Agriculture Ministry and SupremeSAT to introduce space technology to boost farming

The agreement with SupremeSAT to introduce ‘ExactFarming’ will be marked as a major step forward to uplift the local agriculture and agrarian community, said Minister of Agriculture Dumindha Dissanayake.

“Ever since I took office, my key effort was to ensure that our local farmers get maximum possible benefits utilising world class technology. The implementation of ‘ExactFarming’ introduces space technology to agriculture for the first time in Sri Lanka. It is my intention to now introduce every possible facility using this platform to the local farmers and to the sector so that we upgrade the lives of the Sri Lankan agrarian community.

“The vision of President Maithripala Sirisena as well as our Ministry is to establish a glorious era for the local agriculture and farmers in every aspect of governance. This marks as a step towards achieving that goal. I thank SupremeSAT for offering this platform to our Ministry and look forward for the speedy implementation of ‘ExactFarming’ in Sri Lanka, in anticipation to revolutionise the Sri Lankan agriculture sector,” he added.

‘ExactFarming’ is a platform jointly developed by SupremeSAT and Silican Valley’s ExactFarming Inc. The platform will offer high quality, most frequent, processes satellite imagery to the agrarian community of Sri Lanka through the Ministry of Agriculture.

This very innovative step taken by the Ministry will introduce precision farming techniques in Sri Lanka. Using ‘ExactFarming,’ the Ministry will be able to have precise information of each and every agrarian land in Sri Lanka and will also be directly linked with every farmer in Sri Lanka. 

This will take the Sri Lankan agriculture to greater heights since globally accepted advanced benefits such as mapping, crop insurance, weather forecasting, harvest monitoring, seed/fertiliser/pesticide usage monitoring/distribution, harvest related warehousing/export/import planning, farmer pension portal etc. can now be made available to Sri Lanka.

“SupremeSAT salutes the visionary leadership of Minister Duminda Dissanayake. This historic step taken by the Minister and the Ministry officials will take Sri Lanka to a new era of agrarian revolution. ‘ExactFarming’ will strive to make very Sri Lankan farmer to be fully equipped with every little information he should have starting from knowing where his land is to the weather, soil, cultivation, harvest related data of that land right at his palm. The Minister took personal interest to ensure the implementation of this project is fast tracked so that the Sri Lankan farmers too enjoy the greater assistance of space technology without any further delay,” said SupremeSAT Chairman R.M. Manivannan.

“The ‘ExactFarming’ team is very excited to start collaboration with the Sri Lankan Ministry of Agriculture. We believe that with our partner SupremSAT, our platform will create new value for farmers by supporting day-to-day agriculture decision with information from sensors, satellites and weather models. We consider Sri Lanka as a gateway of our services to South Asia and would like to use our partnership as a starting point of ‘ExactFarming’ platform rollout to the whole region,” said Mikhail Kokorich, Founder of ExactFarming Inc. 

Kokorich is a Russian millionaire who also owns Russia’s only private satellite manufacturing company.