Plugin (PLI) and Sumunnati joined hands together to increase the radar range for crop insurance to the small-scale farmers too. The collaboration is applying the weather intelligence functioning over the blockchain platform. Parallely, the above partnership is expected to open up diverse modern technical oriented services to the agriculture sector.

Today, there is no denying that agriculture plays a significant role in fostering wealth across the globe. 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.

To show how precise decision-making at the farm level is hampered by a lack of actionable weather intelligence. In particular, it has an impact on the many daily decisions that farmers and the supply chain make, all of which depend on precise forecasts for success. As an illustration, applying fertilizer without using actionable meteorological intelligence may result in fertilizer being applied right before rainstorms. 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 are 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.)

Thanks to application user interfaces (UI) that are decentralized, weather data comes tagged with latitude and longitude coordinates. 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. one can view weather data by searching for information on a specific country, state, or city.

To guarantee the quality of recorded weather data, PLI conducts periodic checks at the registered weather station. As well, providers of Plugin WFN’s data are compensated for providing accurate and actionable weather info. This helps optimize the data, making it useful for decision-making in 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. With the near real-time data, crop insurance providers can verify whether specific weather conditions were experienced, causing specified problems. Upon ascertaining the data, crop insurers can process payout for affected farmers, guaranteeing continuity in agriculture. Other areas where crop insurance—supported by WFN—  can cover agricultural logistics, hedging in commodity markets, aviation, and government-related policy formulation.

That said, what else does the Plugin-Samunnati collaboration cover?

The partnership also covered analyzing crop insurance availability amongst 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.

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. Currently, business enablement consultations are in progress and within a few weeks directions will be given to community members.