Agricultural production in India is highly vulnerable to climate change. Transformational change to farming systems is required to cope with this
changing climate to maintain food security, and ensure farming to remain economically viable. The south Asian rice-fallow systems occupying
22.3 million ha with about 88% in India, mostly (82%) concentrated in the eastern states, are under threat. These systems currently provide
economic and food security for about 11 million people, but only achieve 50% of their yield potential. Improvement in productivity is possible
through efficient utilization of these fallow lands. The relatively low production occurs because of sub-optimal water and nutrient management
strategies. Historically, the Agro-met advisory service has assisted farmers and disseminated information at a district-level for all the states. In
some instances, Agro-met delivers advice at the block level also, but in general, farmers use to follow the district level advice and develop an
appropriate management plan like land preparation, sowing, irrigation timing, harvesting etc. The advisories are generated through the District
Agrometeorology Unit (DAMU) and Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) network, that consider medium-range weather forecast. Unfortunately, these
forecasts advisories are general and broad in nature for a given district and do not scale down to the individual field or farm. Farmers must make
complex crop management decisions with limited or generalised information. The lack of fine scale information creates uncertainty for farmers,
who then develop risk-averse management strategies that reduce productivity. It is unrealistic to expect the Agro-met advisory service to
deliver bespoke information to every farmer and to every field simply with the help of Kilometre-scale weather forecast. New technologies must
be embraced to address the emerging crises in food security and economic prosperity. Despite these problems, Agro-met has been successful.
New digital technologies have emerged though, and these digital technologies should become part of the Agro-met arsenal to deliver valuable
information directly to the farmers at the field scale. The Agro-met service is poised to embrace and deliver new interventions through technology
cross-sections such as satellite remote sensing, drone-based survey, mobile based data collection systems, IoT based sensors, using insights
derived from a hybridisation of crop and AIML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) models. These technological advancements will
generate fine-scale static and dynamic Agro-met information on cultivated lands, that can be delivered through Application Programming Interface
(APIs) and farmers facing applications. We believe investment in this technology, that delivers information directly to the farmers, can
reverse the yield gap, and address the negative impacts of a changing climate