K3 Analytics

Agriculture is not a laissez-faire market due to various policies and practices. Both farmers and consumers are subjected to unfair and unjust prices, often leading to large variations in production. Adjusting for weather events, production variations influence price and induce volatility in the markets on periods as short as a week.

Our solution revolves around dissemination of information to farmers enabling fair price discovery. Together with farm data consolidation and easy access to markets and cold chains, well equipped farmers can offer better prices to end consumers.

Millions in low- and middle-income countries cannot consume nutritional food due to cost disadvantages. Farmers, like in India, fall into lifelong unrecoverable debt trap and live economically disadvantage life. Our solution makes an attempt to positively address both and change lives of 1 in 8 individuals globally.

Sustenance through agriculture is extremely difficult for farmers in India. Lack of access to information gives rise to unfair market practices. Presence of several intermediaries in the value chain also lead to unjust pricing. The situation is further exacerbated due to unavailability of economical cold storage facilities and farmers are therefore forced to unload entire harvests at one go, which drives down prices. Contrary to notions of good harvest, farmers in reality, has nothing to gain and a lot more to lose when the yield is high. Instead of being a blessing, a large harvest takes a farmer deep into the debt traps.

We believe in making a fundamental shift by providing access to information and storage facilities will positively impact lives of millions of farmers and reduce cost for consumers. 

Food waste in India accounts for over 50% in its journey to the kitchen. Our work reduces food waste at production points and during transportation while ensuring food security for all.

We target the five problems in a sequential manner. Land holdings of India farmers are small hence aggregating producers to share capital is the first step to sell in a commingled manner. We then enable farmers to use their group power to negotiate better prices with traders and bulk buyers. This reduces several market intermediaries thus promoting curtailment of unfair market practices and unjust pricing.

Thereafter, in 2 years, we aggregate and make cold chain solutions available to farmers. Availability of economical storage facilities and data on production and consumer demand offers farmers the choice on when and how much to produce and sell. Farmers can opt to unload their harvest in a future date reducing excessive supply at any instant, which otherwise leads to food wastage and drive prices down.

In all, farmers can sell at a better price while ensuring food security and agro-waste reduction.

Over 70% of the India population is engaged in agricultural activities. Of this, 86% farmers own land which is less than 2 hectares. Quantitatively, this accounts for roughly 650-million farmers and farm-workers. Our two-front solution has a potential to positively impact all farmers sizeably.

Firstly, it begins by offering a choice to farmers. Cooperative structures of small farmers to sell builds a community and support system for each other. Such a structure also increases access to credit and capital, thus enabling systems to take advantage of economies of scale. Unlike most industries where buyers often pay ask prices, farmers are forced by market dynamics to sell at bid prices i.e. whatever is offered. We are empowering producers by reversing that play.

Secondly as access providers to storage solutions, farmers enjoy pre-negotiate economical rates for storage facilities. Further with access to information and demand projections, farmers understand when and how much to sow and harvest, and later store for better future prices

In India, nearly 25 farmers kill themselves everyday due to poor price and market failures. We envision to help farmers thrive with our solution. Farmers should not just work to service debts and survive.

• Building sustainable food systems require addressing inefficient supply chains and expensive storage solutions while improving farmer livelihoods.
• Discovering an opportunity in agricultural supply chains and food storage, we worked on addressing the plight of farmers in finding fair prices and market visibility.
• Structuring our farms into cooperatives enabled efficient use of capital resources and farm inputs, which also led to reduction in the environmental footprint of farming.
• Secondly, as per UN FAO, over 40% of food is wasted due to unavailability of storage and inefficient supply chains. When planned, we have sufficient food to feed over a billion individuals.

Farming in India has largely been a profession with ancestral technology and processes. The limited choice offered to farmers and farm workers reduce agricultural productivity. In our work, we offer choices - how much to sow or harvest, whether to sell or store - together with market access and visibility. In-app purchases and large buying power reduces the cost of inputs for farmers. Further aggregation of their selling behaviour forces traders and wholesalers to heed to the demand of fair and just prices.

Farming need not be difficult from an economic or sustenance perspective. As a business, we offer temporal choices and use the buying and selling power of the farmer community to make prices fair.

Our technology stack includes the use of time-series database, TimescaleDB, Artificial Intelligence, IoT and big data.

Village- and farm-level data is gathered in near real-time and processed on the Azure cloud.

Using the technologies, we assess farm health using vegetation and water-related data, to learn moisture status for better irrigation. Further, tracking farm conditions by visualizing ground data collected by sensors enable us to gain actionable insights using our AI/ML models on top of aggregated datasets.

The central idea of the business is a digital agriculture solution together with demand forecasting, storage and input purchase.

We are using TimescaleDB for processing time-series data and Azure cloud to build, store and process aggregate data. For the development of our AI/ML models and statistical uses, we use Python and R.

All technologies are extensively used and offered by market participants for long, giving a firm standing in terms of effectiveness of the technologies.

The current number of people you’re serving: 50 farmers

The number you’ll be serving in one year: 1,000 farmers

The number you’ll be serving in five years: 250,000 farmers and farmworkers

Within the next year, we expect to serve thousand farmers by providing them with access to information and storage. Many vegetable commodities have a shelf life of less than a week but by using intelligent storage hacks, the shelf life can often be doubled and sold across a larger time horizon. This reduces wastage and provides better income to farmers.

Reduction in wastage covert to the ability to feed more mouth without increasing the environmental footprint.

In the next five years, as our datasets grow, we will be a better position to make smarter forecasts regarding the demand for any item of agricultural produce. Farming has a large environmental footprint. In most parts of India, agricultural activity contributes significantly to environmental damages. Our long term plan, along with empowering farms, will be to reduce these environmentally damaging practices by augmenting and expanding our existing IoT sensor networks.

One of the largest barriers for us at this stage has been cultural, which limits adoption.

Apart from that, we require financial and technical support to scale the business to impact quarter-million farmers and farmworkers in 5-years.

Partnerships with grassroots communities who are friendly with farmers provide a key introduction. This reduces the frictions between a for-profit venture and farmers. 

Solve helps us build media visibility and harvesting that we can work with the government. No private agency has the scale the governments and district agencies can offer us. 

The state government in Assam runs monthly farmer programs but our network limits us to access these initiatives. As Solvers, we build credibility that enables our access to these government programs; thus make our desired impact in a rather faster timeline.

Working as a team within an existing organization (a private limited company) with agreement to spin out after business model validation.

Currently the team is composed of 1 dedicated individual, 1 part-time individual and 5 summer associates.

Siddhartha has worked on reducing information asymmetries in Indian financial markets and has deep knowledge on the working of market structures. Further, he has been working on sustainable agricultural systems in Northeastern India, and speaks and writes about it at government and non-governmental platforms. He has classroom and applied experience of systems design and sensor technologies and is an internationally awarded roboticist. He is a Global Shaper at World Economic Forum.

Ayan is employed at India's largest oil and gas public sector enterprise. He has experience in data science. Academically he holds a Masters in Geophysics, a multidisciplinary applied science field combining physics, geology and computational sciences, at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.

Our business models revolve around three business service models:

• Farming as a Service (FaaS), 
• Data as a Service (DaaS) and 
• Community as a Service (CaaS).

As a DaaS company, data vending provides the largest revenue opportunities. Providing production insights to large retail chains and connecting them to producers and providing production to cold chain solutions providers for gain sharing i.e. commission based on transaction volume or usage fee. Every stakeholder also pays with data.

Our CaaS approach enable low-cost operation by leveraging knowledge of expert farmers who share their ideas and techniques (content) for better harvest. Being part of a large but physically closer to each other, farmers enjoy a shared product experience. It also makes tailored experiences and product development easy with community inputs, which in turn reflects to higher retention.

FaaS lower cost for farmers, by converting fixed costs into variable costs. It making most techniques and technologies affordable for a majority of small farmers. We offer our solution in a subscription, pay-per-use basis or on a percentage of sales proceed. Cost of FaaS services to the farmer are less than a cent per day but it address and appeals to their emotions and attachments to the land. Farmers will be shown agricultural content by means of advertisement and will be able to make in-app purchases which will compensate for our costs.

CaaS enable negotiation powers while FaaS enables farmers the feeling of pride.

Our intent behind applying to Solve is the peer network of Solver and experts of MIT. At this juncture, it is vital for us to receive strategic and operational advice and mentorship and networks of Solve and MIT just does that. 

My team and I are also excited to attend Solve at MIT to meet other Solvers and see how the world is addressing the challenge of Sustainable Food Systems to feed nearly 4 billion in next two-decades.

Lastly, the Solve awards, recognition as Solvers and access to capital that allows us to finance our objectives form the pillars of our motivation. 

We believe our plan to positively affect the lives of a quarter-million farmers with a profitable and sustainable business model qualifies us as a potential awardee of the Future Planet Capital Prize. We not only intend to improve the lives of 250,000 farmers but also their dependents.

Reduction of intermediaries increases the earnings of farmers while lowering the cost for buyers. It, therefore, has a massive positive impact on people who are left out of consuming nutritious food due to cost disadvantages.

Our long-run sustainability efforts in limiting the expansion of the environmental footprint of farming help the planet and feed more mouths with far lesser agrarian areas.