HarvestHub

HarvestHub is a concept idea for a smart crop management system for farmers.

One of the ways that I suggest marketing and launching this program is 1) as a system that can be leased to farmers where they will gain access to this technology with the primary aim of facilitating precise, smart farming that can contribute to optimising crop yield for the farmers. 2) I also argue that this system can be used as a proxy to determine the creditworthiness during early stage loan financing providing financial institutions with a method of determining whether a farmer will be able to pay back a loan based on data about how the crops are doing.

This program comprises of technology including both hardware and software. The idea is to use affordable sensors to collect various data about the soil and crops and then have an application that automatically analyses data, presents information, and provides personalised advice on how to optimally maintain various farming operations in order to increase crop yield in the long-run through the use of IoT and AI technology.

The customer segment this program is designed to cater for is the smallholder farming community that has lower agricultural literacy, dealing with the tough consequences of climate change on harvest yield, and/or have inadequate access to financial resources, with verification of creditworthiness being one of the central issues. I believe this is the appropriate target demographic for several reasons:

• 1. It is estimated that 84% of farmers currently operate with land size smaller than 2 hectares. This represents an overwhelming majority of farmers, which can be visualised by the figure on the lower right.
• 2. Smallholder farmers typically achieve only 20% of their optimal yield capacity, for reasons stated earlier such as consequences of climate change, low literacy, and lack of financial support. This is backed up by the statistic that less than 10% of Africa’s smallholder farmers state that their financial needs are supported by financial institutions.

Taking this into account, I believe that the HarvestHub program can provide a solution for smallholder farmers and ultimately assist them in fulfilling a greater proportion of their potential harvest yield.