The world’s population is expected to grow to almost 10 billion by 2050, boosting agricultural demand. To meet this demand, as a global population, we will need to look to:
- Sustainably improve agricultural productivity
- Eradicate extreme poverty and reduce inequality
- Make food systems more efficient, inclusive and resilient
Looking right at the beginning of the supply chain, tackling agricultural productivity and efficiency will enable an increase in supply utilising existing resources, particularly in lower income countries where there is greater scope for improvement and opportunity to increase income for often extremely low income farmers.
Data access
In most developing countries, much of the agricultural information is traditional, sometimes outdated and not applicable to small farmers’ needs, leaving such farmers with little information or resources to improve their productivity.
Mobile based services, including those offering access to data insights and analytics to even the smallest of farms, could have a significant impact on output and act as a starting point for increasing the efficiency of the traditional agricultural model. Research by the World Economic Forum has outlined that if approximately 275-350 million farms gain access to mobile-based services by 2030, 250–500 million more tonnes of food could be produced and 20–65 million fewer tonnes of food lost.
In this post I am going to explore a couple of examples of companies having an impact in this space through providing exactly these sorts of services in Asia and Africa.
Reuters Market Light (RML)
The agricultural sector is critically important in developing countries like India where it contributes about 15% of gross domestic product (GDP) and engages 52 per cent of the workforce.
Looking to address this challenge and provide much needed data access to farmers in India, Reuters Market Light Information Services (RML) is a mobile-based provider of technical and financial advice. Originally a service providing information in the form of SMS messages sent to mobile phones in their local language, RML provides individual farmers with customised, localised and personalised weather forecasts, local crop prices, agricultural news and relevant information (i.e. crop advisory).
The platform has expanded a lot since launch and now offers the same information free via an app, with subscription fees for more advanced services. In addition to this main product offering it has also created a marketplace to sell produce nationally, and a fintech product to connect farmers with banks and input retailers.
Overall this brings multiple benefits to local farmers in India:
- Improved profitability through knowledge of market prices
- Weather-related risks mitigated through forecasts
- Improved knowledge of crop cultivation and disease control
To achieve this RML uses data to refine and improve the service, utilsing large amounts of data such as user location, language, crops grown, type of fertiliser used, irrigation system, sowing dates, and a number of other indicators. This data allows RML to build profiles for individual farmers and ensures that the advisory information they provide is most effective by being consistently relevant and specific to particular locations, dates, and land types.
The impact of the service since launch, back in 2007, has been significant. As a result of customised advice, based on market and technical information from a number of reliable sources, combined with a platform through which to buy and sell at market prices, farmers’ productivity and cost-efficiency is greatly increased, with the income of farmers using the service rising by 15-25%.
Beyond India and RML
Low productivity, driven by a lack of available information, is one prevalent across many developing countries and there are other services globally that are looking to use recent advances in technological capabilities to capture, interpret and provide access to agricultural data.
A great example in Africa is Aerobotics, an agri-tech startup that has developed an early warning smart scouting platform that can:
- Help farmers identify potential pest and disease issues in tree crops.
- Be used to make more efficient use of resources, including water and chemicals, by applying corrective action in a data-driven manner (rather than blanket application across the farm)
Aerobotics offer free accounts to access up to 3 years of satellite data as well as paid services including requesting drone flights (to provide imagery to monitor crop health and size) and an app that enables in field reviews with supporting historical data, allowing users to take action using data driven insights from AI-based analytics platform and reporting tool.
As these companies grow and new startups enter this space, increased access and effectiveness of data insights will surely expand on the initial success and positive impact these 2 companies have seen. This will go some way in bringing about the benefits mentioned earlier that if approximately 275-350 million farms gain access to mobile-based services by 2030, 250–500 million more tonnes of food could be produced and 20–65 million fewer tonnes of food lost.
References
Impact Assessment of Reuters Market Light (RML) in Agricultural Information Dissemination in Punjab S.S. Chahal*, M.S. Sidhu and Parminder Kaur Department of Economics and Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141 004, Punjab
http://www.fao.org/state-of-food-agriculture/en/
www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/resources/reuters-market-light/
agfundernews.com/rml-agtech-indias-farmers-business-network.html
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