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Placa

Making smart farming accessible to developing economies

About Placa

All around the world cattle farmers engage in a form of agriculture called Extensive Farming, a method that uses almost no fences and is characterized by great freedom of movement for animals on large areas of land, generally resulting in a high level of animal wellbeing. For farmers however, this means long searches for cattle, not knowing when calves are born and vulnerability to theft. The yields of extensive farming are surprisingly high per unit of labour, but fluctuate because of these significant inefficiencies.

Developed economies are investing heavily in smart farming solutions, such as IoT, to improve their farms’ productivity and effectivity. Developing economies, however, stay behind due to lacking technical expertise and capital to invest. According to the World Economic Forum this results in a risk of growing inequality between farmers in developed and developing economies.

TES was approached by the owner of Samudra Farm in Bolivia, where she experiences this problem firsthand. Solutions for cattle localisation and identification do exist but are technically unsuited for the Bolivian landscape and too expensive for smallholder farmers.

We soon fell in love with this challenge and saw the amazing opportunity to enable smallholder farmers in developing economies around the world to compete with global markets through affordable smart farming.

The start of a venture

Together with the Samudra farm, we formulated a project to explore if we could develop a solution using frugal innovation strategies. Frugal innovation focusses on redesigning sophisticated products and services, reducing their complexity and costs to create business models accessible to developing economies.

Placa now is a newly founded venture with a 5-person team run by TES and the owner of the Samudra Farm. The TES team consists of an Entrepreneur in Residence who is fully dedicated to implementing the innovation strategy, Hack The Planet with deep experience in developing economies, and knowledge institutions as experts on farming and frugal innovation. Together we are now developing MVP, business model and the venture Placa.

Next steps

Central to frugal innovation strategies is developing the solution in tandem with local communities, thus enabling a solution tailored to the specific local social and farming context.

The MVP and business model will be validated in a pilot project on multiple Bolivian farms in 2019, with the help of an acquired subsidy from the Dutch Good Growth Fund. During the pilot project, TES and Placa will work closely with local communities to develop a final product that meets these needs.

Together with Placa, TES will work towards a validated product, business solution and venture that are ready for seed investment and commercialisation.

  • About

    • Domain: Base of the pyramid
    • Collaboration: TES.begin
    • Period: Sept 2018 - now
  • Methods and tools

    • Internet of Things
    • Business Model Innovation
    • Coalition Building
    • Lean Startup
    • Strategy Direction
  • Involved network

    • Joep Serrarens Joep Serrarens

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