Dokter Tania

Human population is climbing steadily toward 10 billion by 2050 (FAO), potentially increasing the demand for food between up to 100%, all in the midst of unprecedented climate change that will tax even the most resilient systems.

To fulfill global demand for food, we couldn’t afford to lose any food and need to increase yield instead.

We believe that we can do that through the use of technology in farming. We also believe that smart and data driven farming is something that all farmer can do, and we want to democratize it.

By giving farmers the right tools and knowledge, it could help them produce more, reaching more audience, and distribute better.

To fulfill global demand for food in 2050, we couldn’t afford to lose any food and need to increase yield instead. Currently, Neurafarm focuses itself on plant disease/pest problem, which is a recurring global issue and a burden for agriculture industry as a whole. Each year, up to 40% of total global crop production is lost because of pest and plant diseases in important crops such as maize, potato, tomato, etc (FAO). It is equivalent to US$220 billion annually and is an economic burden for farmers around the world. Lack of knowledge guidance become of the biggest problems and often times led farmers to total crops failure. 

Overall, Dr. Tania’s potential users are farmers who have smartphones. Globally, our market size is around 170 millions of smartphone-user farmers, which is around 35 percent of total farmers around the globe (Skoet et al., 2015). They are responsible for at least 56 percent of agricultural production.

These farmers are facing a lot of challenges including crop failure, and poverty. In Indonesia alone, there are around 34 million of smallholder farmers.  Digital tools will help them to cut the chain and break the cycle.

Our first solution to this problem is a rapid, accurate, and easy-to-use plant disease diagnostics by leveraging Artificial Intelligence called Dr. Tania. Dr. Tania is a mobile application that could help farmers to diagnose and manage plant diseases, connect with experts, and tap into a bigger market to gain more income. To identify a crop disease, the only thing a user needs to do is to take a picture of the plant, upload it through Dr. Tania, and within seconds it will get the diagnosis alongside recommended treatments and related products that can be used to treat the disease.

There are also hundreds of cultivation guide catalog that can be accessed 24/7 by the farmers, alongside other features such as Fertilizer Calculator to reduces excess use of fertilizer, and Agriculture Info section.

This is a first-step towards a more integrated solution that integrates IoT, Drone, Vertical Farming, and other technology to improve productivity and efficiency. Going forward, our strategy is to provide a family of services that empower farmers and businesses to grow more food, reaching more, and distributing better. We want to digitize farms. Make farming more efficient through technology and data.

Overall, Dr. Tania’s potential users are farmers who have smartphones. Globally, our market size is around 170 millions of smartphone-user farmers, which is around 35 percent of total farmers around the globe (Skoet et al., 2015).

In the context of our home country, there are 100 million of people who depend on the agriculture sector, and increasing overall productivity will help them. There are agri extension agents, but the ratio is't add up. In our home city, there are only 12 agents to serve 30 region (hundreds to thousands farmers). So automation by AI will help them, and our catalog + agronomist will help spread the knowledge as well.

Aside from that, 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.  Reduce crops failure risk

2.  Data of farmers behavior. With these data, we can determine market trend, farming trend, food supply prediction and distribution. Government can create better policies, etc.

3.  Ecommerce. Dr.Tania can be integrated with existing e-commerce or even building its own ecommerce for agriculture product. Create transparency for farmers and increase their overall income.

In order for us to provide food for everyone without compromising our (and future) generations, we need to build a sustainable agriculture and a more resilient food system. Creating tools to broadcast knowledge and services to improve farmers productivity will help us to increase per m2 productivity, reduce risks and waste, and include them in 'formal services', hence improving their livelihood. Dr. Tania is just the beginning. We want to digitize farms so that we could create a more efficient and resilient system.

Dr. Tania’s position in the industry is to provide software/technology solution in agriculture which isquite rare in Indonesia. Most startup in Indonesia 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 on top of everything else. There is a product with similar value, like Plantix (Germany) and Agrio (Israel) but compared to those product Dr. Tania provides a more complete end-to-end solution from identification to offering products for treatment, including connect with experts and get online
consultation.

We're also working with several farmers to create new initiative called NeurafarmFresh, to help farmers sell their produce, gain more income, with transparency.

More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXWxCr6qIuQ&t

Dr. Tania is a mobile apps and currently supported on Android Platform as where our come from (Indonesia), the majority of people including farmers are using Android since it's relatively affordable. This app's goals is to become a one stop solution for farmers. There are several features such as Identification (AI Powered), Ask Expert, Fertilizer Calculator, Weather Prediction, and Cultivation Guide which consists of hundreds of disease & pest management in hundreds of crops. Our AI engine is currently able to identify 33 disease in 14 commodities. We have gathered 80,000+ data points in the form of images to train the AI and currently partnering with several farmers and institutions to gather more data.

We want to democratize various technology, help farmers to make informed (and data-driven) decision for better crop management, and benefit the environment from smarter decision making.

It's only a step towards a more complete solution that involve Drones, Satellite Imagery, IoT, etc.

This app is really scalable, and a lot of features can be added that could benefit the farmers. We want to make Dr. Tania as a platform and one-stop solution that could be used starting from planning phase, to marketing phase. This app could also be used as interface for IoT device planted accross the field.

Other than that, at a foundational level, we could enable online services and, increasingly, facilitates digital payments through mobile money.

On average our AI identification system could identify 33 disease in 14 commodities correctly 80% of the times, especially in Corn and also Potato. Computer Vision/AI technology has been widely used in various use cases in many industries. In agriculture, it's already commonly used as well, but we provide a mobile solution that can be used more pervasively by masses. 

From previous demonstration plots, farmers who received guidance from us could reduce the risks of crops failure due to disease by up to 40%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRBsnPpa4zY

With more data, the accuracy will improve.

There are around 500 million smallholder farmers in the world, making up the majority of the poorest of the world population. These farmers are facing a lot of challenges including crop failure, ad poverty. In Indonesia alone, there are around 34 million of smallholder farmers. There are at least 9 layers of traders (middlemen), including loan-sharks, between farmers and the end consumer. The traders make pretty good money, while farmers are stuck in the poverty cycle. Digital tools will help them to cut the chain and break the cycle. By giving farmers the right tools and knowledge, especially digital tools, now it's possible for them to access formal financial services. Technology and data will allow them to have digital record, which can be used for credit scoring, assess best practices, and get help from many institutions including Government. Those data will help policymakers to create better policies, which will result in better ecosystem to make farming more profitable and improve farmers welfare.

The root of the problem is in both knowledge, skills as well as infrastructure (data). We need to create a solution that is accessible and scalable to help a lot of people simultaneously and assist their activities to help create improve productivity.

By creating a platform for farmers to learn, gain knowledge,consult and connect with experts, as well as involved in transparent trading. It will help them to access more opportunity. 

Neurafarm believe that this is key to our goals: digitizing farms. In order for us to transform the agriculture industry, we need more data that can be use
for cross industry: financial, agri-inputs, and many other industries. Commerce activity, and other farming activity (what type of crops planted, the size of farms, productivity) will help us to gather those data which will be used in the future for various purposes such as for government to create better policies, for financial services to include unbanked farmers, etc.

Currently, our apps has been downloaded 8000+ times, and has 1100+ of Monthly Active Users, spreaded in 250+ cities. 

Our next step is that we want to reach around 15,000 of registered users and 5,000 MAU by the end of 2020 and gain more than 100,000 registered users by 2021. We also want to make Dr. Tania able to identify more than 1000 plant disease in 150 commodity in 2022.

We'll be setting up several local 'clinic' to help unconnected people deal with plant disease and other problems in agriculture as well. Partnering with agricultural agents and government to deliver more impact.

For the next 5 years, we’ll be focusing on three things: democratizing smart farming technology, smart green houses, and building plant factory. Our goal with this is to build a more robust food system, and a more sustainable agriculture on which we could produce food for everyone without compromising our future generations.

We'll be focusing on inspiring young generations to enter agriculture as well. Not only about improving overall productivity, but also preparing next gen of food growers so that there would be more people that will take care of us in terms of demand for food. Starting from selling starter kit for young kids, and youth to pique their interest in farming, as well as field visit, etc.

But our core is still in the technology space. Creating a more transparent and fair market for farmers. In Indonesia alone, there are at least 9 layers of traders (middlemen), including loan-sharks, between farmers and the end consumer. Providing knowledge and digital tools will not only help them increase their chance of success, but also help them to break the cycle of poverty.

It's only a step towards a more modern agriculture where we  could use less resources, and produce more.

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. Our marketing strategy is 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 such as komunitas 1000 Kebun, Indonesia Berkebun, 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). Although we want to impact more rural farmers, we realize that it's a long journey, and in the meantime, we have to target the innovators first, then grow our impact from that. We're experimenting to encourage urban farming as well during this #stayathome period.

Culture and mindset are among the biggest barrier for us and it needs collective movement to make our solution accepted by farmers. So we target communities and farmers union to help us gain market traction. We realize that we can't do this alone, that's why we partnering with  communities and various organizations such as NGO, government, tech companies, telco companies, etc.

We also establish create a partnership called  "Mitra Tania" or "Tania Partner" (Tani means farming in Indonesia).We believe that community is an important aspect in agriculture and is also the backbone of any strong and growing brand. So we plan 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.

We've also setup a digital farming community for rural farmers during COVID-19 to help more people from other platform (not only our apps), and in the past 3 months alone, we have 4000+ active members. This would be our strategy to enter the market as well. We aim to add 10000+ more people by the end of the year into our community.

As a major agricultural products and an agricultural country, the government of Indonesia have already taken initiatives to put the agriculture industry as an important aspect of Indonesia. There are several agencies whose goals are to develop and provide agriculture technology, provide counseling, or even funding for farmers. Neurafarm can collaborate with this agencies as well.

2 full-time staff (co-founders), 3 part-timers, 9 contractors

Our team is unique and diverse. We realize that the problems require multiple perspective so we combine our unique experiences in Computer Science/AI, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Agriculture Engineering, as well as Marketing.

Our CEO (Febi Agil Ifdillah) has previous experienced in AI companies such as Kata.ai, and Prosa.ai, our Chief Agriculture (Lintang) is the most outstanding student in Agricutlure Engineering at Bandung Institute of Technology in the past and has experiences in agriculture space.

Most of our teams are from Bandung Institute of Technology, one of the best university in Indonesia. We've been doing the work for years and that speaks the level of our commitment to deliver more impact.

We're also a huge believer of collaboration. Since its inception, Neurafarm has been lucky enough to be supported and collaborated by a lot of organizations including: Telkomsel, NVIDIA, Huawei, Thought For Food, Alibaba, LPIK ITB, Indonesia Ministry of Research and Technology, etc and we believe that it's key to creating more impact.

1. Telkomsel (TINC) - Accelerator
2. Huawei - Channel Partner

3. Thought For Food - Accelerator

4. NVIDIA - Tech Partner/Inception Program
5. LPIK ITB - Incubator
6. Plug and Play Indonesia - Accelerator
7. Undisclosed Partner - PoC
8. Undisclosed Partner - PoC

9. Alibaba - Incubator/Accelerator

There are three source of revenue: subscription fee of Dr. Tania premium, advertisement from inputs company, and enterprise solution. Recently, we also initiatied new unit for helping farmers to tap into bigger market called NeurafarmFresh. The whole ecosystem is supporting each other.

Basically, Dr. Tania is a freemium apps, where farmers can connect with experts, identify disease by AI, learn from hundreds of best practices available, calculate their fertilizer, etc, but to access more feature, they have to pay for a monthly basis.

The other source of revenue is from advertising. Inputs company could market their products on our platform to better target their markets.

We also open customized solution for plantations/industrial farming company to increase their efficiency through technology (Computer Vision/Drones).

Our goal is to help create a sustainable food system in which we could fulfill the demand for food without compromising our generations. To achieve this, we can't do this alone. Our strategy is to collaborate with various organizations: tech partners, community partners, government, to deliver more impact.

By applying to solve, it will help us to get supported by a lot of people in the community. From mentors as well as peers. This program will also help us to find more collaboration to deliver more impact. 

The prize money will also help fuel our innovation engine and deliver more services for farmers. But last but not least, to have fun and connect the other innovators.

We believe that we all have the same goals, which is a more sustainable world. 

We've identified three types of organizations we'd like to partner with:

1. Mission Partners

agriculture startups to collaborate and bring value together to  farmers together This will include startups the likes of Tanihub, Sayurbox, and other related startups. They will help us fill the gap between farmers, our solution, and direct consumers. 

2. Local Government Partners

To support us reach more audiences/farmers

3. Farmers Partners

Champions of our solution and advocate for our mission

4. Experts/Faculty

In business, agriculture, and technology, to guide us navigating uncertainty.

At Neurafarm, we believe that the power of innovation and technology could solve even the world's biggest challenges. Including food security. We have harnessed the power of AI in our solution (Dokter Tania) to help farmers identify and manage disease. But the potential is bigger than that.

Our goal is to digitize farmers. Because we believe that in order to create a more efficient food systems we need more insights. By digitizing farms, we could do more: predicting supply demand, distributing better, create better policies, better credit scoring system for farmers that help them to access formal financial services, etc.

The prize will help us a lot to gather more data, established more partnerships with research institutions, and democratize smart farming solution, powered by technology such as AI, to farmers.

Neurafarm has always had a big vision: to achieve global food security, and make the world a better place. We have a mission to improve productivity and resource-use efficiency in the agriculture industry through technology.

Human population is climbing steadily toward 10 billion by 2050 (FAO), potentially increasing the demand for food between 60 to 100%, all in the midst of unprecedented climate change that will tax even the most resilient systems. Today’s food and agricultural systems are accountable for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of global freshwater use. Those same systems deplete soils, water quality, and natural habitats all across the world. At the same time, more than 800 million people around the world go to bed hungry each night. And ironically, most of them are farmers. Who are providing us with food everyday.

Our goals are to empower farmers to produce more, reach more, and distribute better and we believe that we could help farmers and the next generations of farmers to break the cycle, and improve their livelihood.

Not only improving farmers welfare, by improving productivity and reducing risks of crops failure, we could help to create better environment.

As we rely on industrial agricultural commodities such as palm, soy, and industrial produced meat and dairy, we are losing forests and accelerating a climate and ecological emergency. By increasing productivity per m2, we believe that we can halt deforestation, and better use our resources. By developing and democratizing technology and knowledge, we would be
able to help farmers improve productivity while using less resources including land area, chemical, etc.