Dr. Tania: AI-Powered Crops Protection & Management Apps

According the FAO, by 2050 we'll need to feed 2 billion more people. We need to increase our food production by 70%. However up to 40% of global yield is lost due to pest & crops disease ($220 billion) annually. Not only is it a threat for global food security. It's also an economical burden for (especially) smallholder farmers. Farmers need guidance, but current infrastructure (farming counseler, etc) is limited.

A rapid, accurate diagnosis of disease and its management will help to reduce crop yield losses and improve farmers income.

Bangladesh’s rural economy, and specifically agriculture, have been powerful drivers of poverty reduction in Bangladesh since 2000.  Indeed, agriculture accounted for 90 percent of the reduction in poverty between 2005 and 2010. The performance of this agri has an overwhelming impact on major macroeconomic objectives like employment generation, poverty alleviation, human resources development, food security, etc.

Up to 40% of global food production is lost annually, or equal to USD 220 billion. This problem affects lots of farmers, including in Bangladesh. According to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), for FY 2014-15 (provisional estimate), crops, livestock, fisheries, and forest products account for about 16 percent of Bangladesh’s total GDP and employs approximately 47 percent of the total population, which is around 70+ million.

Less arable land and limited natural resources increase the importance of developing new agricultural technologies. Aside from improving yield, we also pretty concerned about the amount of food losses. By focusing on crop protection first, we can save up to 40% of global food production. 

We focus on smallholder farmers. In the last 2 years, we've been working with smallholder farmers in Indonesia and we want to replicate and scale what we done in Bangladesh as well. There's no single answer to solving problems in agriculture. That's why we attack the problems from various angle. Combining our experience in agriculture engineering, biology, software development, machine learning, electrical engineering, we try to help farmers thrive and elevate their lives.

What we do in Indonesia is that we collaborate with urban farmers, and farmers community to deliver our value.

Our solutions will help farmers to be more adaptive and work better with the help of technology. Which will improve their result in farming, and also in their lives. We designed Dr. Tania (our apps) to be the one stop solutions for farmers, starting from deciding what to plant, how to grow it, how to grow more, and where to sell it. Creating a more transparent marketplace, etc.

According to the worldbank, (https://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2016/10/07/bangladesh-growing-economy-through-advances-in-agriculture) Agriculture is key driver in reducing poverty in Bangladesh. And one way to do that is by creating a more efficient market, and using technology to improve overall agriculture industry.

We build Dr. Tania, an AI-powered apps that could help farmers identify disease only from images, and get knowledge on best practices in agriculture and disease management. So they can farm better with data, and scientific information. 

Mainly we use Machine Learning, and train the engine to be able to distinguish disease automatically. That's why when farmers send an image to Dr. Tania, she will be able to tell what kind of disease that affected your plant and how to manage it.

Dr. Tania is able to identify disease and give practical insights on how to treat the disease, alongside proper product (fertilizer, etc) that can be used to treat it. If they were to choose to talk to human instead, they can also  ask expert and explain the problem further with multiple images and description.

In the future, they will be able get advice on what kind of crops to plant, get advice to grow the crops better, and to sell and reach more people. This will give farmers transparency. 

Dr. Tania’s position in the industry is to provide software/technology solution in agriculture which is quite rare. The value propositions proposed are unique so we believe that Dr. Tania can stand out in the market. Most startup in  propose an investment platform, marketplace, or supply chain solution while we propose a solution for reducing the risk of plant disease and also increasing yield productivity. There is a product with similar value, like Plantix and Agrio but compared to those product Dr. Tania provides a more complete end-to-end solution from identification to offering products for treatment and also ask expert. Another competitive advantage is our close relation with various partners including farmer unions, research institutions local/central government in our home country. 

Our team consists of people from various background and we bring new perspective to the problem. Our multidisciplinary approach – which combines biology, software and machine learning – is key to our vision to help improve food production by empowering innovators across the food and agriculture supply chain.

We begin by finding key leaders in each farmers community and gathering data in the form of images from various locations and train our AI. Meanwhile, we create demonstration plots to show the farmers on how to use the technology and how our solution will help them. From previous demonstration, our solution could reduce crop yield losses up to 50%. We also provide guidance on good agriculture process, etc. Lastly, we help them to market their products and added more value and market their products, resulting more than 60% more income for farmers especially in coffee.

In the near future, we want Dr. Tania to be one stop solutions that can help farmers choose what type of crops to plant (based on maximal future value), predicting yield, advice on a daily basis, and marketing product.

We also try to help farmers and connect them with local government so that they can get funded and get some help in agriculture tools, etc.

Scaling our solution doesn't necessary mean scaling the organization. This continuous cycle of guiding the farmers towards prosperity is hopefully can be replicated through the help of Technology, and what we offer can be accessed by a lot of people at the same time. 

Currently Dr. Tania has been downloaded by more than 6000 people and is actively used by more than 2,000 farmers on a monthly basis in more than 300 cities in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, etc.

We've worked with 20+ communities in Indonesia, and will work with 50 more in the next year. Scaling our impact throughout the country.

In one year, our goal is to deliver our value to 50,000 farmers and engaging 100 community especially in Indonesia, and around 5 million farmers in the next five years globally.

Overall, we expect to reduce resource use greatly, and improve farmers income by at least 50%.

Dr.Tania is one step towards precision agriculture technology solution that can be scaled to a more integrated solution involving satellite imagery, drone imagery, IoT integrated system, real-time crops monitoring system, e-commerce, business insight, etc.

Within the next year, we'll continue to focus on crop protection for smallholder farmers as well as B2B market (enterprise). We planned to add more features such as farmers forum, marketplace, connecting farmers with SME (restaurant, catering, etc) to cut middlemen and improve their income. We planned to continue to build our database. Currently we have 1650 plant disease database + best practices in 150 commodities. We want to add the number to 2000 plant database and around 200 commodities.

We want to engage more community: around 50 community in 50 villages. This will be replicated in Bangladesh as well, we expect to deliver value to at least 50,000 more farmers within the next year.

Our biggest barrier is financial. We need more resources in order to engage more farmers, improve our product's in terms of features and userbase. Also, market and cultural barriers as farmers still hesitant to use technology and a bit resistance to do something in a new way. 

One of the biggest barrier to enter the market is that farmers tend to resist new technology. Unless they’ve been proven and ‘accepted’ by their leaders. So our focus now will be to engage and create feedback loop with key opinion leaders in farmer communities. In the first year, marketing strategy will be focused on the acquisition of the market in segments that belong to innovators to early majority. Classified in this segment are the urban gardeners or urban farmers known as farmers in big cities. We distribute the product through Google Play Store, and promote it to farmers community  and gardening extracurricular units in universities. These communities have a total of tens of thousands of members. We use social media as tools, but we mainly approach a community on our own, blending and participating in their events or held events of our own to gain their trust (3-5 times a week we visit local farmers/community, and joining their events on weekend). 

We know that building a more robust food system will take a community of innovators – companies and institutions of all sizes – empowered with the most advanced technology and data.

We’ve also defined three types of partner namely Mission Partners, Local Government Partners, and Farmers Partners. Mission Partners are startups whose product is related with Dr. Tania, to bring value to farmers community but not Dr. Tania’s direct competitor. 

Of our 6000+ downloads, a big chunk of them are from Bangladesh. However, as Agriculture is one of the most important industry in the country, we plan to increase our attention, engaging local Bangladesh farmers, build community, and deliver impact not only from online, but also offline. We want to empower farmers there to grow more, reach more, and distribute better through technology. Helping them to implement best practices on a day-to-day basis and help them to achieve price stability and transparency.

Bangladesh, a country that covers an area of 147,570 square kilometer, is one of the predominantly agro-based developing countries in the world. Agriculture has been the core sector of Bangladesh economy, which is still contributing around 17 percent of the GDP and also providing employment to 47 percent labor force.

Key members of Neurafarm team: Febi Agil Ifdillah (CEO & CTO), Lintang Kusuma Pratiwi (Chief RnD & Operation), Naufalino Fadel Hutomo (Co-Founder), Pebriani Artha (Co-Founder). Dzkira Yuhasyra (Business Development), and David (Business Development)

Our team is diverse, and dynamic, with various background that supports our goals. At Neurafarm includes plant agronomists, software engineers, data scientists. We’re a multidisciplinary team that believes in the power of industry collaboration to achieve more sustainable agriculture.

Febi, CEO of the company has 3 years experience in Software Development, Product Development, and Machine Learning and has built software in various scale affecting millions of people. Previously worked at Kata.ai and Prosa.ai and was Microsoft Student Partner.

Lintang, Chief RnD & Operations is quite experienced in Agriculture space. Has experience at Syngenta and BIOPS Agrotekno.

Naufalino, our Co-Founder is a talented engineer who has built several businesses before and work for a unicorn company called Traveloka.

Pebriani, our Co-Founder is experienced in System Analysis and Business Development. Previously worked at Ruangguru and has experience at Paragon Technology for marketing. The company that has some of the biggest brand in Indonesia under it.

We're currently partnering with several organizations.

Our tech partners are Amazon Web Services, Alibaba Cloud, and we're part of NVIDIA Inception Program. NVIDIA is the leading GPU/Hardware company in the world. The NVIDIA Inception Program nurtures cutting-edge AI startups who are revolutionizing industries.

We're part of Plug and Play Accelerator (https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/) Indonesia, and is supported by Bandung Institute of Technology and also Indonesia Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education.

Dr. Tania is a freemium app and we plan to generate revenue from subscription fee. As we provide product recommendation, we also open and offer advertisement space for agrochemical company to list their products on our app. Lastly, we open services for government/industrial farming for Data Analytics, or API as a service.  The best thing about Dr. Tania is that we designed it to be highly scalable, product-wise and business-wise. In the future, we will add more feature and services that can be integrated to Dr. Tania and will be our source of income as well, including B2B solution, data analytics solution, farm management, API as a service.

In the short term, we fund our solution through grants, and bootstrapping. However, we also sell products and services to government/industrial farming. But our end game is to help smallholder farmers to elevate their lives through technology. 

In the future, we will add more feature and services that can be integrated to Dr. Tania and will be our source of income as well, including B2B solution, data analytics solution, farm management, API as a service. 

Dr.Tania opens up many opportunities with lots of potential benefits for customers, industries, and society as a whole. Below are several opportunities presented by Dr. Tania: 

1. Data. With these data, we can determine market trend, farming trend, food supply prediction and distribution. Agrochemical enterprise can get insight to distribute their goods more efficient based on these data. Farmers can get the products they need easily. Government can create better policy as well.

2. Ecommerce. Dr.Tania can be integrated with existing e-commerce or even  building its own ecommerce for agriculture product.

3. Personal assistant. Dr.Tania can be a one stop personal assistant for farmer to manage anything for their farms. Starting from pre-farming, on-farming- to selling.

4. IoT device interface. Dr.Tania can be a mobile app interfacing several IoT systems on farm with user. It supports the use of Dr.Tania as a farmer personal assistant.

Winning Tiger Challenge will help us gained one of the biggest barriers for our solution to take off: financial. In order for our solution to work, we need creative methods to gather data for training our AI engine. As well as, demonstration plot, reaching out to farmers (in urban/remote areas), building community, etc.

We'd also like to be connected with experts/companies/institutions of all size who are willing to collaborate to help us build sustainable agriculture, and improve farmer welfare.

If our solution were chosen, it will be a great opportunity for us to spread the words to media and reaching out to more people and get help.

We are willing to establish mutually beneficial partnerships with three types of organizations.

1. Mission Partners

We will partner with other agriculture startups to collaborate and bring value together to the farmers. These startups have the same mission as us, but doesn't necessarily have product/services like ours. So by combining the product/services, we can create a more complete/better solution. This will include startups the likes of Crowde, Vestifarm, and other similar startup/company in Bangladesh.

2. Local Government Partners

We would like to partner with local government. Because we realize how important it is to our success. Government will help us greatly. This could be legal, bureaucracy, or even doing project together with local agiculture institution.

3. Farmers Partners

We believe that community is an important aspect in agriculture and is also the backbone of any strong and growing brand. So we planned to continue to invest in growing a strong community of farmers. We are currently maintaining fruitful relationships with many farmers unions in several regions neighboring the city of Bandung, Indonesia such as Sumedang and Subang. We want to replicate it in Bangladesh.