The Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperation Ltd (IFFCO) is using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for drone-based fertilizer spraying.

Following a pilot project, IFFCO has built a cloud-native application on Oracle Cloud that enables farmers to easily book, view, and manage drone-based spraying of IFFCO nano fertilizers.

The solution is based on real-time data received via IFFCO's Kisan Udan mobile application, which collects data from 2,500 drones.

“OCI plays a pivotal role in enabling us to leverage technology to promote sustainable farming, and we are excited to expand our collaboration further. OCI is the only platform that can provide us with the scale and performance needed to handle the influx of data, which is set to increase by 100 times over the next few months,” said AK Gupta, director, IT and board member, IFFCO.

IFFCO uses OCI Media Flow and OCI Media Streams to process the video content captured by the drones, which includes the longitude and latitude, area of nano fertilizer sprayed, flow rate, battery health, altitude, and fertilizer consumed.

Beyond that, OCI Media Streams transcode, transcribe, and integrate the data stored on OCI. IFFCO can then use OCI virtual machines to scale up compute capacity as needed.

“The Indian agriculture market is undergoing a major transformation as farmers are rapidly adopting new technologies to boost productivity and improve profitability,” said Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India. “With OCI, IFFCO can revolutionize farming practices and drive positive change in rural communities across India."

IFFCO was founded in 1967 and helps 55 million farmers through 36,000 member cooperatives. The cooperative has been a customer of Oracle Cloud since at least 2020, and has used Oracle products for "decades."