The problem

Farmers in northern Sri Lanka are facing challenges due to changing climate conditions, including prolonged droughts and rising temperatures.

Incorrect conventional agricultural practices such as excessive use of chemicals for quick yields, overwatering, and cultivating unsuitable crops in mismatched environments have caused significant reductions in crop yield.

Furthermore, both farmers and buyers face difficulties in supply-demand source matching due to poor market access choices. Middlemen in the agriculture value chain makes this process more difficult by increasing the retail price and reducing the marginal benefits for valuable stakeholders. These conditions lead to high production costs, overall yields dropping by 30%, and challenges in achieving optimum productivity.

The company

SenzAgro creates precision agriculture technologies for a sustainable future. Their solutions optimise sustainable productivity by enabling growers to cost efficiently, produce better and higher yields, while using less resources in terms of water, land and energy. They achieve this through their technology, deep agronomic expertise and capacity-building training.

Project description

SenzAgro has developed a transparent Digital Agriculture Value Chain platform that communicates regenerative agriculture practices, such as timely weather information and soil health conditions to farmers. This enables farmers to produce sustainable yields and facilitate efficient interactions with other stakeholders in the agriculture value chain such as buyers, input providers, delivery services, and more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The proposed platform is an extended version of SenzAgro’s Agricore platform, a marketplace equipped with smart-farming solutions already serving 10,000+ farmers and 200+ agri-businesses. This project is expected to onboard 500 young smallholder farmers from 20 geographical clusters chosen from five districts in the northern part of Sri Lanka. In addition, the project aims to include 200 micro small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), buyers, input service companies, and agri-businesses.

Founder

Quote from Founder

“Instead of simply providing a handout, let’s equip communities with the tools and knowledge they need to nourish themselves. Through innovation, we can empower people to grow their own food and build a future free from hunger.”

Team

20 full-time and 22 part-time staff members