InfoCrop, available for free on IARI’s website, can forecast climate impact on farm yield in real time
Early this year, just as India was reeling from its warmest March in over a century with an unusually early onset of heat
InfoCrop, available for free on IARI’s website, can forecast climate impact on farm yield in real time
Early this year, just as India was reeling from its warmest March in over a century with an unusually early onset of heatwaves, scientists at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in Delhi conducted a first-of-its-kind experiment to quantify the impact of the hot weather on crop yield in Punjab and Haryana.
“In the last week of March, we forecasted that wheat farmers in Punjab would experience a yield loss of 6-10 per cent. In Haryana, farmers should be prepared for a 4-5 per cent yield loss,” says S Naresh Kumar, principal scientist at IARI.
The forecast was close to the actual crop loss. Gurvinder Singh, director, Punjab agriculture department, tells Down To Earth that the heatwaves, which continued till April, caused a 14 per cent loss in crop yield to the state.
Currently, the country does not have a system to forecast crop loss due to heatwaves or most other extreme weather conditions. The Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre, under the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, provides pre-harvest forecasts for eight major crops at the national, state and district levels.
The agency also puts out forecasts accounting for drought events, but not for other extreme weather conditions. Besides, the agency forecasts with static crop models, which cannot factor in real-time changes.
The IARI scientists, in contrast, used InfoCrop version 2.1, India’s only dynamic crop simulation model developed and released by the institute in 2015 to study the long-term impact of climate change and crop management practices on yield.
The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change included the model’s projections for 1976-2100 in the first two national communications, reports submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change detailing the level of vulnerability and risks the country faces due to the impacts of climate change. But the March experiment shows that the model can also be used for near-term forecasts.
This is promising as, Kumar says, government and insurance companies should use at least three models for climate impact projections and for pre- or in-season crop yield forecasts to improve accuracy, and InfoCrop could be one of them.
He says the model has an 85 per cent accuracy rate, which is on par with widely used dynamic models such as the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer model, developed by the US, and Agriculture Production Systems sIMulator, developed by Australia.
InfoCrop is more suited for India as it has the life cycle data for almost all the local varieties of 11 crops: paddy, wheat, maize, sorghum, pearl millet, pigeon pea, chickpea, soybean, groundnut, potato and cotton.
Foreign models can be used to forecast local crop yield, but they would need fine-tuning, making the process cumbersome.
“Indian researchers will have to feed daily temperature, precipitation, along with soil conditions, plant varieties and their characteristics into the foreign models. Next, they will have to check if the model can reproduce the observed performance of that crop variety,” says Kumar.
In InfoCrop, the parameters are already calibrated to Indian crop varieties and they are updated at regular intervals by the institute. The parameters deal with aspects of weather (precipitation, temperature, radiation and others), crop growth (phenology, grain characterist