Disruptive tech to reshape agric landscape – Experts

Today’s agriculture cannot be discussed without touching on sustainability, experts said Thursday, in a two-day summit that gathered stakeholders in the agri-tech space.

The experts maintained that disruptive technology is a viable means of keeping sustainability in focus while solving the numerous problems the sector is facing in the country. Disruptive technologies are innovations that significantly alter the way consumers, industries, or businesses operate; sweeping away the old systems because of their superiority.

The agric tech experts explained that they are currently working with other stakeholders in the sector to provide interventions with sustainability as a focus.

“We use the agribusiness cluster approach to build clusters that connect farmers and their local network to markets. We also intervene in trying to avail safe and nutritious food to the base-of-the-pyramid-consumers,” Maxwell Olitsa, country team leader of IFDC, Nigeria & Egypt, said.

He added that agriculture is not just a business for most smallholder farmers, but a way of life. Hence one of the ways to keep it sustainable for them is to link them to constant training on innovations.

Olitsa also explained that his organisation’s 2SCALE program offers technologies that have been able to address processing and e-commerce.

“Bringing all these elements together from the input side to the market side will really drive demand for these technologies, embed the skills/services in the value chain, and also enable us to move beyond where we are now in terms of food production to going further to address food and nutrition security in a way that is digitally tracked,” he said.

For Confidence Odionye, Beat Drone CEO and founder, using agric chemicals responsibly while also managing cost effectively are key issues of focus.

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“In 2017, we came out with spray drones, 16 litre capacity just like a knapsack”, Odionye said.

The drones reduced the chemical footprints, eradicated inefficiencies, improved farmers’ ability to harvest 80-90 percent of their crops, reduced costs of spraying, and reduced costs of production.

“Even Olam was able to cut down its cost of production – they used to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying chemicals and spraying with aircraft annually,” he said.

With drones, the entire farmland can be mapped, making farmers understand the terrain, topography, and elevations of the land to enhance certain preparations ahead of the rainy season.

The drones, aided with infrared sensors, can determine which crops are unhealthy and which are healthy, and also differentiate a stressed crop from a healthy one.

Another agritech at the event, CropIT, focuses on the smooth linkage between the banks and the farmers. Findings from a survey conducted by the company showed that there seems to be a significant level of ghost farming within the ecosystem which makes loan recovery very difficult.

Paul Dotun, director of operations, CropIT, said his company has a tool for collecting and validating farmers’ details; profiling and compiling historical data about the farmers.

“We call it credit scoring,” said Dotun.

CropIT has also been able to capture postharvest losses by introducing ‘Cocoon’, an hermetic storage system that helps farmers store their produce for as long as they have to.

“The economic benefit of this is that the farmer is not in a haste to sell,” he said.