SM4RT TANI: Building The Next Gen Of AgriTech Farmers
Welcome back to an all new Head’s Up. This week we look into smart farming and how it stands to be the future of agriculture.
Founder of SM4RT TANI and Chief Executive Officer of Singularity Aero Tech (SAT), Hafeiz Hassan shares his thoughts with us on his efforts to elevate the industry to greater heights.
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Although Malaysia’s agriculture sector is developing rapidly, we still face an array of issues such as shrinking arable land, heavy use of fertilisers and pesticides that affects the ecological status and food security issues. The good news is that these issues can be combated with smart farming.
Smart farming is a management concept that uses technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, drones and artificial intelligence (AI) to manage farms. It optimiees the quantity and quality of products along with the human labour that is required.
At the 10th Summit of the D-8 Organisation for Economic Cooperation, then-Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin highlighted smart farming as the future of agriculture.
According to Business Wire, the AI market in the agriculture industry is forecasted to grow by $458.68 million during 2021 to 2025. With much economical profit to be made, it makes sense that Malaysia would jump on this bandwagon.
Founder of SM4RT TANI and Chief Executive Officer of Singularity Aero Tech (SAT), Hafeiz Hassan saw the opportunity in smart farming and founded SM4RT TANI, an end-to-end solution for precision farming, utilising Zero-G IoT network and Big Data analytics.
It offers services such as soil monitoring system, weather monitoring system, water monitoring system and Urus Tani, a Digital Farm Management System (DFMS)
Sowing and Reaping
SM4RT TANI has proven to be a success story from time to time again. Among their successes were their very first pilot project in Selangor on a pineapple plantation having installed soil and weather monitoring IoT sensors onto a 55 acre farm that managed to collect real-time data.
From these data, farmers managed interventions that prevented problems such as under-fertilised plots and diseases due to excessive water caused by heavy rain and flooding.
In fact, this saved them around RM10,000 per hectare just by purchasing a technology that cost them less than RM3,000 per season per hectare.
“To put this in a dollars and cents perspective, the system managed to reduce the rate of damaged produce due to diseases and malnourishment by half, from a typical 25% to 12%,” says Hafeiz.
SM4RT TANI has also managed to reduce labour cost by almost half by installing IoT sensors to test the water quality of a crayfish farm in Selangor.
Without having to rely on the workers to manually take the reading from each tank twice a day, the data is immediately recorded in the server. The owner can access the data and manage his farm remotely without relying on his workers so much.
Fortunately, SM4RT TANI will not stop there as they plan to create much more successes. They plan to expand further into other agricultural sectors such as livestock and dairy farms. They are currently working to introduce IoT with several Malaysian companies that run cattle farming as well as chicken broiler farms.
Moreover, there are plans to integrate SM4RT TANI with the supply chain management system along with a point-of-sale (POS) system. A POS system allows businesses to accept payments from customers and manages to keep track of the sales. This is to ensure farmers enjoy an end-to-end digital transformation of their businesses.
With the deployment of around 10,000 new devices, they are also targeting a total of 100 farms to be equipped with their products by the end of 2022.
SM4RT TANI is also looking to address the gap in the prerequisite to the full implementation of smart farming under the Industrial Revolution 4.0 framework. They aim to have the Malaysia agriculture industry on board with the concept and practice of Smart Farming otherwise known as Precision Farming where the operation is data-driven.
This can be done by acquiring a reliable and affordable data acquisition system to allow any subsequent modernisation in Agriculture to be driven by actual necessity. It also enables realisation through proper analysis of the cost-benefit and value proposition of the new technologies.
Recognising Barriers
By leveraging IoT technology, SM4RT TANI is able to help farmers collect data from the soil, water and air autonomously with minimal human intervention. Being made easy with Plug-and-Play IoT sensors, farmers are able to receive these data by simply installing sensors onto the farms.
Farmers do not need to worry about maintenance as SM4RT TANI technicians will be doing a periodic maintenance along with any troubleshooting throughout the period of their contract. In addition, the data is presented in a simple and user-centric intuitive dashboard called SATU Dashboard.
With the SATU Dashboard, farmers are able to look at the data for selected parameters. They are also able to receive alerts for any anomalies and are suggested corrected actions to address them.
On top of that, the data received allows preventive measures by anticipating problems and improves their efficiency by notifying them of problematic plots instead of having a blanket approach when addressing the issues.
However, helping out the farmers also comes with the challenge of convincing them to use SM4RT TANI solutions.
The cost of technology appears to be another concern of farmers. Since they have not budgeted and are not used to the cost, farmers are quite reluctant even with cost-effective packages.
Besides that, another barrier the team faces is in managing the farmer’s expectations. In comparison with a drone spraying pesticide which would excite people, IoT is not as exciting as it requires one to have the patience of seeing how the data gathered and analysed is able to improve the process of the next crop cycle. It is only then they are able to see the value in how there is an increase in yield, quality and savings.
The founder explains further by saying, “What most don’t realise is that IoT and DFMS bring substantially more value in the long run. Getting this across has been quite a challenge for us”.
Growing SM4RT TANI
For 2 years, SM4RT TANI have been engaging and discussing measures with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industries (MAFI) to get Malaysians to embrace Smart Farming. One of it is to introduce IoT and DFMS as a standard to farms to be subsidised by MAFI.
This will allow more farmers to adopt technology and give insights of the condition of the industry to MAFI to enable them to make data driven decisions and policies.
Education about the importance of adopting technology with the right understanding and realistic expectations should also be included in agriculture-related training conducted by MAFI and its agencies.
“Technology is not a magic pill that will solve all problems but rather a tool that will unlock further opportunities to improve efficiency, reduce waste and ultimately increase the income of farmers,” adds Hafeiz
Knowing it takes more than them to expand their services even further; SM4RT TANI has collaborated with Malaysian Pineapple Industrial Board (MPIB), Unit Agropreneur Muda (UAM), and Lembaga Pertubuhan Peladang (LPP) from MAFI in developing and deploying IoT sensors.
Moreover, they are also in business with Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) to champion digital transformation in agriculture, as well as Koperasi Permodalan Sahabat (KOSAHABAT) in bringing IoT and DFMS to co-ops in Malaysia.
To further develop sensor and communication technologies for IoT applications in agriculture, they are looking into collaboration with Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) on the R&D and education side.
Additionally, they have also partnered with several technology and subject matter partners such as Aeronerve, Pinewealth and Trestrade Global, as well as Al Rawda Ventures for their IoT technology deployment in Sarawak.
In addition, SM4RT TANI is able to grow further with potential investors investing into their infrastructure scale-up, installations of the IoT sensors and deployment of our DFMS solution by increasing their market share in Malaysia.
“In 2-3 years’ time, we plan for the integration of AI capabilities into our data analytics process, increase the use of automated processes and tools and integration of virtual marketplace for future buying,” says Hafeiz.
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