Small farms may suffer from the technological gap between them and bigger producers. This gap is going to result from the introduction of ICT products in an unbalanced manner. If these products are not simple and cheap enough, only a fraction of the farmers are going to adopt them, leaving the rest in inferior conditions.
The solution is the simplest precision agriculture kit, from the sensor to the report. This is probably the first step of the farmer on precision agriculture, so we want to keep it simple and cheap.
Use case:
A farmer connects to the platform and register for the product because a colleague was talking about it. The web is straightforward and asks for basic questions. The platform determines that for this case, the best value indicator is ‘water consumption’ and presents the price of the ‘smart meter’ along with a return of investment prediction (based on real use cases). Once the kit is bought and installed, the farmer can use the mobile application with a simple three colour interface (green, yellow, red) and prevent water losses because of the alarms and advices received.
The impact of this kind of platform is:
a) Social: Empowers small farmers and gather statistics to improve overall region performance
b) Environmental: Helps to adjust the amount of phytosanitary and fertilizer products. Tracks water misuse
c) Economic: Increases production and cut costs on products and water
The Business model is based on selling devices with a one-year platform subscription. After that, customers will subscribe for additional years because the platform is improved with statistics and more crops.
This is Precision Agriculture Monitoring as a commodity.