SERO Rice - Easily track, manage, and keep crops healthy

Sero is crop intelligence company that focuses on optimizing rice paddy production with full-cycle analytics. We collect in field data throughout the entire growth stage via smartphone and IoT sensors, and provide expert recommendations to rice farmers and agribusiness.

Sero enables climate-smart farming by collecting field data and connecting farmers to businesses and experts.

We work with extension centers (government) in mountainous provinces, where average education levels are lower, to train young ethnic farmers on good farming practices and  how to use our smartphone app for their collecting and documenting their farming activity, which will help them produce higher quality crops, increase their income and become self-sustainable.

Practical training with the application is more efficient than books and theory, and helps young farmers achieve better results after one harvest cycle (3 months). Upfront prerequisites are very low:

- Cheap android phone (USD $50), 3g connectivity (USD $4 a month)

There are two main problems still existing in mountainous provinces in Vietnam:

1. Old farming methods which increase risk of crop failure and a lower sales price. 

2. No data collected. Hard to know what can and should be improved without documentation.

3. Lack of market understanding leads to dependency on the middlemen (traders) who takes a big margin of farmers profit. 

Our solution helps young farmers in mountainous areas approach modern rice farming method, using technology (SERO Rice) to record the whole rice cycle and easily track their farming activities during rice seasons. Additionally, it increases the interaction between farmers and local extension workers, who will provide farmers timely solutions and recommendations based on data collected via the SERO App.

The target outcome of our solution is to change the rudimentary farming method into high-tech farming and train young farmers into skilled workforce and to become more self-sustainable.  

Relationships with 20 extension workers secured with contracts who can cover the training of in their land area they cover. - Develop relationships with extension workers in Hoa Binh and Son La.

Track downloads in app store. - 2000 download our app

Review end of seasons reports and compare yield and operation costs from pre app season to post app season. - 2 seasons of data collected.

With simple mobile UI we help farmers easily collect data and monitor pest and diseases. Using our platform we are able to connect many individual farmers into collectives and benefit from a central management. We also connect farmers with agricultural extension officers via mobile, which is still very inefficient use of resources. This helps farmers get fast feedback and recommendations that help them make better discussions regarding their land.  

From day 1 we have always worked very closely with our user base to understand their needs and problems. This has resulted in us building simple to use tools with real impact.

One lesson we quickly learned was assumptions on how things should be built are uselessly false when dealing with rural farmers in South East Asia. Baby steps are needed. Brining them from no records or a few records to using technology is no easy task. 

Through direct training of leaders/trainers (ToT) within 3 sessions, after which we will support online.

Sero admin creates a new collective account, and we add farmers to this group. They will be invited to download the app for free.

Tech cost:

• Android phone: $50 one time

• Cost for data: $4 per month

We are currently self funded. 

Our goal is to make money when farmers make money or when agribusinesses use our technology for professional crop production. We would charge per hectare per production season. 

Our second big goal is it to work with Seeds, Insurance, Lending industries to provide them with our hyper-local crop production data.

1) Developing updates and refinements quickly enough within the 3 month growth cycle.  

2) Comparables requires several growth seasons of data.

3) Farmer understanding that the more they use the app, the more help they will receive from extension workers. 

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B6MyoVxravItLU5JSWtNbmxOM1E

Rice is biggest food crop on earth, every year over 220$bn USD of value are produced globally, feeding 3-4 billion people. We want to SOLVE

1) We would like farmers to put more money in their pocket my helping streaming line the supply chain and cut out the middle man by leveraging the data the farmers collect so they can provide end of harvest reports to agribusinesses on their own.

2) Give farmers access to experts and disease detection software to help solve crop failure at a low cost and without time delay.

We are working with: 

1) Extension Centres/Plant Protection Station in the North and Mekong Delta

2) Dai Mo Agricultural-Technical Service Station, National Seed Experiment Centre 

3) Universities (Vietnam National University of Agriculture and Southern Agriculture College)

4) 6 Agricultural Collectives in the North Vietnam and the Mekong Delta