YGC - Explore Agri Tech
foreign foreign of uh exploring and the opportunities and the problems that are The Challenge season 10. so I would welcome all of you to these okay CEO go micro with us to conduct this question today foreign foreign so to give some information to the participants until uh Shivam get ready with the presentation we are conducting these on webinar mode so we will be initially doing a smart presentation and then we will open it up for question and answers so uh today at the end when we have a question and we will be able unmute you and then you can ask your questions uh hello hi can you hear me yes uh hi hello everybody can you hear me yes okay okay um I guess we can start can we or yes we can start Shiva okay uh welcome everybody we are going to do I think this is the first presentation on connecting with people who are in various things so um you got to let me scare share the screen so I can I can share my presentation uh now you should be able to share Siva okay got it okay can you see my screen yes it's visible okay so I just want to start with what happened to agriculture in uh in in Sri Lanka from a historical perspective so in the fourth Century BC uh there was uh a Tamil saying if I translate that into English those who plow and eat their food truly live the rest been subservient even eating what they give so what this means was agriculture was number one top priority it was the best profession in the 4th Century base so let's see what happened to it I'm not sure if you all know this this is the paragraph samadra so Sri Lankan civilization was built on AG Tech there was this king called parakramabahu who essentially created an entire irrigation system which was developing before that but he managed to irrigate the land so the production was doubled this was one of the best agricultural Technologies of the time and Sri Lanka benefited from it and this is a big technological breakthrough at that time so there was act Tech before well well before we we call it now so what happened after the British came they tried to help the farmers by having you know District officers and extension officers but that system today remains incredibly inefficient so for example the Agricultural Extension reaches less than one percent of farmers in Sri Lanka and in countries like Africa the ratio between farmers and agronomists is one is to 13 000. so there was the beginnings of a system to help farmers increase their knowledge and support them in agriculture which the colonial government started which has become completely dysfunctional and ineffective what the before the colonial period you know the most lucrative jobs were farming jobs so you had a farm you made money but colonialism created a second layer and this was the layer of Clerks of people who are serving the colonial government in Sri Lanka and also outside and everybody wanted to be a clerk so that those were the hot jobs so people gave up farming to move on to or aspired to clinical jobs and today farming is really one of the worst jobs particularly in if you're a subsistence farm this global warming is what a shortage there are diseases and pandemics sweeping the agricultural world because of travel and so on and there are things like fertilizer band which come for no reason so farmers subsistence farmer is not a good job today it's amongst the worst it's survival jobs now in countries like Australia things are quite different this is an Australian farmer each farmer in this country is able to create food for 707 people the average Farm sizes are big and there's a lot of Technology being used foreign and the people who are doing farming are really really really interested in what they do you can see this Farm he's so fascinated by the orange and he knows everything about it all these trees have water senses uh they're very very interested in using technology and very good at it and Farms are managed with a lot of technology and with a lot of efficiency by a small number of people who who are able to feed a very large population and also export food so this is what is happening in the diff in the developed world there's a lot of knowledge a lot of skills and people who are doing it are very often interested and excited and they're very very skillful and they use the best of Science and Technology and universities and research institutions to to grow food and they grow it really efficiently now if you look at this this is the pricing from a supermarket here I have put the pricing in Sri Lanka if you translate that into Sri Lankan rupees and I have taken the pricing from John Keels today and I compared the prices so a good number of vegetables in Sri Lanka actually more expensive than in Australia so this is an important thing to realize that farming in Asia is actually very inefficient and very costly and it's cheaper to import food now and there are many reasons for that primarily because our educated people don't connect to Farmers at all because as I've explained before the aspiration is to be a clerk is to work for the government that's a saying in Tamil right so we have separated our substance from a from society and they are just looking for government jobs right and we're now in the second wave then you of course you have programmers and you have you know other stuff but you are creating the next layer that doesn't connect to the bottom layer and this is one of the problems in in developing countries so for those students here who want to you know continue those things of course you know you have big data in agriculture your climate science you have internet of things a lot of things related to agriculture but they don't really help or benefit or they are disconnected and that is one of the challenges that we have I mean there's nothing wrong with this if you want a good career this is what you should do but the question is does it really connect is a question so on the other hand if you look at if you're really interested in the science of of all this right a plant is an incredibly complicated thing and it has inputs you know you have to have money to essentially buy seeds you know rent the land then you have to input labor you have chemicals you have fertilizer you have to put water you have to have seed another plant buries some carbon now that's being monetized and it has output right so it's a very interesting engineering problem it is input and output and the efficiency of farming depends on the cost of the input and what you get out of that right so so you can see that in Australia the input costs are going down right and the output is increasing so the difference is a profit right the profit is the difference between input cost and output cost so in countries like Sri Lanka the input costs are also going up right because all the imported fertilizers applied badly inefficiently without knowledge right and the output is not that great so that is why the prices are high right and it is a knowledge about agriculture that actually separates the input cost from the output cost so from a business point of view agriculture like any business as an input cost and output cost and if you have Smart use of inputs and correctly matched use of input and if you understand the plant biology and everything then your output is that so all this is not understood this way I mean Farmers understand this generally but this is not the way it's modeled in generally and I think we have to start understanding this if you want farming to be profitable so the interesting thing is 80 of the worst food is created by these Farmers small subsystems farmers they produce eighty percent of the world right many of them have no formal edification there are virtually no Agronomy support there's a lot of Market uncertainty then of course there's global warming there's agricultural pandemics in this growing water shortages right so if you are doing something in act Tech or want to do something inactive you've got to be able to work in this kind of environment if you're working with this sector if you're buying and selling stuff it's it's a different matter right so it's a very tough and difficult area so so those who want to get to act Tech you should look at this and maybe be discouraged because it is hard right and success is is not guaranteed at all but on the other hand this is where the balcumber food is produced so that's where the challenge is so if you look at what's happening in the world today um India and China are not really that fantastic in in terms of producing food but a couple of thousand years ago they were the most powerful economies of the world and what's happening now is the world is coming back to what it was China and India are going to be very very dominant economies right and things are happening in China and India that are in agriculture that are really really amazing incredible things are happening in China and they are going to be the powers of the world the most dynamic part of the world is Southeast Asia this region is the most dynamic part of the world in many ways it is related to the conditions in Sri Lanka but unfortunately people in Sri Lanka agencies some startups and you know they all kind of hallucinating they think they are Hub they are thinking they are center of the world when they're absolutely important to understand Sri Lanka is nothing it's not a competitive place to do anything and but around Sri Lanka is a very very Dynamic feature and as far as subsistence farming is concerned it's a huge Market because a large part of Asia Africa and Latin America so together it's constituted a huge Market but Sri Lanka is just simply not in the game so so think of Sri Lanka as a Hab I don't know what to say to those people they should really rethink what they are thinking um across the park street is India and what's happening in India is just absolutely amazing 600 act Tech startups huge investments in Agri Technologies and the amount of incubation centers for agriculture is breathtaking and all these are very often connected with Departments of Agriculture connected with the government of India and India is moving in an incredible way nurturing hundreds and hundreds of startups and it's going to be a Powerhouse for agricultural technology for sure so I would seriously suggest that you look at Indian startups not all of them are doing clever things because as you know India is a big market so you don't really have to do anything clever if you just deliver food efficiently you have a you're a couple of million dollar company so why do you want to do anything clever but there are also very clever companies at the same time so I think we have to have the right sense of where the Technologies are developing and how this is going to transform the world and of course Indian companies also have a presence in other parts of the world and the the sheer number and the shared talent and the sheer funding available in India is really going to make a huge difference uh in the decades to come it already has started so if you look at the ACT Tech opportunities in India um you might get a glimpse of what the opportunities in Sri Lanka are so the Indian market agricultural Market is 276 billion um Sri Lanka's Market is 6.2 billion so I think the ratio is something like 44 to 1. but I think the problems and the opportunities are somewhat similar so a lot of the startups are focusing on you know how do you sell inputs to Farmers right that's a 1.7 billion Mark
in India how do you you know because getting farmers buy all these inputs right that's part of the production costs are selling that advising that is is a huge Market opportunity then of course for efficient cropping you know whether water Transportation all these things are also the infrastructure is not very developed in India so that's a 3.7 billion dollar industry so in Sri Lankan terms I have I have just divided by 44. and it you know it's a 77 million dollar space then quality assessment you know traceability knowing where because your products come from that's a three billion dollar market then of course there's a lot of food loss after you plug in after you harvest and that's a 12 billion dollar market and then of course you know farmers buy seeds they need money you know it's lending and banking Arrangement that's about food so roughly I think the opportunities in Sri Lanka are also like this they can be grouped like this and this is still a sizable Market opportunity in Sri Lanka to to develop solutions for those sectors so if we look at what's happening to this 80 percent of food production the problem for startups is that the subsistence farmer earns very little right so if you acquire a farmer as a customer you know for the entire lifetime of the farmer you'll only get a few dollars but cost of getting that farmer is actually quite High because you have to have people talking to them you know your distribution you have to have a lot of work so you spend a lot to acquire a farmer and their value is very low so business models don't work so India is seeing a lot of failure in this sector so it is a very very hard to create any viable business for subsistence firms on the other hand on top of you know there's a lot of things there's a lot of money going into agriculture there's a lot of Labor for fertilizer pesticide water seeds and output and there's a lot this there's a lot of activity that's happening but it is very difficult to reach the farmer what's happening right now is there are all these new technologies credit cards cell phone Cloud you know satellite imagery drone imagery you know tractor hire you know equipment higher and artificial intelligence these are technologies that are beginning to effect and change how these Farmers interact with this input and output things and there are interesting opportunities there but they all have to take into account that farmers will never be able to pay and you know you can't so they all have to have business models that somehow are successful in this context and that is one of the hardest problems in um act Tech when you have when you're dealing with subsistence farmers any any questions uh you can raise your hands they may be able to unmute you and then you can ask or please post a question on the chat either way it's fine [Music] looks like there aren't any questions after this yeah right so I'll I'll okay so I just want to share three interesting examples in this space so I don't know if you have heard of this company pindolo it's worth 145 billion worth of farm produce is being sold by this company and this company sells so China like India after Mao small farms subsistent Farmers they are selling the products of subsistent farmers this is now the world's largest online grocery with 731 million uses and the guy who founded this is richer than Jack Ma Jack ma is the founder of Alabama so here is an example of a successful and business company whose base is subsistence Farm they have done some very very clever things with the app they have gamified the purchasing parts so they're very good that have development they're very good at AI they have sorted out the supply chain problem how do you buy from Farmers and China has incredible you know logistic systems and deliver it to the end custom so the world's largest e-grosery is based on the products of subsistence funds China is almost there in terms of being the world leader in AI and this company also runs an AI competition where they have greenhouses and different schools universities and companies from all over the world compete in this competition they have a row of strawberries and they can control the water the humidity the light and so on so this is a fully automated Strawberry Farm competition run by pindodo and in average they managed to produce 196 percent more almost double of what the normal average strawberry farmer produces using artificial kidneys so China is now a Tech Giant um and it's moving in a very very very interesting uh Direction with a lot of technology and um a lot of things that is going to help small farmers so I think this is one of the most interesting or shall I say successful active Adventures there's I won't be surprised if you will buy if you will be buying in Sri Lanka vegetables from pindodo soon foreign company which is incredible called plant takes they have 10 million users and they have one million monthly uses and what this does is it uses artificial intelligence to detect pests and plant disease and you know 15 to 30 percent of crop loss is due to disease and the huge success of this is primarily due to peer-to-peer support that is Farmers advising other Farmers on crop problems the artificial intelligence is there in the background but the main advantage to Farmers is just Farmers being able to talk to other Farmers to accept is what makes it really popular and makes it very useful then there's another company based in Thailand which I really really like it's called listen field and what happens to a lot of economic companies is they are run by Engineers Engineers don't really understand agriculture right they know iot they know satellite data they know all that stuff but they don't understand plants very so if you don't understand plants and if you don't have anagram in me understanding you can't really help or support agriculture because it just becomes a tech game so this company is founded by somebody who understands Agriculture and she has built this company to support subsistence farmers in Thailand I think Thailand is one of the worst largest producer rice with the help of the Japanese government so they do different breeding they have a very comprehensive set of things that will finally help because just by doing you know iot or whether or satellite you're not going to be able to help anybody but if you have a comprehensive a very thorough um framework of understanding what happens in the farm what Farmers needs and you can actually increase energy this is a company to watch for and of course there's my company uh called go micro but I'm not going to talk about it this is about a general introduction to AI but if you're interested in what we do you can always follow us on LinkedIn go micro Co we do a lot of interesting stuff okay the flow is now open to questions I hope you have a lot of questions participants you can raise hand or post your question on the chat so that we will we will be able to answer those I can answer so I was talking about the failure in agriculture the failure in our education is our students don't ask questions they just consume stuff that is poured into them and that is really sad so I would appreciate if you ask some questions because then there's some hope for you all and for agriculture has asked the question um for the listeners in this call so this was organized by yalit the light is doing a terrific job trying to build entrepreneurship in the northern East particularly and this is to make them aware of of what's happening in the world in inact Tech so that perhaps encourage them to start their own active Adventures so I think that is the purpose as I understand it foreign looks like there are no other questions yeah uh so there's a comment from elango saying uh North or east have great fertile land need to start thinking about how to get more benefits okay so I actually disagree with that comment because agriculture is no longer about fertile land it's about fertile mines and the point that I want to make is that the northern East does not have a fertile mind because the northern East as I explained before has a clerical mind it's all about getting those jobs and and not connecting with what is actually the northern East and its potential so having fertile land is actually not very helpful is not a huge board a fertile mind is an open mind yes and of course a willingness to ask to to learn perhaps ask questions those are the things that I think give hope to an economy and people who do things so looks like there are no more questions so um yeah so I think uh then if there are no more questions uh we can wind up so any last point that you would like to say Siva any closing points no I think um as you know um we've um as we have discussed this before I think yeah agriculture is becoming a tech industry and I agree with elango and not particularly on the fertility of the land but the northern he says a lot of Agricultural and aquaculture potential but for that to happen uh the younger generation whom we are talking to who should be asking questions now need to be connected to what's actually happening in the world and that connection is not going to come through the universities it's not going to come through what is there it's going to come through their own understanding of the world and thanks to the internet you can find out what's happening in the world you can find out what's happening in India you can find out what's happening in China you can find out pretty much everything that I can find out and I I think if the next generation of students start thinking that way and stop thinking about jobs and sitting behind a desk and getting some set feedback and think about the problems that the farmers can have and think about making money right then I think that's a huge potential and future but I think the main problem in the northern East I think is a mindset rather than anything else so that's my view all right anyway so I hope I hope this talk will encourage them to just look outside don't have to believe what I say just look outside and learn what's happening and you know make use of the best things that that you have access to which which is knowledge and knowledge is now freely available for for those who want to to make use of it yes uh thank you so much Shivam uh thank you so much for your time and uh for sharing the insights which related to agritech we hope our listeners here today and all those who are watching this live on Facebook uh we'll look at the opportunities that you pointed out to and start building or start taking those problem and finding solution to those and thank you everyone for joining here today to listen to sivam the CEO of go micro who have been supporting uh us with a lot of other initiatives as well uh who conducted this session here today so thank you everyone for joining and listening to this session and we hope to see you all in the future as well thank you thanks bye
2022-08-21 00:51
