When it comes to farming, pest infestation is a major worry for farmers. Of course, there are chemical and organic pesticides available in the market.
However, many complain that applying pesticides doesn’t yield the required results. Often, things go sideways, and farmers pay the price.
This is where technology comes into play. ‘Revin Krishi’, a startup incubated at IIT Palakkad in 2023, is using technology to make scientific farming practical and accessible.
According to Dr Sreenath Vijayakumar, associate professor at IIT Palakkad, Revin Krishi was born from the need to make scientific farming practical and accessible.
“Farmers face unpredictable weather, rising cultivation costs, water constraints, and pest and disease pressures. However, many still lack reliable, timely information specific to their crops. General advisories often fail to capture differences in local weather, soil, and crop conditions,” he says.
“We combine hyperlocal information using AI to turn data from farms into useful insights and advisories. This helps farmers make informed decisions about irrigation, crop care, and input use, reducing avoidable expenditure and improving productivity,” says Sreenath.
According to him, their purpose was to make scientific farming easier through trustworthy information, practical guidance, and measurable results.
The idea for Revin Krishi took shape in 2018, when research and development activities began, he adds. The startup was formally established in 2023 with two founders — Sreenath and Sreehari V.
“We began as a bootstrapped venture, focusing on developing our technology and validating it under real farming conditions. Our farm monitoring device has been deployed in various farmers’ fields and research and seed-producing organisations, including the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and government farms,” Sreenath explains.
The team is building an AI-powered farm intelligence platform that helps farmers make smarter, more profitable decisions. By combining IoT sensors, drone technology, AI, and hyperlocal data, the plan is to help improve productivity, reduce cultivation costs, and make agriculture more climate-resilient.
“In a recent deployment at Alathur State Seed Farm, Palakkad, Revin Krishi helped increase paddy yield by 33%, reduce pesticide expenditure by 64%, and lower production costs per kilogram by up to 31%,” says the team.
All in all, it delivers an additional economic benefit of ₹8.03 per kilogram, Sreenath says.
As for the future, the start-up’s immediate focus is to scale its proven model across major agricultural regions in India, starting with paddy cultivation.
“We are also exploring strategic investments and partnerships to accelerate market expansion, strengthen our AI capabilities, and bring farm intelligence to thousands of farmers,” says Sreenath.