Angshujyoti Das, is the Founder & CEO, of Express Weather.
Farmneed for development
Population growth in human history was slow but steady. But in last one hundred twenty years, population growth has been accelerated from 1.5 billion to 7 billion. Do we produce enough and safe food to feed these 7 billion people?
In spite of all technological advancement around the world, today even 1 out 7 people, i.e. 1 billion people are chronically hungry. Even though food is most important need, various factors have made agriculture less profitable.
Today farmers in the developing and under developed nations are facing multiple challenges including knowledge gap, poor extension service, weather risk, price risk, and too many layers in the supply chain and so on.
‘Mobile is everything’. We started exploring the real meaning of it from the food security, climate smart or even rural livelihood stand point, way back 2010, when we first developed an idea of customized agro-meteorological content for every farm.
In quick time we have been able to build an engine through a perfect marriage between crop science and micro weather data, to deliver various content related to weather, crop protection, agri input management, guidance on sustainable practice etc. The challenges were how to reach out to each individual farm? How to generate the farm level data? How to study the cost of farming of each individual farmer? How to understand the efficacy of the agri input at each farm? And at last how to deliver solutions for each farms and for its farmer? Eventually, we got all the answers in the mobile eco system.
During 2011, first in India, an IoT enabled automatic agromet station was established to pick up multiple data from the farm level related to local weather, soil, plant etc., have been able to build a complex simulation software using real time data, weather prediction. With the help of growing mobile population in the rural India, we started delivering customized content through mobile phone. Farmneed app was born in 2013. Today we have been supporting about 150,000 of grape and potato growers in India both in B2B and B2C segment. 
Growers see an overall benefits between 18% to 25% using Farmneed app. India has huge farmer base population of about 220 million. And it is largely rainfed agriculture, so as our other target market in Eastern and southern part of Africa. Our mid to long term target is to reach out to at least 25% farmer base in each of our target markets through which we would like to ensure that farmers are able to deliver safe food at low production cost, produce higher yield and make more money than today while also ensuring traceability.
During an intitial period, we faced low penetration of smartphone among farmers as well as low bandwidth. However the improved availability and affordability of smartphones has become an encouragement for Farmneed service. Let’s connect every farm and delivery customized solutions to their needs.