AGROS

Our solution is to reduce financial exclusion of smallholders farmers and improve agronomic advisory and training services accessibility. All our team is from Piura, Peru, a farming city, in a farming country, so all of us know the barriers that farmers face each year and we are committed to change the current conditions of farmers and use technology as a tool to improve farmers life conditions. In five years we plan to be AGROS Bank, a microfinance institution to offer insurance, loans and technology toolkits to smallholder farmers, reducing uncertainty and risk using precision agriculture technologies to improve farm management and fair financial services.

In Latinamerica, just 13% of smallholder farmers get access to financial support and loans, due to lack of accurate information and uncertainty involved in their farming. Smallholder farmers cannot invest in improving their activities, working just 40% of yield potential, and lowering their products' quality. having no access to agricultural training, farming inputs and cash availability to afford their basic needs. Indeed, microfinance institutions cannot improve their financial services offered to farmers, because they don't get enough information from them, so they avoid the risk with higher interest rates to smallholders farmers. To solve this problem AGROS offers 2 solutions: AGROS RiskTool: a tool offered to microfinance institutions to get historical information of each farm based on satellite images, weather conditions analysis and field gathered data; so this information is used to improve their risk analysis getting information about historic yield, yield potential, water availability (using geographic government information), and landslide risk. This helps the farmer create a footprint of their agricultural activities, reducing uncertainty and improving access to financial services. 

And AGROS Advisor is a tool that uses previous information to contact a remote specialized agronomic advisor that brings recommendations based on information gathered by each farmer.

Small family farmers provide more than 80% of world food (FAO 2017) and just 13% of them are included in financial services regardless of the efforts of the countries (agricultural banks or financial institutions dedicated to supporting family farmers) because usually there's no information about their average and historic production, land information, and yield potential. In Peru Agrobanco, an agricultural finance institution supported by the government, get bankrupt because of the lack of information for delivering financial services (more than 30% default rate). So AGROS is committed to helping smallholder farmers to get access to smart financial services, erasing uncertainty in cash lending operations.

AGROS is working alongside microfinance institutions and agrochemical distributors through AGROS RiskTool service reducing uncertainty in their risk analysis, offering better interest rates to smallholder farmers and including new farmers to their current customer portfolio. The biggest problem for these institutions is that they don't know farmer yield history, farm variability, or yield potential, because usually even farmers don't have this information, so working together we could get a fair and accurate loan (cash or inputs). Our solution is offered through an app, to gather GPS information and in 60 seconds we analyze satellite images, hyperlocalized weather data, georeferenced government information (rivers, water sources, landslide history, predial extension, and others) and through our statistical models we calculate yield history, yield potential, resource availability and disaster risk, so now small-scale farmers could have a historical footprint of their farms and as consequence reduce uncertainty and get more accurate and fair loans and finance services. Last year we reduce the interest rates from 100 farmers up to 40% and increase current farmers portfolio of 2 microfinance institutions in 30%, validating the market opportunity and technology robustness, getting in the right position to scale our services in Peru and Chile for this year.

Founder team has more than 10 years of experience working with smallholders farmers and technical farming extension programs, getting a deeper knowledge of the family farming ecosystem, and also have more than 13 years working in precision agriculture and technology transfer programs, having the secret sauce of track the problem from the roots in a lean and smart way. Other organizations rely on a guarantee-required model to offer financial services, unfortunately, less than 20% of smallholder farmers have the formal information to apply for land valuation. Also, other organizations use the crowdfunding model to get access to cash and offer lower interest rates for microlending services, although the risk remains high due to the uncertainty of available information. Finally, another approach in this problem is based on buyers money, giving loans to farmers securing next season production, but farmers cannot negotiate fair prices for their production.

Our technology roadmap follows this pattern:

2018.
AGROS Risk Tool Web APP launched: We create an engine to use georeferenced information (currently gathered by executives in financial institutions), historic satellite processes information (vegetation indexes, cloud correction, atmospheric correction), weather historic hiperlocated information and government predial information, apply our machine learning and extract insights to improve risk management activities.

2019 AGROS Advisor.
We have launched a mobile app where farmers could receive satellite images and weather analysis insights daily (weather alerts, vegetation index alerts) and they can take a picture to upload a question to our advisors in any time. Until now they manually label each image (pest, disease, general problem, root, plant. leaf, fruit, soil, irrigation, and others) and we connect them to the account of our advisors database (for now advisors who work for associations, NGO's and on-demand advisors hired), and then farmers received a recommendation.

2020. AGROS Advisor Smart Labeling.
We will add an image processing engine in the mobile app to make easier to give the right information to advisors, and reduce the gap (60% farmers in Peru never have received technical assistance or training).

2020.
Income forecasting Tool.
We have discovered that many farmers don't even know if they will have profits in each season, so we plan to include estimated crop price and develop accurate cost estimation model.

After one year working, we have enabled strong relationships with 3 main actors of the value chain:

- Farming Associations: In Latin America, the associative model is improving the traditional farming value chain, grouping smallholders farmers to get access to better prices for agricultural inputs and farming services, so we are working with 7 main associations related to banana, mango, rice and lemon crops, working with 878 smallholder farmers. We offer them technological services for free (satellite images, weather forecasting, communication tools for advisory services) and they register smallholder farmer information (name, id document, geo-position). We use this information to improve our database.

Microfinance Institutions: we are working with 3 microfinance institutions in Peru (they currently attend 5000 farmers in Peru), processing the information gathered in our machine learning engine to provide the farm foodprint, reducing uncertainty for both actors. They also, register the information they gather in field visits, keep feeding our database. After one year working they have increased by 15% the number of farmers attended.

Farmers now receive loans with up to 30% fewer interest rates and 94 farmers have received for the first time a formal loan with a financial institution.

Our success metrics are:

Land Monitored.
Farmers Registered.
Information Records provided by farmers.
API Queries & Consults by Financial Insitutions.

For the next year we will focus on these three main objectives:
- Integrate 3 new crops in our knowledge database (coffee, potatoes, and cocoa)
- Register 10 k farmers.
- Improve 3k financial operations risk management.

The internal risk we are facing is the technology adoption resistance of many farmers, and resistance to register information of their daily or season work.

The external risk we are dealing with is the climatic and resource availability (water and inputs). 

To combat the resistance of many farmers, we are working with farming associations, identifying farmer leaders to motivate them to use technology to secure their production, and changing traditional mental and predisposition to technology.

To protect resource availability (water and inputs), we are working alongside farming associations and microfinance institutions to develop an affordable smart agroinsurance. In this challenge, 1% of association incomes are used to have a save for climatic phenomena problems, using crop diversity inside associations to reduce vulnerability.

10

Our team has 3 founders, Robinson (CEO), Hugo (CMO) and Sindy (COO) and 4 employees (1 marketing specialist, 1 Data Scientist, 2 developers).

Hugo had been working in the agribusiness sector and agricultural extension government programs (Peru Sierra Exportadora), identifying problems in the current financial model, and technology accessibility, Robinson worked in precision agriculture research projects in academia, developing technology for smallholder farmers (cacao farming sector in Peru), and Sindy is a software engineer with experience in the financial sector. All three 6 years ago founded Sinergia (www.sinergiacti.com) a consultancy company focuses on technology transfer projects for the farming sector, but 1 year ago after an event for technology popularization in agriculture (www.viveagro.tech), they decided to develop a solution for the financial exclusion problem and that's how AGROS was born.

We started in Peru because 17% of the latin-america smallholder and family farmers are located there with 0.43 ha average land owned and just 12% of financial inclusion in the farming sector. Being in Peru give us a clear understanding about the family farming sector in Latin America and Caribbean region, and now starting understanding farming and financial sector in Chile (a more mature market) show us that this scenario is a problem on different levels in different countries, helping us to build a scalable solution. With this previous experience, we are focus to attend Brasil and Mexico in next years taking advantage of our founders' team an local/regional knowledge.

Our team was part of StartupChile Seed20 program, StartupPeru 6G program, UTEC Ventures 4G, Endeavor Scale Up 3G and NXTP Labs AgTech 2G program. Also in collaboration with the Ministry of Production (Peru) we developed a program to train farmers in the usage of new technologies and tools to improve inputs usage and management (www.viveagro.tech). We were working in the popularization of AgTech tools to smallholder farmers associations and government programs and that's how we know we are improving our press coverage.

We are working in association with precision agriculture technology manufacturers and microfinance institutions to offer financial tools to help farmers acquire technology.
Our technology partners are:
- Qampo (www.qampo.es)
- Felix Instruments (www.felixinstruments.com)
- Arable Devices (www.arable.com)
- Plantae (www.plantae.garden)
- Anaka Farming as a Service (www.anaka.io)

Our business model is focus on leveraging technology to farmers to gather information and improve our big data models and sell insights about sectors, crops, and farm digital footprint to financial institutions to complement their risk analysis. We are still validating pricing strategies with different stakeholders (microfinance institutions and input suppliers), but until now our fixed price is 1.75 USD per API Call or Query (1 query is based on a georeference gathered by mobile app, or through our web app) and each call give a report based on the last 3 years vegetation index behavior, satellite images (moisture maps, heat index maps, salinity maps, canopy maps, and others), historic weather conditions, regional pest and diseases, historic regional yields and our distributed precision agriculture sensor network. In the last three months, we got 3400 calls and we have registered more than 1K farmers.

If were selected to SOLVE, we will invest the 5k USD in hiring 1 agronomic engineer specialized in farming extension programs, to improve feedback collection about farmers usage of information and promotion activities to motivate more farmers to register in our solution and get final inclusion benefits. 8k USD we will invest in buying high-resolution satellite images package to include new crops like coffee that needs more resolution to get useful insights, attending one of the 4 major family farming crops in LatinAmerica. Finally, we will invest in marketing and popularization events, that we have successfully proved before (www.viveagro.tech).