Remote Agricultural Technical assistance

ManejeChat is an application developed for the family farmer. Intuitiveand accessible, the ManejeChat will guarantee the access to information and scale the work of professionals involved in the development of the agricultural production chain.

In the world, there are around 570 million rural properties. According to the last agricultural census, there are 5 million of production units in Brazil. Of these, 86% are small properties. Farmers have a bad time looking for agronomists specialized in certain pests and crops; in this process, they can lose their crops. Farmers suffer from a lack of technical assistance in the field. 75.98% of Brazilian rural workers do not have any specialized technical support. This lack of aid, in turn, negatively impacts the production chain, production costs, farmer's quality of life, family income, and the conservation of natural resources. According to data from the Brazilian agricultural research organization, the annual losses caused by pests and diseases in Brazilian agriculture are 55 billion Reais. The presence of more technical assistance in the field could reduce these losses.

We provide a tool to facilitate the communication between farmers and rural technical assistance, register and collect agronomic information from the field, and offer technical recommendations. The platform helps the producer to make the best decisions in the field and facilitates the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and intelligent solutions. Professionals involved in rural assistance, with the application tool, can have daily contact with their producers. Besides the tool for the remote agronomic advisory service, the platform also optimize the route of technical visits and organize the information on a dashboard.

We are developing a solution to offer remote technical assistance in agriculture for capacity building in sustainable rural development at the family farming scale. ManejeBem is a solution created to facilitate the diffusion of information and connection between technicians and farmers to mitigate the lack of specialized technical assistance in sustainable production. The business proposes scheduling technical visits, chat, field book, among other facilities, bringing innovation and technology to work in the field to help 200.000 farmers by 2030. The platform aims to reduce the costs of technical assistance, eliminate the complexity of contact professionals, extend the technician's work, and create connections that were previously lacking in the field. Developing technology is intended to gather information from the field and to benefit farmers on this critical mission of feeding the world. 

We start this company because we see an opportunity to impact billions of people. Agriculture is the largest source of income and jobs for poor rural households. Also, it's necessary to increase the competitiveness and quality of the products that came from family farmers an make them access new markets. We intend to collaborate to double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers and food security, including new technologies and tools to productive resources and inputs, and the share of knowledge for empowering farmers to do more sustainable agriculture.

ManejeBem offers innovation in the way farmers get technical advice and how the information coming from the field is obtained and processed. The platform aims to empower and to generate wealth for producers, to insert them into society and to show that they are here not only to serve but also to be served by the technology. We are generating connections between farmers and professionals that help in obtaining sustainable products to strengthen the chain. Our competitors are traditional technical assistance companies (Agronomic Consulting Agencies, Epagri, Emater), digital platforms for data collection by sensors and other technologies (Agrosmart, Agronow) and online solutions for technical assistance (Wefarm, Plantix). However, ManejeBem has a methodology of online and offline support with a larger scale than traditional agronomic assistance companies. In contrast to other data collection solutions developed for large producers (Agrosmart, Agronow), our focus is the small producer, and so our tool is adapted to their reality. Also, we connect the world offline and online; we are working in this way in Brazil plan to expand to Latin American countries, in exchange for other initiatives that develop their work in Africa (Wefarm) and India (Plantix). 

Through a mobile chat application, which works online and offline, we provide field notebooks, technical recommendations and rural technical assistance chat. The technology helps the producer to make the best decisions in the field and facilitates communication for the adoption of appropriate management and intelligent solutions.

Main Results with the application: Increases of 300% in the technicians' work capacity (remote performance); 50% of farmers have gained access to rural credit (with registration of activities); 334 hrs of technical assistance; 90% remotely; 100% sustainable recommendations; 60% of the problems solved. ManejeBem has already avoided the application of more than 780 kg of  pesticides in 70 hectares of crops, helping family farmers in the use of sustainable agricultural practices.

Pilot Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFpWfqeWhyQ&t=

Our end users are family farmers, they previously been excluded from the digital economy. They use our solution because we offer the qualification necessary for small producers can access new markets. The platform aims to empower and to generate wealth for producers, to insert them into society and to show that they are here not only to serve but also to be served by the technology. The use of smartphones and connectivity in the field has been growing and generating opportunities. With our experience working with farmers in Brazil, they are starting to use the internet to find faster solutions to their problems. We are generating connections between farmers and professionals that help in obtaining sustainable products to strengthen the chain.

The current number of people you’re serving: 76; the number you’ll be serving in one year: 3.500; the number you’ll be serving in five years: 20.000

We want to positively impact family farming communities in Brazil, Perú and Colombia. Our goal is to bring technical assistance to 20.000 farmers over the next 5 years. First we intend to expand the work started with producers of cassava suppliers of raw materials in Brazil. This expansion would begin in the next six months, in the state of Maranhão and culminate in the implementation of a technological tool for the technical support of farmers. The work aims at the qualification, connection, and sustainable development of these communities. Now we are developing marketing strategies for selling the solution to the agro-food industry. In the next months we will start to develop network of qualified ambassadors to expand ManejeBem's activities. Also, we plan to maintain qualified and recurring connections between family farmer and large buyer of agricultural raw materials (Agribusiness) in the North and Northeast of Brazil, Perú and Colombia.

The diffusion of the internet in rural areas bring significant risks to the success of this project. Research conducted in 2017 shows that 61% of Brazilian family farmers have smartphones and only 39% have internet. Of these, 92% are connected to social networks. In Latin America, some countries like Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica present a situation similar to that of Brazil. However, in other Latin American countries, this percentage of connected may be lower. Despite this situation, there is a significant annual increase in the number of people who have access to the Internet. 

The entry barriers are related to the risks regarding the connectivity in the field and adoption of the new technology. That can be overcome by the increment of a solution of sending of SMS in the platform ManejeBem. We also plan to act via technology "ambassadors" in the region that would bring farmers' demands to the platform.

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full-time staff: 3

part-time staff: 3

contractors or other workers: 2

The key members are professionals with technical expertise to assist farmers in the agronomic advice service. Caroline Luiz Pimenta is a co-founder and Technical Manager at ManejeBem, where she has been developing extension and agricultural advisory services for two years. Juliana Mattana is a co-founder of ManejeBem and responsible for the development of the product. She worked for seven years as a public company focused on the development of agribusiness in Santa Catarina. Juliane M. L. Blainski always sought to specialize in the agricultural area and developed over ten years of research related to agronomy. Co-founder, it has the perfect balance between patience, flexibility, and common sense and leads the team to a critical mission that is to develop sustainable agriculture.

Pilot Project AMBEV; Municipal Secretariat of Agriculture, AGERP -
Maranhão; 

Entrepreneurship networks: SEBRAE; EMBRAPA; ACATE (Agribusiness Vertical) and NITA.

Our value proposition is to assist the development of family farmers, raw material suppliers agro-industries and cooperatives through the insertion of a technological tool of technical assistance. With this tool, agronomists and technicians were able to increase their work capacity. ManejeChat raises the scale of service, helps in organizing appointments and assists in making decisions in the field. Also collects socioenvironmental data in a reliable, safe and up-to-date manner from family farming.  

Because it is an excellent opportunity to get the support we need to consolidate a company that is economically sustainable and able to attract investments from private capital. More than profit we are seeking to impact the lives of millions of farmers who work every day from sunrise to sunset to bring food to our tables. We intend to work on one of the most critical issues that food production in the world represents, and without the help of the Solve program, perhaps our efforts will not be enough to achieve this higher goal.

We plan to expand to Latin American countries, and we intend to be a world reference in the qualification, connection and sustainable development of family agriculture. For this reason, we are always seeking support from large companies and other Startups partners to be able to scale globally. Besides the financial resource, international cooperation partnerships withs other Satrtups. At the moment the challenges are to organize our processes and deliveries so that we can scale and reach more customers and farmers and structure the data generated and the correct communication of the data to attract new customers (marketing for sales).

MIT (network to contact large companies and other Startups partners to be able to scale globally), Retos (expand to Latin American countries).

Because ManejeBem is structuring of information gathering and the evaluation of social and agri-environmental indicators. After analyzing the data, the impacts are reported to the contracted companies in the form of semiannual reports. Also we use data science to generate insights and to communicate results to the community involved in the project.