Russian govt to allocate over 900 mln ruble for digital tech in agriculture

MOSCOW. June 7 (Interfax) - The Russian government will allocate more than 900 million rubles for the rollout of the latest information technology in the agriculture sector.

"On the instructions of the president, the government is continuing to support the development of the agribusiness sector taking into account the use of information technologies that meet today's demands. We are allocating more than 900 million rubles for the application of digital technologies in agriculture," Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said at a meeting with deputy prime ministers on Monday.

This is needed to make Agriculture Ministry data available in real time to all stakeholders, including individuals, businesses and government agencies, he said.

"In order to increase the accuracy of harvest estimates, there are plans to roll out artificial intelligence technology this year already in eight pilot regions. They are Voronezh, Kursk, Bryansk, Tula, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow regions, Perm Territory and Tatarstan," Mishustin said, adding that initially the experiment will be done on seven key crops: spring and winter wheat, sunflower seeds, corn, sugar beet, buckwheat and potatoes.

In addition, the registry of federal property in the agribusiness sector will go into operation. It will help gather together fragmented information, analyse it and use it to make well-considered decisions, he said. In addition, rural household registries, many of which date back to the 1930s and often exist only in paper form, will be digitized.

"As a result, the government system of monitoring and forecasting food security will become more precise," Mishustin said.