“There’s a huge need for this,” Thiam said, showcasing her work at an agri-tech conference in Dakar last month. “Today, between 25 and 50% of the cost of school meals goes to intermediaries, but schools have limited budgets. If you shorten the supply chain, canteens can bring down the cost of meals and offer the children more varied menus.” Her one-stop platform draws on a databank of crop production and schools to match potential demand with supply.
It group-purchases to lower the cost for schools and in a final flourish organises the transport of the goods, with operations monitored in real time. A project called Pix Fruit, meanwhile, aims to help farmers who have until now estimated their mango crop by counting the fruit on a bunch of trees and then extrapolating for the whole plantation.
This rough-and-ready method has considerable room for error. Emile Faye, a French researcher in digital agro-ecology who works for Pix Fruit, says the margin for mistakes could be as much as a factor of 10. A purchaser, for instance, could pay the price for two tonnes of mangos while taking delivery of 20 tonnes from the farmer, although errors may go either way.
Pix Fruit’s alternative uses advanced modelling software to produce a more precise count of the crop. Using a smartphone, the farmer takes photos of a selection of trees in his fields. Fruit-recognition technology then calculates the likely overall harvest, drawing on a databank compiled with the help of drones that also includes information on climate, soil and administrative constraints.
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