17/08/2026
Field Visit to Dacope, Khulna: Advancing AI-Driven Shrimp Farming Research
As part of an ongoing research initiative at the ZNRF University of Management Sciences (ZUMS) Incubation Center, our team recently conducted a field visit to several remote villages in the Dacope upazila of Khulna district. The purpose of this visit was to engage directly with local shrimp farmers and gather first-hand field data to support the development of an AI and Machine Learning based dashboard for shrimp disease detection, production monitoring, and financial risk assessment.
This initiative aims to help partner banks and financial institutions that provide loans to shrimp farmers by enabling them to monitor pond activities, track expenditure across different farming inputs, and assess whether a farmer is operating at a profit or a loss — using real-time and field-collected data rather than manual, delayed reporting.
During the visit, our team spent time understanding the day-to-day realities of shrimp cultivation: water quality management, pond preparation practices, common disease challenges, and the financial pressures farmers face across a single production cycle. These conversations provided invaluable context that will directly shape the design of our data collection framework and machine learning models moving forward.
We are grateful to the shrimp farming communities of Dacope for their time, hospitality, and openness in sharing their experiences. Field-level engagement like this remains central to our approach at the ZUMS Incubation Center — ensuring that the technology we build is grounded in real needs and real challenges faced by the communities we aim to serve.
Stay tuned as this project moves into its next phase of data collection and model development.
