Proximal Soilsens’ Affordable Tech Helps Farmers with Rapid and Easy Soil Testing

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Among the seven startups selected under Cisco and Social Alpha’s Krishi Mangal second edition, Pune-based Proximal Soilsens Technologies Pvt. Ltd. stands out due to the uniqueness of their product and its relevance for farmers. Launched in 2021, Krishi Mangal is a scale-up accelerator program that supports agritech startups to design solutions for and support smallholder farmers.

Proximal Soilsens started in 2017 by students and professors of IIT Bombay, the company builds precision agriculture technologies for farmers enabling them to manage crops and soil with best practices of irrigation, fertigation and disease prediction. The company aligns with Government of India’s vision for irrigation, ‘Per drop more crop’ and aim to develop advanced, affordable technologies for agriculture community and make agriculture sustainable and profitable.

Through the years, mis-selection and unbalanced application of chemical inputs has resulted into degraded soil and increased dependency on chemical inputs. It is difficult for farmers to take informed decision for selecting the right type and quantity of inputs as per their soil health. The current infrastructure of 3000 soils testing laboratories across the country is not sufficient to address the need of 9 Crore farmers, also these laboratories take considerable amount of time at least 10-14 days to deliver the soil advisory. To mitigate the above challenge, setting up soil testing laboratories is also expensive, as current soil testing technologies require infrastructure, electricity, and skilled personnel hence difficult to scale. Due to these issues, soil testing is often neglected, and the unregulated use of fertilizers has become rampant and serious.

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