With Agri-Tech, Soil to Sale Trumps Farm to Fork
By Sanjay Dasari
Have you ever bought a house? Or observed someone buy one? If so, then you’d have observed the decision-making process closely. They have to know everything about the house before making the purchase, from previous owners, to neighborhood details, and more. When making an investment of that magnitude, it’s important to do research and have confidence that the foundations are strong, so that you know you are making the right decisions.
This is quite similar to whenever a farmer prepares to sow their crop. They have to evaluate several parameters and make informed decisions to get the most out of their land. One of the most underappreciated but critical elements of such an evaluation is the soil testing process.
A soil test is like a glimpse into the soil’s history, yielding a health report card that the farmer can then use to make decisions.
Data analyzed from soil tests can help advise a range of decisions. For example, if the soil has low traces of a certain nutrient critical for product growth, then the farmer will have to invest in buying fertilizer to ensure his crop comes out as required. At the same time, the opposite is true. If the soil test reveals an excess of a certain nutrient, then the farmer can avoid making the investment into the fertilizer, thus saving cost, and time. Soil tests help diagnose problems, rationalize use of inputs, predict yields, and maintain nutritional balance in the soil. Data from soil tests can even help a farmer understand whether a tomato or a brinjal (for example) would have better yields on his farm. Clearly, these have massive financial and non-financial impacts on a farmer’s life, in addition to ensuring that soil health is maintained for generations to come, not just that one harvest.
Soil degradation is impacting India’s 147 million hectares of cultivable land, — extremely concerning for a country that produces a large part of the world’s food, and has nearly half its own population drawing their primary income from agriculture.
Having seen how important it is to understand soil health, it would be safe to assume that this has become common practice across the country. However, we aren’t there yet. A range of factors from cost, accessibility to the technology, and even ability to understand the results, have kept farmers from actively engaging in this practice. One by one, these are being addressed.
The Soil Health Card & WayCool’s Outgrow program
Introduced by the Government of India in the year 2015, the primary aim of the Soil Health Card program is to improve farm productivity and optimize soil utilization through rationalizing the use of inputs by doing regular soil tests at labs across the country. These Soil Health Cards are issued at each individual farm’s level, and you can read more at here, and here.
WayCool is also tackling the problem on similar lines, to help farmers get the most from their land, through the Outgrow program
Through the Outgrow program, we work on the entire P&L of the farmer, and focus on profitability at farm rather than just revenue. Hence, conversations with our farm partners begin at the soil testing level.
Partnering with marginal and small farmers across South India and Maharashtra, Outgrow is an agricultural extension program that engages with farmers through the entire cultivation cycle, from planning to inputs to harvesting. We use a host of emerging technologies to measure soil health, quality of inputs and yield strength, thereby reducing the risk for farmers. One of the most exciting products we are working on is a Mobile App soil testing solution, by which the soil can be tested using any Android smartphone by taking a soil sample on the farm itself. This solution would not only reduce the time taken to get soil health test results from weeks to minutes, but also cost a fraction of what farmers would have to pay at testing labs far away in local villages.
Mobile App soil testing is just one of the many “Big Idea” projects that we’re working on here at WayCool. We understand that there must be far more to Agri-Tech than a simple transactional relationship between us and farmers if we truly want to reimagine India’s food supply chain. Through AI and ML tools we are also working on planning farmer’s cultivation cycles to perfectly match those of customers in cities, thereby reducing farmer risk and food wastage to nearly 0%. Through sophisticated logistics planning softwares, we can optimize route plans for our hundreds of vehicles to ensure the lowest carbon footprint possible. And through analysis of years of customer data, we can forecast customer requirements before they know them themselves.
At WayCool, the “know thy soil” approach is a step in the right direction in a larger picture, bringing tech to the farm and connecting farmers to the world. Stay tuned for more updates about some of the amazing work people in the WayCool team have been doing, and feel free to reach out to partner with us on any of these, and more, projects.
