Harvesthive

Revive agriculture through the integration of automation technology.

Climate change has affected some parts of the continent and deemed them unfit for agriculture. One of those areas is my community, Taita Taveta county. According to statistics, the County recorded normal rains but poorly distributed in time and space and vegetation greenness condition was below the normal range (VCI-3 Month; 23.2) in the first six months of 2022. The rest of the year had minimal precipitation to no rain at all. Crops in the field were in poor condition and withering due to moisture stress.

These changes have affected my local community of approximately 200,000 people and increased hunger and poverty to a greater extent. Lack of rain and water from the water catchment areas have made it impossible to harvest farm produce or even have a decent feed for animals and humans. 

The lack of rainfall to facilitate farming and rearing livestock has made my local community experience temporary drought and famine. This is no exception to the months that some showers of rainfall bless the land. Farmers live in stressful conditions being that they can no longer sell farm produce and families get scared of when next are they going to have a decent harvest to cater for themselves.

Harvesthive is a tech-based irrigation system that helps farmers in areas affected by drought to detect moisture and temperature of the farm produce and help notify them when it's appropriate to water their farm products. The use of temperature and moisture sensors in conjunction with an irrigation system will help in scheduling water supply and distribution more efficiently from a water source such as a borehole. This will help farmers as it will improve plant growth and farm produce. 

The process can be automated to work with minimal supervision while the farmer monitors the moisture and temperature levels on their smartphone or even on prompts that the farmer initiates themselves after receiving a pop-up to water the plants. We also understand that these areas experience very low to minimal rain and that is why we are specifically using drip irrigation for this particular system. The ability to monitor the levels from the comfort of your own device is also an addition to help reduce the unnecessary stress of worrying about plant growth and water retention.

According to an article from Caritas, around 4.1 million Kenyans are suffering from a lack of food and water because of drought. This was a 17% rise from the month of May 2022 (Caritas,2022). This shows how the drought has had an adverse effect on a very large number of people. 

Our solution is to serve people living in drought-prone areas and places that experience very minimal rain. It also targets every single farmer that is interested to minimize the amount of water consumption used for farming and also gives the choice to be able to monitor your farm’s moisture and temperature condition in the comfort of your own digital devices.

Farmers in my local community and those of any place in Kenya can use this system to be able to harvest quality farm produce both for consumption on small scale and for sale on large-scale farming.

We are a team passionate about social change and deeply concerned about the sustainability of our communities, which rely heavily on agriculture. My CTO, Sumeiya & I are both senior-year students in Computer Science. Sumeiya also has experience in modern agricultural practices and technologies. I have leadership experience, as I held many related positions at our school. Besides, we have an advisor by our side. He's a CFI (Certified Financial Analyst) and has experience in the VC arena. We have the resilience needed to deliver this solution as well.

We interviewed several members of the community to understand their pain points, motivations, needs, and wants when it comes to a solution that could curb the problem. First, we wanted to understand what resources were readily available and easily accessible to them. The fact that the community is in a rural area, many of them are not in a position to afford a borehole that will provide water for the farm. Second, we pitched the farming system to them and explained the whole procedure most of them felt and agreed that having a drip irrigation system was more efficient. Lastly, we discussed with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and also got several responses from the organization about the technology we were about to deploy.

We also interviewed some farmers from farming agencies that are currently practicing drip irrigation and they shared some very nice responses that added to our decision to implement the system.

Our solution stands out as it uses modern technology to solve modern problems. It is a small system that uses the latest technology and can be achieved at a very affordable cost. The most innovative part is the integration of an automated system with drip irrigation, which leads to quality yields. There are other systems that have been used to facilitate growth in drought-prone areas, but they are very costly and cannot be used on a small scale, which is totally different from ours.

Our impact goals for next year include;

1. Giving back farming hope to farmers in my community. By deploying the system to the local community first, we give them a chance to experience farming again and harvest quality yields for their families.

2. Deploying the system to the neighboring communities and helping them to evade the drought effects and have a good harvest from their farms.

3. Giving small scale farmers who are entrepreneurs a revived agricultural system that will increase their sales.

4. Reduce drought effect levels and increase farm production from 71.4% to below 50% in the next year.

Our solution uses different electronic equipment and assembles them together to perform the required task. The core technology used is internet of thing(IoT). We are using sensors, valves, solenoid gauges and a mobile application. The sensors are the inputs to our solution, they collect the data and transmit it to the mobile application. A command is then sent to the valves if the recorded data triggers the gauges.

Since we haven't launched yet, we are planning to serve my local community first which totals to a number of 1000 households that we received feedback from. After stabilization, we plan to move into the neighboring communities consisting of approximately 3000 households and 425 small scale farmers who are entrepreneurs. This gives us a total of 4425 farmers in the next year.

We are currently facing 2 main challenges;

1. Insufficient funds to be able to build the number of automated systems required and also make this project a success. We also need funds to pay the farmers and other people who will be working with us closely. Another need of funds arises as we will also need to visit the neighboring communities for our different visits.

2. Shortage of skills to come up with the automated systems. We need to hire several automation engineers who are going to help with the assembling of the automated systems and help in deploying them to different farmers.

The Ellen McArthur foundation - we are not only solving the drought issue when it comes to farming but also integrating circular economy to and sharing the knowlegde with other farmers. The foundation helps us with mentorship and also gives us a platform to network. 

The African Leadership University entrepreneurship club - This club helps us with different scheduled workshops around becoming entrepreneurs and financial modeling.

We make money by selling and installing our system (pipes & sensors synchronized with our software) in the farm. The software will charge a monthly subscription to provide real time data and insights about the moisture, the temperature etc.  

Because it may be expensive we will unite farmers into small cooperative and they will bundle their savings and find a shared farm for our system to be installed.

As we are still in the process to launch, we depend on grants to make our solution effective. After launching, we shall be earning money by selling the automated system and serving them at a fee. We will also expand to other drought-prone areas and sell our system. We also hope to partner with the government and get contracts from them to help this project function worldwide in the future years.