During Innovation Olympics 2017, a competition organized by vegetable seed company East‑West Seed last September 29 at the University of the Philippines‑Los Banos (UPLB), Laguna, students from different universities presented new ideas to address real‑life challenges of smallholder vegetable farmers.
After a three‑day training capped by a pitch competition, two teams from UPLB and one from Asian Institute of Management (AIM) were chosen among eight competing groups to implement their ideas all aimed at enhancing the productivity of local farmers. Check out their super cool inventions:
Connecting farmers to suppliers, consumers
Team Agriviz from AIM presented a project called “e‑Magsasaka,” an e‑commerce platform that connects local farmers to suppliers and consumers. The app, according to the team, will help to “improve the profitability of farmers” using a business model that converts the farmers’ mindset from being production‑driven to market‑driven.
“We’re linking and building trust between each stakeholders in the value chain: the farmers, buyers, and the suppliers. E-commerce is giving each stakeholder different value,” Reiah Sarmiento, member of the team, said. “We want the farmers to be equipped with knowledge and skills, so they will be more entrepreneurial and more market‑driven. For the suppliers, we want them to have a wider market reach while for the buyers we want them to have an access to quality products and regular and reliable supplier of those produce.”
While the platform is initially designed to benefit smallholder vegetable farmers, Ms. Sarmiento said it can also be used by other farmers who produce all kinds of agricultural crops in the future.1
The team knows that internet connection plays a huge role in running the project that’s why they also aim to incorporate e‑Magsasaka into the corporate social responsibilities of telecommunication companies. Doing so, according to them, could assure the efficiency of internet services for the project to gain huge tractions.
“We’ll target first the regions near NCR, so there will be more stable internet coverage, then when we get enough traction we can convince [telecommunication companies] that the platform is doing good and we’ll pitch its social values to them,” Gorby Dimalanta, another member of the team, explained.
Making money out of surplus crops
The first winning team from UPLB, Team i‑Agri Ventures, pitched that farmers can make money out of over‑produced vegetables, particularly tomatoes, when turned into dried products.
The team presented a “multi‑crop dryer”: a solar panel that can dry vegetables faster than the traditional process of drying food, which usually takes up to a couple of weeks.
According to the team, dried vegetables would increase the price of farmers’ harvests by up to 1000%. For example, the team said farmers earn as low as ₱1 per kilo of tomatoes during summer season due to surplus in supply. When tomatoes are dried, they said the end products can be sold for as much as ₱150 per kilo.
“There’s a study [saying that] approximately 40% to 50% of our perishable commodities are lost due to post‑harvest losses. If somehow we can reduce that number even by just five percent, I think that will have a great impact to our farmers,” Job Ruzgal, member of the team, said, adding that the device could cost ₱50,000‑₱70,000.
Assuring proper irrigation
The second team from UPLB, Team Oppa, introduced a contraption called “Pocket Farm.”
The device can gather data about the moisture content of the land with its sensors and send them to farmers through SMS. This, according to the team, will allow farmers to know the proper time for irrigation as well as the right amount of water to use.
One device, which the team estimates to cost ₱30,000, should be installed in every 0.25 hectare of a land to ensure the accuracy of the measurement.
“Our project is basically putting the farm in the farmer’s pocket and the impact is that it decreases the amount of water that farmers use by more than 65% and it increases their yield by more than 87%,” Sean Vince Maningas, member of the team, said.
Each team received seed money worth ₱150,000 which they will use for the implementation of their projects to their chosen farms for 120 days. The winner among the three teams, to be announced in January next year, will receive a ₱250,000 cash prize.
