Secure Food for Future

• Problem: Absence of scientific data analytics and monitoring application for ensuring food security.
•  Details: There is no central system to monitor and analyze the supply-chain of food or status of food storage in Bangladesh. The governance of agricultural system is mostly manual and regional. Farmers cannot leverage the benefits from those storage when required. There is no system to produce scientific data for researchers to fight food security. Therefore, it is impossible to predict future supply-demand for food and ensure food security. In addition, there is a huge unemployment problem in the country, on the other hand, during season farmers cannot utilize their lands due to lack of manpower and financial aid. A cloud based analytic system can solve existing problems significantly.  All the food storage can be registered to be monitored under this system. Deep learning algorithms can be used for analyzing annual food supply and demand.

More than 1 million (35% female) farmers will be affected by the projects.

Proposed solution is target to solve the following current problems

• Maintenance and governance of food storage is bureaucratic and manual, therefore, Farmers can not leverage the benefits efficiently.'
• There are lot of people is unemployed in the rural area on the other hand, farmers cannot utilize their land properly in correct season due to lack of money as well as manpower. There is no collaborative communication system among the farmers
• Farmers do not communicate private sector directly, there are several third party between farmers and private food industries, therefore, farmers get relatively very low price for their product
• Farmers are not trained or informed regarding different modern farming practice to increase productivity. They still uses unsustainable agricultural practices which cause huge loss every year and they become poorer. 
• There is no analytic system to predict the future supply-demand, food market situation, price hike or international food shock. There is a 15% increase in onion price in 2019 due to price hike in neighbor country and international shock but due to lack of analytics data the food retailer and farmers in Bangladesh were not prepared for such crises. 

A survey has been conducted (following some World Bank questionnaire) 

Participants: 15

Place: Horihor Nagar, Satkhira, Bangladesh 

• This project helps farmers to leverage the benefit of local storage depot. All the food storage can be registered under this system.The storage  current status can be monitored.
• Deep learning algorithms can analyse annual food supply-demand. Analytics can predict food crisis, price hike, food shock across different season of the year. The government can take the initiative to encourage farmers to grow foods based on seasonal demand. This system thereby can help to maintain a balanced supply-demand for different crops.
• Deep learning or machine learning algorithms can predict any future failure for any of the storage. An automated alert can take necessary action for any failure in the storage.  
• This project assists them in creating a local or national pool of farmers, where farmers are registered and can be hired by other farmers.  A collaborative farming system would be beneficial for local or regional farmers to maintain a communication channel.
• This project aims to produce scientific real-time data for researchers to fight food security
• This project provides an effective communication system among farmers, expert, governments and market representative 

Product: A cloud based analytic service and web application

Technology: REST API, NO SQL database, micro-services

The main components of this project with specific strategies are as following     

Food Storage Management

• Each food storage is registered with the system. Proposed system monitor capacity, any maintenance, status, next available free storage container etc.
• The status of storage is published to the public through a web application
• Farmers can submit request for storage through the web application. Once the request is validated by authority, management takes necessary action to bring the crop to storage and store.
• Any failure is alerted to management in real-time and fast actions can be taken

Collaborative Farming System

• Farmers are registered to an online system. As most of the farmers in Bangladesh are not familiar with internet, government can assign a local representative or Farmers can choose some one among them.
• Local farmers can for a group. Among the group members, they can pool resources, share costs and information, exchange risks experiences. Together they can take necessary action in case of natural disaster and other problem such as pesticide, irrigation etc.
• National level of collaboration provides farmers a bigger market which would increase their profit.

Analytics Food security Prediction

• Farmers lead research would be much more effective and can increase as well as diversify the food production of Bangladesh. Therefore, it requires to collect data from root level and analyse those data in real time and publish reports periodically to the public. Once these reports are accessible to farmer, they can play their role efficiently to improve the availability at local as well as markets  

Virtual Assistant

• Most farmers these days have access to mobile phone. Government can take initiative through this service to send awareness message to farmer’s phone. Any natural crises or incoming flood, heavy rain, drought alert can be sent across registered farmer’s cell phone.

Expert Consultation

•  The farmers in Bangladesh need training and consultation in order to adopt the international standard farming practice to improve productivity. This online service can provide them instant expertise consultation on different farming practice and challenges.  

Private sector:

• This project link up different private industries such as Arong milk, fish companies to connect with collaborative farmers in national level directly which will help farmers to get higher price for their product and it would solve their poverty to a great extent. 

• This project is a new application of existing technology to serve a new population.
• This project design an application that assists Famer to leverage benefits of different agricultural services provided by Bangladesh government easily and quickly.
• This application saves them time and effort and works to include local, regional farmers in a collaborative farming system that leads to access to national market and direct access to private food industries in the country.  Once the farmers can share information and access market easily, this application helps them to increase their income and economic activity
• This application increase the potentiality of farmer-lead research on agriculture along with subject matter expert. This application generates analytical report in order to predict different agricultural, natural and food market phenomena efficiently, therefore, necessary actions can be taken in time.
• This application provide an easy and sustainable means for farmers to learn and understand sustainable agricultural practice. 

The theory of change is described in following image  

1. 0 

2 . 250,000

3 . 1 million

My goals are described in following Table 

Financial

Resource:Need financial aid to hire software developer and implement the infrastructure of the cloud based solution

Domain Knowledge :Agricultural market tendency and food shock concept.

Cultural

Farmers are usually not familiar with technology. They need representative 

Financial: 

Need sponsorship or partnership 

Domain Knowledge :

Agricultural market tendency and food shock concept.

Cultural

Initial training needs to be provided among farmers to use this application, local and regional representative needs to be deployed. 

This is a concept. therefore, at this moment  me and 3 of my friends are working on this projects 

We are skilled with REST API, cloud, distributed application, web application development, micro-services development 

No-SQl Database : Mongo Db, IBM cloudant 

Analytics : IBM Watson, Machine learning algorithms (CNN, RNN, fastCNN and others) 

We have also conducted research to understand agriculture data, market data and farmers challenges for a very long time. Therefore , we have a better understanding of farming data and practices. We have analysed the food market and generalize an algorithm to understand price hike and food shock. 

The business model is depicted in following image

This project uses mixed model for strategic framework which is a combination of social and business entities.

Revenue source can be

• Advertisement
• Generated Agricultural analytical data to external research entities
• API to different agricultural application
• Private food companies 

This proposed application can be a model application and similar application can be developed for different other sector such as healthcare, road and transport etc.  Strategic and operational support for application development and maintenance from Tiger IT would be highly appreciated.

As the data and food storage are under government monitoring , therefore this application would require partisanship with Bangladesh Agricultural Ministry. Although data of previous years are available but to get access to  real time data, Agricultural Ministry can help .