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Smart farming: RI agritech offers smallholders a helping hand
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A farmer harvests his rice prematurely in response to flooding in Muhuran village, East Kalimantan, in this undated photo. (©Ricky Martin /Indonesa)
I
ndonesian tech firms are proposing new ways to make farming more efficient at a time when food security is causing headaches around the world, but the start-ups have some convincing to do to get farmers on board.
Beleaf Farms, an agriculture technology (agritech) start-up based in Bogor, West Java, says viewing farming as a service is key to optimizing processes with the fundamental idea of producing more with less.
“We can help farmers all across Indonesia to improve the quality and productivity of their crops and thus provide more food with the same amount of land to our population,” said Beleaf Farms CEO and founder Amrit Lakhiani.
Eighty million of the 120 million hectares of forests in Indonesia have been degraded, Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto stated recently, adding that if the country converted 16 million of that land into food production areas, it “could be the breadbasket of the world”.
“This existential threat and, let us say, ecological or environmental disaster, we can turn into an environmental opportunity and food opportunity for the world. […] Nature has given us this, let us say, comparative advantage,” Prabowo said at the Global Food Security Forum on Nov. 13.
Notwithstanding that potential, a projection by BPS and Euromonitor forecasts that Indonesia’s agriculture sector will achieve a mere 4 percent in compound annual growth until 2026, while farming costs are expected to rise because of an insufficient adoption of technology, a reduction in the farming workforce and logistical inefficiencies.
Read also: G20 agriculture ministers to improve global food security and nutrition
