Adithya Dahagama’s father is one of thousands of farmers in the Telangana region of India, where agriculture has been the chief source of income for the state’s populace for centuries. As a master’s student at SNRE and the Ford School of Public Policy, Dahagama set out to solve a problem associated with the local agricultural communities back home in India. Currently, farmers irrigate their land by accessing ponds built in the region many centuries ago. The ponds store rainwater from the monsoon season, but over time, silt has been filling the ponds, reducing their capacity. Adithya and his teammates Hassan Bukhari, Sara Cole, Leon Espira, Shamitha Keerthi, John Monnat, and Kelly Serfling discovered that silt dug up from ponds during the dry season to partially supplement for fertilizer increases Cotton crop yield by nearly 30 percent and reduces greenhouse emissions intensity by up to 40 percent. The team’s findings on systemic carbon impacts helped Mission Kakatiya, a flagship program by Telangana state, to receive a support of $300 million from the Green Climate Fund. By 2019, the impact of this work will be felt across 11,000 villages and will affect 21 million villagers.

From their survey of 1100 farmers in Telangana, the team discovered huge yield variation within and across Cotton growing villages. They also found that more than 90% of small-farmers have not conducted a farm soil nutrient test nor have access to local weather forecast. Shortly after this discovery they co-founded Cheruvu, and are joined by new interdisciplinary student researchers: Aniket Deshmukh, Samhita Shiledar, and Kavya Vayyasi to explore the potential of Big Data and information to address yield gaps among small-farmers. Cheruvu means pond, tank, or lake in the region’s language, Telugu.

Currently, Cheruvu is working with faculty at U-M and researchers and government in Telangana to develop data-driven frameworks to improve crop yields of small-farmers. “Though our current effort is focused on the distributed pond network and developing data-driven frameworks to inform cotton farmer decisions in the Deccan Plateau, we hope to collaboratively address agricultural sustainability problems throughout the world,” says Dahagama.