In 2015, Muslimin signed up with an application developed by Koltiva to trace the sales chain and crop quality and inform thousands of cocoa farmers about the global cocoa price in partnership with major businesses.

The system, he said, helped him sell the crops for a fair price and taught him a better replanting system that increased productivity.

“I can now harvest about 1.5 tons per hectare per year and sell it for around Rp 29,000 [US$2.20] per kilogram. That’s an increase from a less than 500 kg harvest sold for Rp 5,000 a kg,” he said.

Koltiva is a technology start-up jointly developed by business-oriented foundation Swisscontact, agro giant Cargill and food maker Mondelez International.

The application is the latest example of how tech start-ups have spread into the agriculture sector with the noble task of making the lives of farmers easier. Such applications help farmers sell their products at fair prices and cut out the role of middlemen, who often put farmers on the losing side of transactions.

With the application, Koltiva aims to register 150,000 cocoa farmers across the country by 2020, from 82,000 farmers today. Each farmer owns a farm with a maximum size of 2.5 hectares.

“Each farmer has an ID card with a barcode, through which buyer [Cargill] can track the sales and allow end processor [Mondelez, which buys cocoa from Cargill], to know where and how the raw materials are planted and sold,” Koltiva CEO Ainu Rofiq said recently.

The start-up will start marketing the system to oil palm and coffee industry players this year.

Early last year the government embarked on a program to encourage farmers, economic ministers and central bank officials to go digital to monitor commodity prices and prevent price speculation and hoarding by wholesale traders.

Labeled “synergized action for the people’s economy,” the project has relied heavily on digital solutions. The pilot project will be initiated in Brebes — a heavyweight producer of shallots, rice and mutton.

Aimed at cutting costs and distribution chains, the Communications and Information Ministry launched the LimaKilo and TaniHub mobile apps last year, which directly connect farmers with consumers or large buyers such as restaurants.

The Indonesian Start-ups Association (Atsindo) has noted that around 10 technology start-ups are tapping into the agriculture sector, but says that so far they have had a limited impact.

“They may have had a minimal impact due to limited synchronization with each other,” Atsindo agro-tech section head Sunil Tolani said.

Aside from Koltiva, LimaKilo and TaniHub, other start-ups vying to scale up include iGrow, which enables the public to invest in farmers’ crops; 8Villages, which provides price and farming information to farmers in areas without the internet; SapiBagus that connects cattle buyers and suppliers; and eFishery, an app for commercial aquaculture that can be used to create automatic fish feeding systems.

Sunil said the firms had a lot of room to grow, citing the example of iGrow. The application has registered 2,000 farmers to cultivate 1,197 hectares of unproductive land since 2014 by allowing the public to fund farmers to cultivate selected crops.

The application connects investors, farmers, landowners and crop buyers.

The agriculture application boom has come amid a decline in the welfare of farmers as indicated by the so-called farmers exchange value (NTP), a monthly indicator used by the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) to measure farmers’ purchasing power.

The NTP has been in steady decline since early 2015 despite the Rp 50 trillion (US$3.73 billion) of taxpayer money spent annually to revive the sector.

Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution even said the hefty spending on agriculture had evaporated without positive indicators suggesting a rise in productivity.

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