Farmers and crop buyers have started to harness smart gadgets and crunch numbers to improve productivity and reduce costs
How do you manage the trick of feeding school children better and at a lower cost? How do you count the number of mangoes on your farm so that you get a fair price? And what is a clever-but-cheap way for a farmer to cut down his irrigation bill?
“There’s a digital revolution unfolding in Africa,” says Pascal Bonnet, a deputy director of Cirad, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development. Awa Thiam, a 28-year-old telecoms engineer, is following suit in her native Senegal. The company she founded, Lifantou, connects school canteens with farming co-operatives with the help of big data.
Her one-stop platform draws on a databank of crop production and schools to match potential demand with supply. Pix Fruit’s alternative uses advanced modelling software to produce a more precise count of the crop.Fruit-recognition technology then calculates the likely overall harvest, drawing on a databank compiled with the help of drones that also includes information on climate, soil and administrative constraints. That way, farmers learn the true worth of their crop, while wholesalers and price negotiators have a better take on the risk of glut or undersupply.
It operates in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi, Madagascar, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
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