India, 5 August 2025 – Bengaluru headquartered Cropin, claiming to be the world’s largest deployed AI platform for food and agriculture, has secured a strategic €700,000 contract under EIT Food’s Impact Funding Framework. Cropin will deploy its AI-powered initiative, FIRST Potato (Field Intelligence for Regenerative Agriculture and Sustainability in Potato Farming), to accelerate the adoption of regenerative practices across Europe. As part of the initiative, Cropin will convene a consortium of food processors, research institutions, and sustainability leaders to accelerate the transition from conventional potato farming to regenerative agricultural practices.
According to its press release, Cropin’s AI-powered decision support system integrates crop-specific intelligence, real-time field data from sensors, satellite images, weather stations, IoT devices, Cropin’s own data models, and predictive analytics to enable the seamless adoption of regenerative methods without compromising yield or quality. FIRST Potato delivers plot-specific daily advisories to growers tailored to the unique soil profile and microclimatic conditions of each farm, enabling optimized irrigation, input usage, and residue management. These hyper-local insights enable effective regenerative practices by enhancing soil health, significantly reducing the environmental footprint, and improving yields, making regenerative agriculture economically attractive and scalable.
The press release implies possible benefits of a 5% yield increase, 15% pesticide reduction, 5% lower water use, and 1.5% higher solid content of the potatos. Economic benefits could be of the order of €410/ha, combining revenue growth and cost savings for growers and agri-food businesses
Pilot farms in Denmark and processors in Germany, UK
In order to scale adoption across Europe, the FIRST Potato deployment will scientifically validate its performance on pilot farms in Denmark and initiate the first commercial pilots with two potato processors in Germany and the UK. The company has partnered with Aarhus University, a globally recognized leader in sustainable agriculture research, to validate the insights and impact delivered by the platform.
“As regenerative agriculture gains momentum, the absence of verifiable, measurable outcomes poses a real challenge to meaningful, scalable impact,” said Krishna Kumar, CEO and founder of Cropin. “Without robust digital systems, farmers struggle to consistently uphold regenerative principles. Through AI, data intelligence, and real-time decision-support, we are bridging this critical gap, bringing precision, accountability, and scale to regenerative agriculture. With FIRST Potato, our goal is to help farmers adopt climate-smart practices that are both profitable and scientifically validated.”
Potato processors seek to source tubers with high solid content to enhance the product quality of chips and fries, while regenerative practices support corporate sustainable sourcing requirements. These practices also improve potato solid content, but often result in reduced yields in the initial years. Cropin’s precision and predictive technology helps farmers address this challenge by optimizing inputs, improving yields, and meeting quality goals, while simultaneously restoring soil health and building climate resilience. This deployment aims to deliver collective benefits, enabling growers to enhance profitability, helping brands meet their sustainability targets, and benefiting the planet, creating a win-win for the entire agri-food ecosystem.
With regenerative agriculture rapidly advancing across Europe and the UK, Cropin is actively engaging in strategic commercial partnerships and pilot deployments in the region. The company is in advanced discussions with several leading UK and Europe based agri-food brands and expects to close multiple regenerative agriculture pilots in the region before the end of the current financial year.
Seven million farmers impacted and 30 million acres digitized
Founded in 2010, Cropin is a leading AI platform for food and agriculture, driving innovations such as the first enterprise grade real-time Gen AI-powered agri-intelligence platform, a Micro Language Model (µ-LM) for Climate-Smart Agriculture, and the world’s first industry cloud for agriculture. Cropin’s Gen AI-powered platform, Cropin Sage, provides actionable insights by decoding the past, present, and future of crops.
Cropin collaborates with global leaders in CPG, food retail, finance, development agencies, and governments to tackle challenges like food insecurity, climate change impacts, and supply chain disruptions. As a pioneer in the Ag-Intelligence movement, it has partnered with over 100 B2B customers, digitizing 30 million acres of farmland and positively impacting more than 7 million farmers worldwide. Its crop knowledge graph, covering 500 crops and 10,000 varieties across 103 countries, powers the Cropin Cloud. With intelligence built around over 1 billion acres of the world’s cultivable land, the company continues to lead the transformation of global food systems.
Editor’s note
Regenerative agriculture while not a specific practice, is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, supporting biosequestration, and increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil. Practices include maximizing recycling of farm waste and adding composted material from non-farm sources. Regenerative agriculture claims to mitigate climate change through carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere and sequestration although there is some discussion on this amongst scientists.
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An English-language food and beverage processing and packaging industry B2B platform in print and web, IndiFoodBev is in its third year of publication. It is said that the Indian food and beverage industries represent approximately US$ 900 billion in revenues which implies more than 20% of the country’s GDP. Eliminating the wastage on the farmside can help to deliver more protein to a higher number of the population apart from generating sizable exports. The savings in soil, seeds, water, fertilizer, energy and ultimately food and nutrition could be the most immense contribution that country is poised to make to the moderation of climate change.
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Naresh Khanna – 10 February 2025
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