SAN RAFAEL, Bulacan-–The 2018 Innovation Olympics of East-West Seed Inc. has produced some technologies suitable for vegetable farmers.
Three entries made it to the Innovation Olympics that was concluded Friday at the Catalina Hall of the 8 Waves Resorts in this town.
East-West Seed Innovation Olympics is a competition challenging the next generation of agriculture, business and technology leaders to develop innovative solutions to real-life challenges of small-holder vegetable farmers.
Team Agriviz from the Asian Institute of Management bested two other student groups, Team Pocket Farm and Team i-Agri Ventures that are both from University of the Philippines Los Banos, and won the championship in the Innovation Olympic 2018 and brought home a PHP250,000 cash prize.
Team Agriviz is composed of Aiah Sarmiento, Gorby Dimalanta, Aaron David, and mentored by East-West Seed’s Downstream Marketing manager Dexter Difuntorum.
The team came up with an e-magsasaka (electronic farmers) platform that envisions to convert farmers into agri-preneurs, in the hope of addressing two of their major problems: lack of direct access and lack of market information between buyers and growers.
Through this method, it is expected to minimize the involvement of middlemen in the vegetable trading and help increase the farmers’ revenue by at least 20 percent.
The e-magsasaka would have a database that would help buyers find the farmers that could provide the products that they need. At the same time, the farmers could also use the database to find the market to sell their produce.
Team Pocket Farm thought of using the cellphone as a tool to help the farmers in determining the moisture level of their farmlands and prompt them through text messages on when to water their vegetables and how much water their plants need.
Team i- Agri Ventures, on the other hand, came up with a solar-powered multi-crop dryer that could significantly cut post-harvest loss and create new markets for vegetable farmers.
The first Innovation Olympics was launched last year as part of East-West Seed’s 35th anniversary.
“One of the major pillars of East-West Seed is learning and innovation. And so far, we have trained and enabled close to 50,000 smallholder farmers on proper vegetable farming techniques,” Henk Hermans, East-West Seed Philippines general manager, said. (Manny Balbin/PNA)
