The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) will provide technical and manpower assistance to Andhra Pradesh for digital soil mapping, also known as predictive soil mapping, a computer-assisted generation of digital maps of soil type and properties.
Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Wednesday launched the BMGF Program on Digital Platform for Agriculture.
Digital Green, a global development organisation, will help ensure collective use of technology by small farmers by partnering with the government.
Describing the agreement as significant, the Chief Minister said the visit of Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the BMGF Bill Gates to Visakhapatnam on Friday would bring good luck to Andhra Pradesh.
‘Big honour’
“It is a big honour for us to receive him at the valedictory of the three-day AP AgTech Summit,” Mr. Naidu said after the inauguration of the conference by Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu.
“Mr. Gates visited Hyderabad and the opening of Microsoft development centre there gave a boost to its emergence as IT hub. He is a great man who spends all his time in serving the people, to address health, agriculture issues and the needs of the needy,” the Chief Minister said.
He said the State government was very delighted to partner with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to boost the yield and income from agriculture by popularising various technologies.
Mr. Naidu said ‘Sunrise’ Andhra Pradesh would always pioneer in using technologies to improve the livelihood of various sections.
From the BMGF, its Global Director, Agriculture Development, Nick Austin, and Head of Agriculture in Asia Purvi Mehta attended the first day of the summit.
Soil profile
When contacted, an official involved in the implementation of the BMGF-assisted programme in A.P., said digital soil mapping involved creation of spatial soil information by the use of field and laboratory observational methods coupled with spatial and non-spatial soil inference systems.
