Our Project
The Problem:
The is no low-cost solution for small farmers to access precision agriculture technology
Farmers deal mostly on a trial-and-error basis, with seasonality and climate changes that impact their production yield. Operation costs including managing water resources and agrochemicals make small farmers less competitive comparing to large producers that have capabilities to build infrastructure to address such problems. There is not a techno-economical feasible automated solution for decision making process for small and mid-farmers. In addition, the lack of data regarding crops limits ensuring their origin and quality, constraining traceability for the end-product. Hence, labelling processes are not reliable enough to ensure health and quality, which is vital for food safety.
Our solution:
TFSC for Fair Trade Practices
Precision Agriculture PA with Artificial Intelligence
Which enables to gather remote, periodic, and precise information about crops, to enhance its performance in the long term and reduce operating costs and consumables. Indicators such as water stress, chlorophyll index, biomass, to assess the crop health and even fertiliser metrics can be computed and contribute for decision making process.
Blockchain
Which uses the data collected and processed by PA-AI, to guarantee origin on the crops, protocols using in farming, among others. The immutable and open nature of blockchain enables to farmers, customers, suppliers, and shippers to verify product traceability and ensure quality standards. In addition, the information presented by the tool offers transparency which in places with vague export legislations can contribute to fair trading schemes by adding value to the agriculture products.
Work that has been done:
Our prototype:
Our platform was built to identify NDWI water index, and NDVI vegetation index indicators in a more simplified manner, so common farmers can understand and take proper action. We are foreseeing five indicators’ including NDWI, NDVI shall serve for kilograms per hectare, this shall be beneficial for farmers to calculate their yield production. Furthermore, the PA indicators helps to define de correct use of pesticides and fertilizer usage. Currently, we look forward to adding relevant indicators on circular economy and sustainability so we can correlate such to a bio labelling automated solution powered by blockchain.
We have raised our first private angel round for building our prototype. Our prototype concluded tests and successfully combines both technologies in a real-world environment. Our application was positively proven in the ground, reaching a Technology Readiness Level TRL-6 with proven documentation and interviews of such ground prototype demonstration.
We have successfully been granted a 25K Innovation Voucher by the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia LIAA, which is been used for performing scientific research on our infrastructure. In this sense, we are cooperating with the Institute of Energy Systems and Environment of Riga Technical University RTU for incorporating circular economy indicators in our current solution.
We have successfully been granted with a pre-commercial development & demonstration project sponsoring by the NoR Network of Resources supported by the European Space Agency-ESA for accessing high-resolution satellite imagery.
Milestones Achieved by our Team:
Three of our co-founders are PhD engineers with more than 150 scientific index publications (high impact journals and Scopus conferences), more than 6 years of experience in the field of remote monitoring, drone manufacturing and data processing. Our co-founder Dr Esteban Valencia was granted in 2020 the MIT research award for building a monitoring platform for forestry surveillanc https://www.technologyreview.es/listas/35-innovadores-con-menos-de-35/2020/inventores/esteban-valencia-ecuador and in 2021 the UNESCO prize on precision agriculture and biodiversity preservation project https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/sc-21-conf-233-11_young_scientists_awards_scheme_en.pdf
Our long-term view for building for public goods:
Our platform is intended to be a tool for small and middle farmers to be able to access precision agriculture metrics, in a readable language, with a simplified approach for decision making. Our goal is to reach as much people as possible and promote fair trade and equal opportunities for small farmers. We have concluded a Letter of Support with Sinergise the leading provider of Satellite Data for accessing their API imaginary for powering our solution and make our platform globally scalable.