National Agro Foundation (NAF) established in the year 2000 by Mr. C. Subramaniam (the ‘Architect of Green Revolution in India’ and a Bharat Ratna awardee) and nurtured by Dr A P J Abdul Kalam (Former President of India) with a vision to “create a Healthy, Literate and Prosperous Rural India” has been working on comprehensive rural development with special focus on agriculture. The prime focus of the Foundation is to transform the direction of the Indian agriculture from “production oriented” to “market-oriented” or in the words of Our Founder from ‘seed to grain’ to ‘soil to market’ by addressing the issues of entire supply / value chain in agriculture.

NAF’s team believes that sustainable development is about recognizing, understanding and acting on interconnections between the thematic areas of Education, Economy, Environment and Empowerment – The ‘4E’ approach for development.

NAF works in partnership with various Government and Non-Government Organizations, Educational and Research Institutes, Financial Institutions and Corporate Organisations. NAF has dedicated infrastructure and domain expertise for R&D and Outreach Programs. NAF is reaching out to more than 220,000 farmers in 830+ villages across 15 States of India.

NAF has a strong bond with NABARD since 2005 through its first and foremost collaboration through FTTF project.. Followed by this, we have formed many Farmers club, JLG’s and federations through the support of NABARD. We have signed first 4 watershed projects with NABARD during 2009-10. There started the growth of NAF towards water conservation, water augmentation, Sustainable agriculture development. Today we are working with NABARD on 15 different projects like Farmer Producer Organisation, NABARD- CSR watershed, SDP projects and Climate proofing projects.

Climate change, the most debated and used term in last decade. The effect of climate change cause greater impacts on daily lives of people and all other business sectors. Agriculture is one of the sectors which largely depends on weather and climate for its prosperity. In country like India, about 60% of agricultural land falls under rainfed irrigation where weather plays a key role in determining success of the crop.

On the other hand, farmers having difficult times in deciding field activities like sowing, irrigation and other intercultural operations due to dynamic weather conditions. Our current weather monitoring and advisory systems are operational at block level but the distribution of rainfall within a block always differs which makes block level advisories are risk in applying at village level. To address this issue, National Agro Foundation with technical assistance from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University decided to provide village level weather forecast and advisory services to the farmers in Chengalpattu District through climate proofing projects

Farmers/users can register via web through which they can receive location and crop specific advisory based on past and forecasted weather conditions

The Bank of New York Mellon (or BNY Mellon) is an investments company. They provide investment management, investment services and wealth management that help institutions and individuals succeed in markets all over the world. For over 100 years, BNY Mellon has maintained a valued presence in Asia Pacific, where they have been one of the first U.S. financial institutions to invest in the region’s vast potential. Today, they have approximately 14,000 employees in the region and maintain extensive operations in 17 locations.

BNY Mellon believes that Corporate social responsibility (CSR) enables them to protect the long-term sustainability of their company while they address pressing global issues, contribute to healthy economies, and support thriving communities. Their CSR policy is built around the four themes – Responsible Economic Growth, Gender Equality, The Future of Work and Climate Action.

BNY Mellon joined hands with National Agro Foundation in the year 2013 for implementation of rural development activities in the areas of farmer’s skill development, watershed development, agricultural productivity enhancement, women empowerment, digital literacy, disaster relief & rehabilitation and many more to uplift the life of rural people.

In a country like India, where about 60% of sown areas are rainfed agriculture, the weightage for the weather factor in determining the success of a crop field is higher. While weather remains a key factor in deciding the output of a harvest, it also is the most dynamic variable in the equation, posing a challenge to the farmers in crop management. With rapidly changing climate patterns across the globe, monitoring the weather to understand its impact is critical for natural resource management in various sectors, especially agriculture.

Our current weather monitoring system can only predict the rainfall and other weather data for a larger area (district or block level). But, within the block itself, the distribution of rainfall isn’t even. Hence, relying on the current accuracy and precision level of our existing weather monitoring system for taking farm-field level decisions sometimes becomes a risk for the farmers. And the exposure to the risk is higher in the case of small and marginal farmers.

Hence, setting up a weather monitoring system that can provide hyperlocal weather information and prediction with highest possible accuracy and precision is a much-needed solution to move Indian agriculture in the direction of technologically advanced agriculture powered by data driven decision making. Advanced information on local weather will help the farmers in tackling theweather-related risks andmaximize the farm productivity.

In this context, National Agro Foundation with technical assistance from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University decided to address this problem by providing village level weather forecast and advisory services to the farmers in Chengalpattu District and scale up the model to other project locations across India. The project is financially supported by BNY Mellon under their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.

Farmers/users can register via web through which they can receive location and crop specific advisory based on past and forecasted weather conditions in English and regional languages. Farmers can also access the services through the Android mobile application.