Into an AI agricultural future

We aim to build an integrated agriculture environment, producing (clean energy- water- fertilizer- machinery) and controlling all systems by feedback sensors with a mobile application.

So, as a response to this crisis, we made our project which is the creation of an integrated agricultural environment based on technology and artificial intelligence, where all the necessary needs for the agricultural environment are provided (clean energy - fresh water sources - fertile fertilizer – machinery) with the introduction of a feedback control system to contribute to the development of the agricultural Environment. First, we tried to solve the problem of water resources, so we made two systems for clean water production, the Multiple effect Desalination system and the Atmospheric water generation system. Following the fertilizer price, we made a waste composter by recycling the waste from the agricultural environment. After that, we solved the problem of energy resources by providing three systems for energy production which are, Concentrated Solar Power System (CSP), wind turbines, and Stirling engine. Finally, for providing machine power, we made an NXT robot with a robot arm to be a simulation for the farmer by doing all the agricultural missions.

The agricultural environment suffers from many problems (water scarcity – lack of energy sources – high fertilizer prices – application of primitive cultivation methods) that lead to deterioration of the agricultural environment, pollution, and national economic delays.
Our project aims to create an agricultural city that works with AI for various purposes.
First, we built a machine that made fertilizers from most of the organic wastes (composter).
After making the fertilizers, we had to solve another problem, which was the availability of water.
The first method was to build a machine that extracts water from the moisture in the air(atmospheric water generator).
The second method was the extraction of water from seawater or any wasted source by multiple-effect desalination(MED).
The previous methods ensured sufficient water production for harvesting.
This robot arm is responsible for all the agricultural work like moving the fertilizers manufactured from the machine to the ground.
We installed a CSP system that generates energy by focusing the heat of the sun on to heat exchanger we increased the efficiency by an LDR sensor tracking the sunlight by moving all mirrors with one motor.
We did not waste any source so we installed wind turbines with special designs inspired by the black marlin fish and Stirling engine to use the wasted heat from the composter.
we provide all systems with a feedback control system connecting all the data with a mobile application.
this mobile application features controlling all the data of the farm to make you know where and when is the problem, recommendations for increasing the production, and contacting the special technical engineer.

Our projects aim to offer many services to the farmer and businessmen. For the farmer, it offers fresh water that helps him to solve the problem of water scarcity. It also offers clean energy that will help not to use fossil fuel that causes harm to the environment. In addition, it offers organic fertilizer, which is useful, cheap, and not has negative effects on the environment. Finally, it offers machine power by using the robot and controlling it by mobile instead of the farmer. For the businessman, the project will help him to get machines that produce water, energy, fertilizer, and machine power. Therefore, the services that the project presents help to make the environment better and help to make the life of farming easier. On the other side, we have good expectations about marketing and customers. From the business plan, we expect that our project will earn capital after only two years. To be sure that we will get a customer, we went to farms and the countryside and did an interview with farmers about their problems. We found that our problem will solve all of their problems and will make their life better. They admired our project and said that it will help all of the farmers in the world. Therefore, we expect that we will take a place in the Egyptian market. 

To make this project, everyone on the team must have the skills and the ability to work on a huge project like this. At first, all of us is in Sharkya STEM school, which improves skills in time management, project management, presentation skills, and working under pressure. all of us have all of these skills, which helped to make a strong team with the least number of people. This team worked on this project for about 6 months and joined about 5 competitions with it. we got first nationally in the competition of IEEE victoris, the top 35 teams in the world in the competition of IEEE yesist12, top 10 teams in UNICEF youths challenge 3.0. We also got second place in Egypt's competition of the Climathon Egypt series. All of these trials helped us not to give up and keep going until we hope to be finalists in this challenge, which we see as the hardest challenge we join and he hopes to get good results from this experience. We lost a lot of competitions and won a lot, but we see that is the most important opportunity for us and our project to be done on a large scale. 

Before making our project, we did a lot of research to identify problems that the population faces in the agricultural environment. We made interviews with farmers to know more about their needs and how our project can help them to solve their problems. We also must do a lot of research to make sure that our solution would be effective. We asked farmers and people if they would use the project or not. They told us that this project would solve all of their problems because it aims to solve the problems of water scarcity, the lack of energy, the high price of fertilizer, and the feu number of human power. We also made surveys for the farmers to know more about what they face and what would help them to pass these obstacles. Finally, we did many types of research to know more about the problem, the most useful solution for the farmers and the agricultural environment, and how can we make people know more about this solution to reach them.

Our project address and faces the most crucial problems that face Egypt, These problems include the scarcity of water, energy, fertilizers, gender equality, and, new technology (replacing the farmer with hard-working). All of these were solved in our prototype. The farmers suffered from over price of fertilizers, we have to recycle the agricultural wastes and foodstuffs converting them through decomposition into high-quality organic compost, also install a feedback control system to reduce the used energy and ensure high quality, in addition, this is in a short period. The lost heat energy from the decomposition process used by the modified Stirling engine to generate the electricity needed for the robot arm that is done with the goal of gender equality.  We used a robot arm that was fixed on the car with the NXT to do the hard-working of the farmer in agriculture. We have to solve the scarcity of water by solutions for working on the coastal farms and near the desert. We have to build the moisture collector and also build a smart distillation system that uses a small amount of energy relative to the amount of water. These two sources of water are collected in one tank with a smart feedback system to reduce the amount of water usage. We have to use all energy resources that we build wind turbines and a CSP system with parabolic mirrors to convert the heat in the focus point into electricity.  We aim to solve all the problems of the agricultural environment through our project.

Our project has impacts that help the environment to be better. Our project affects climate change by using renewable energy instead of fossil fuel, generating organic, non-toxic fertilizer that has high efficiency, using AI, and which helped to save water and energy. In addition, the farmer will not face any problems with water scarcity and manpower and fertilizer problems. For example, the price of fertilizer is 360 dollars per ton and our fertilizer that has higher efficiency costs 160 dollars per ton. Therefore, our project affects the environment positively and helps it to be better. By that, we achieve Egypt’s vision for 2030 this was our first step in the next year. the second step was that we have to bigger and help more people in Africa, when we have a stable base we will publish our international company and services to all the world. we can achieve that through hard-working and good planning.

Our project has many features that make it a great project that can be done in Egypt and affects it positively.  Our project saves time and effort for the farmer, fixes errors in each system of the systems, and saves water, energy, and manpower.  The project saves time and money because it aims to offer systems to the farmer to make fertilizer and produce freshwater for his farm. When farmers produce water and fertilizer by themselves, it made them save money because they do not need to buy anything. They save time because finding these things became sometimes hard nowadays. This project also fixes errors because of feedback control systems that tell the farmer about errors and how to fix them. For example, while producing fertilizers, there are sensors for temperature and humidity that help to be sure that fertilizers can be used in farming. This is because it required a specific humidity and temperature to use it in farming. Fixing errors and detecting them in an early stage make the project high efficiency because of the saving of energy, time, and money. The project also saves a lot of water by using a feedback control system in the process of irrigation. This is done s by using a humidity sensor that tells about the moisture of the earth and if it reached a specific percentage, a water pump works automatically and irrigates the soil. This advantage helps to save the effort of the farmer and save water and makes the soil better. The project also reduces the number of manpower by making an AI environment, which is independent and works by itself with a few numbers of humans.  The project also saves more time by using a robot that works instead of the farmer and does all of his tasks. This robot can be controlled by the farmer y a mobile application. The project helps to solve the problem of climate change because of generating energy from renewable resources like waste heat, sun, and wind power. This caused reducing using fossil fuels and keeping the environment safe. Using renewable energy helped to use devices that work by electricity like robots and water systems. Therefore, the project helps to solve the problem of climate change. One of our advantages is producing cheap fertilizer from the organic wastes of fruit and vegetables, which makes getting this fertilizer cheaper and makes the soil better.

After targeting and specifying our two personas with the way of dealing with them, we can say that our customers in the first year will not be less than 300 farmers and 20 businessmen. This amount is expected based on many reasons beginning from the marketing plan which targets the showing of the agricultural crisis and relating it with the economic crisis then showing our product as the main solver to both problems with cheap price and high quality. Making connections with nutrition companies that have farms and dealing offers with them will also help to rise our brand and raise our network to another level. 

In the following year, with adding more features such as the water systems and feedback control systems that will earn more trust of our customers leading to spreading our name and increasing the number of new customers into 2000 farmers and 50 businessmen with 50 companies relying on us by buying our energy, water, and fertilizer production systems and also buying our products for small farms. Continuing the development of our business plan according to the market conditions will help us a lot to reach more success.

Many barriers face reaching our goal next year, which are financial, technical, and legal needs. At first, we did not start our start-up yet because of financial needs that we cannot work without it. We need money to pay for land, human power, materials, and technology. We also face another problem, which is technical needs. This is because the required technology does not exist in Egypt. We need experiences and technology that will help us to make the project on a large scale. To do this, we need to make partnerships with high-level companies to offer the technology and experience that we need. After all, of that, we need to make partnerships with ministries that will help us to work in a legal way that will help to increase the safety of the project. 

To support this project, we need many factors. At first, we need ministries to help us to work legally. This is by helping us get the land we need to build the project and patent that will help us to work in relief because this is the first time to make something like that in Egypt. We also need sponsors to help us with the capital because we cannot start that project because it needs a high capital. This will help us start our project and start-up and enter the market. Because of the variety of technology of the project, we need to offer a unique technology, which is hard to find in Egypt. This is because we make a robot, mobile application, and feedback control system in each system. All of these things are needed to start the project. we hope we could have these partnerships in the future. with our Governorate or with an international organization like USAID.

After completing our project and testing it, we wanted to share our idea to help our country and the whole world to have a better agricultural environment. To spread our message and help humanity, we realized that we need to design a complete business plan for our market entering against all the existing huge companies. So, at the first, we considered the main four bases such as: Specifying our consumers, Scalability Roadmap, Product Growth plan, and the financial budget needs. 

First, Specifying our consumers:
To enter the market in any field, you have to choose your real customer types to know their needs and provide them with your product. So, after a lot of studying, we made our two types of personas, which are simple farmers and businessmen.
We began with the first persona which is the farmer persona as it is the main consumer to us as he will buy our eco-friendly products (Water – Energy – Fertilizer – Agricultural robots) on his farm which will be a cheaper price than other companies and has more efficiency. We will also provide some consulting services to the farmer by agricultural engineers to help him grow the farm in an eco-friendly way with the insurance of high productivity. 
Then, the second persona will be the businessman persona as he may have huge agricultural areas or food companies that need large production of crops. By the way, we will sell him our main devices such as (Water resources systems which are atmospheric generators, and MED desalination – Energy resources systems which are CSP, Stirling engines, and windmills – Wastes fertilizer composter – Agricultural robots). He will choose us rather than any other agricultural company because of our cheap price compared with our area and the high quality of devices that lead to increased productivity.  
Second, the Scalability Roadmap:
To complete any strategic plan, you should put a scalability map to put all the goal lists along the future years. First, we constructed our small-scale prototype and finished all the development on it by the end of Q2 of 2022. Then, we put a plan to enter our market and 
begin the first campaign over years, so we intended the following.
Before the market enters, we should take the patent first to document the ownership rights of our idea to help us protect the theft from any other side. So, we began to take the patent until Q4 of 2022
After taking the patent, we will begin to prepare our license and regulations papers to open our startup with legal form. We will do this until Q1 of 2023.
After proving all the legal papers, we will begin our real startup by making a pilot-scale project to test it in different shapes of farms around Egypt and knowing the errors and mistakes in the products before selling them. We will do this beginning from Q1 in 2023.
After proving that our project is eligible for every farm in Egypt, we will begin real manufacturing after being marketed by a huge campaign between the farmers to try our products. We will do that at the beginning of Q1 of 2025.
After observing a gradual success in our sales, we will begin to add more products and devices to our market to increase our market share and win with customer satisfaction. We will do that in Q1 of 2026.
After being successful in Egypt and being well known in the society of our specified personas in the country, we will target opening our project in more African countries to help them in providing the agricultural requirements. We will do that in Q1 in 2027.
Third: Growth plan:
To enter the market, you should enter it with one or two products to test your productivity and your customer’s feedback and then add
more products. So, we made our growth plan.
In 2024, we will begin manufacturing the fertilizer Composter and CSP energy system as they are the best devices for our customers.
After that in 2026, we will develop the composter by adding a Stirling engine for providing more energy and add the MED seawater distillation device as a source of water. Then in 2027, we will enter with our robot after developing it with sensors for agricultural safety to help the farmer in the field and to represent the machine power. Finally, in 2028, we will add our windmills for providing more electricity and the atmospheric water generation system to be an additional source of water.
Fourth: Budget for construction:
For constructing any project in real life, you should calculate the budget you need for everything. So, after a deep search and studying the market with our needs from everything we reached that we need about 460,000 Egyptian pounds to construct our project on one Acre which is a very cheap cost compared with using other systems and products from another company in addition to being our project eco-friendly. This budget was divided into main shares which are: Legal documents, devices, organic wastes for fertilizer, renting an agricultural area, taxes, and salaries.

To get the money that will help us to start our startup, we depend on donations and grants that can be given from business incubators. We can depend on the competition with a high prize to start our project. After starting the project, how can we get revenue? We can get it from many things such as selling our products (water, energy, machine power, fertilizer). On the other side, we can gain money by selling devices to businessmen to start their work. This will help us to help more people and make the products reach a huge number of people in the long term. We also plan for gaining money continuously through maintenance that we will do every year for people who have our devices. If we did all of these things, it is expected to gain our capital in only two years.