Founder, Khetiyaar
Founder of Khetiyaar, an AI farming app built in Gujarat for Indian farmers. Khetiyaar publishes practical guides on crop planning, government schemes, market prices and farm economics — in Gujarati, Hindi and English.
Five different capabilities are sold under the word AI, and they have wildly different reliability. Photo disease diagnosis scores above 95% in the lab and commonly 70-80% on real field photos. Judge each feature separately.
The word free is doing four different jobs in this market. Government apps are permanently free and almost nobody recommends them, because there is no commission on a free app.
Advice written for Punjab is close to useless in Marathwada. The monsoon is one system but it fails differently in each part of India, and the coping strategy has to match the failure.
A seasonal forecast and a three-hour warning are different products with different reliability. Knowing which to trust for which decision is most of the skill — and it is rarely explained.
The nakshatra system is a solar calendar, which is why it tracks the seasons well. It has also drifted about three weeks from the seasons it was calibrated against — and you can verify that yourself.
A thousand-year-old body of weather couplets that Gujarati farmers still use. Some of it is careful observation with a real mechanism. Some of it is not. Both deserve to be said out loud.
A wet fortnight at sowing followed by a month of nothing is the pattern that destroys most kharif crops. The reason is not just the drought — it is what the early rain did to your crop's roots.
The monsoon is not four months of rain. It is a sequence of heavy spells and dry breaks, and the pattern matters more to your crop than the total. Here is what causes it.
Farmers read the sky, the wind, the birds and the trees long before there were forecasts. Some of those signs have a real physical mechanism behind them. Some do not. Here is the honest separation.
Cumin is among the highest-value crops a Gujarat farmer can grow and among the easiest to lose. Two cloudy weeks at flowering can take the whole field. Here is how to give it the best odds.
North Gujarat supplies much of the world's psyllium husk from light land and almost no water. The crop is easy until harvest — and at harvest one shower can take the value out of it.
Gujarat grows most of India's castor, and India supplies most of the world's. A deep-rooted crop for light land that pays across several pickings — and one you must never treat as food or fodder.
