, other filters are available to help narrow down weather data collected by PLI to the granular level— i.e., one can view weather information for a specific country, state, or city by searching for it.

PLI conducts periodic checks at the registered weather station to ensure the quality of recorded weather data. In addition, Plugin WFN's providers are compensated for providing accurate and actionable information. This optimizes the data, making it useful for decision-making in different industries.

Let's take, for example, the case of processing crop insurance claims and how WFN can help. With climate change introducing weather uncertainties—some extreme–, there is a need for real-time weather data to help validate and verify crop insurance claims. With the near real-time data, crop insurance providers can verify whether specific weather conditions were experienced causing specified problems.

After collecting the data, insurers can process payment for affected farmers, ensuring continuity in agriculture. Crop insurance—supported by WFN—can cover agricultural logistics, hedging in commodity markets, aviation and government-related policy formulation.

The Plugin-Samunnati collaboration also worked on the following: studying crop insurance availability for smallholder farmers, and how these challenges can be handled during unforeseen and weather-related calamities. Some weather events considered include unexpected rain, floods, extensive drought, etc.

In addition, Plugin has also signed a Memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Samunnati, which will see Samunnati onboarded as Master Node Operator on Plugin's decentralized oracle network. At present, business enablement consultations are in progress and within a few weeks directions will be given to community members.