I’m Pravin Haribhau Shinde, I belong to Village: Nimbavi, Tehsil: Shrigonda, District: Ahmednagar. For the last 4 months, I’ve been using the Fasal’s system for their actionable alerts for pests and disease management & their irrigation advisory, and I’m really impressed with the Fasal system’s predictions they were always spot on. Fasal’s system helped me in prudent water management across my farm leading to a lot of water savings, its predictions and alerts were super helpful for me in controlling thrips attack, powdery mildew attack & downy mildew attack. If you look around my field you won’t see a single spot of downy mildew, as on the day the crop age is 62 days, and there have been no signs of powdery mildew at all in my field. All of this has been possible because of well-advised water management, and I feel the irrigation advisory is the biggest USP of the Fasal system. The Fasal app played an instrumental role as an interface between myself and the sensor-led Fasal system deployed within the canopy and it helped me in saving 50% of water, and as we all know with over-irrigation the chances of pest and disease attacks also increases, I was fortunate to experience the opposite of this phenomenon because of Fasal’s excellent irrigation advisory. If I compare my water usage at the same crop stage (i.e. crop age 62 days) this year and last year I can clearly see that I’ve been irrigating 50% less this year compared to the previous year. Last year I used to irrigate my fields every 2-3 days for 5 hours each, this year I’m irrigating my fields every 3 days for 3 hours each. Because of the Fasal system, I’m 100% confident that I’ll save around INR 10,000 to INR 12,000 per acre this year on my overall farm expenses. Last year the weather was really bad and the same is continuing this year as well, we had the last rainfall of this season on 23rd October and on 24th November we again had light rains, in these kinds of circumstances also, as one can see there are no instances of downy or powdery mildew and in terms of irrigation, compared to last year this year I’ve managed to save 40-50% of water. Because of my prudent water management, Fasal felicitated me as ‘Water Champion’ as part of their ‘Fasal Water Credit Scheme’ and I was in the top 10 Fasal system users who have successfully utilized the irrigation advisory for better management of their water resources leading to fewer occurrences of pests and diseases. And I strongly feel because of such innovative initiatives like the ‘Fasal Water Credit Scheme’ more and more farmers will get the motivation to transition towards less water-intensive farming techniques.