From IoT-based solutions to online organic grocery stores, these agritech startups support the country’s effort to increase high-tech farming production value

In a February 2018’s article released by Vietnam Investment Review, the country’s agricultural sector’s GDP contributions were reported to be in a modest state judging from the numbers.

It says that agriculture only accounts for 16 per cent of GDP, while labourers in the sector account for 42 per cent of the total workforce and up to 70 per cent of the population in rural areas.

There is quite a gap in the numbers shown, which often causes the harvest oversupplies with bumper crops that decrease price. This is something that the government has paid attention to, labelling it as “chronic disease of the domestic agricultural sector”.

In response to this situation, Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development reportedly has planned for 500 hi-tech agricultural cooperatives and to increase the high-tech farming production value by five times by 2020. The ministry planned that each province and city would have at least three hi-tech agricultural cooperatives.

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According to another report in January 2018 by Vietnam Investment Review, the ministry said it was important to develop a production value chain of high-added value farming products and to promote the linkage of cooperatives with enterprises, as well as to encourage technology transfer and provide preferential loans to agricultural cooperatives.

With Vietnam’s startup scene burgeoning, it made perfect sense for the country to turn into technology for solutions. In fact, there are five detectable agritech startups that have been making waves with their solutions to the number one problem the country’s facing in agriculture: fragmentation in household farming.

The five startups are:

Demeter

Pham Ngoc Anh Tung founded Demeter in 2017 after deploying a US$4.4 million Cau Dat farming project in Ho Chi Minh City. Tung did it while partnering with Intel Corporation to continue the expansion of their customer network.

At first, Demeter launched an Internet of Things (IoT)-based system at Cau Dat Farm, inspired by international farms overseas. The IoT system allows for automation that replace human involvement and was proven to be beneficial to farmers, helping farmers doing management work, maintaining productivity, and product quality.

The IoT system Demeter introduced at Cau Dat Farm consists of three main parts. The first one is Connected Edge, hardware that controls tasks such as pumps, irrigation systems, micro-climate control systems, drones, weather stations, camera systems, and sensor systems. It connects and pre-handle data through gateways before moving to the cloud.

The second part is storage, equipped with the processing and data analysis, turning data into insight on the cloud.

The third part is the identification of all agriculture tasks based on analysed information and data.

The system all depends on the equipment, providing actionable information that’ll help users understand what their production status is.

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Nine months after introducing the IoT system, it was reported that the farm started to see positive signs, with flowers, green tea, fruit and vegetables reaching productivity targets without compromising quality.

The focus of this startup is now to do expansion to countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

MimosaTEK

MimosaTEK was established in October 2014 by Nguyen Khac Minh Tri after he resigned from his position as the CEO of the Saigon Institute for Techniques and Technology.

In e27’s coverage, MimosaTEK is described as a cloud-based system that lets farmers control and manage farms with the use of sensors that communicates through radiofrequency waves to monitor the environment, alerts on unfavourable environmental factors, crop progress monitoring, crop database, and remote irrigation execution through mobile phones. With such implementation, the system allows farmers to manage crops and farm plan based on collected data on daily environment and historical crop database.

The company offers two key parts of its large farms’ management solutions: the sensor equipment to measure parameters and a smartphone app that helps to show water levels and providing advice to farmers on planting.

MimosaTEK was the winner of Vietnamese round of the Seedstar World Competition and has competed at the Seedstars Summit in Switzerland back in March 2017.

One of MimosaTEK’s users for more than a year, Nong Phat High-Tech Agriculture JSC, said that it managed to save 10-15 per cent in total water and fertiliser used for eight hybrid muskmelon hybrid greenhouses. MimosaTEK’s application also allows just one worker to cover all the 2,100sqm greenhouses, instead of eight workers.

With up to 70 per cent of the population in Vietnam lives in rural areas doing largely manual and experience-based farming practices, MimosaTEK said it seeks to have one or two per cent of the proportion use their service.

Sero.ai

Sero.ai is the AI-based startup that seeks to overcome erratic crop production problem by connecting farmers and agriculture experts through mobile internet. It works by tracking the plant’s health and detects pest diseases using pictures.

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Described itself as a crop intelligence company, the company that was founded in 2016 collects in-field data throughout the entire growth stage with images and sensors to provide preventive recommendations via computer vision technology, and production insights via partnerships with farmers and exporters.

There are not many activities around the AI-based startup thus far, but it did mention the latest investment deal it received, which was worth US$20,000.

Naturally Vietnam

Based in Hanoi, Naturally Vietnam was co-founded by husband and wife Mai and Patrice Gautier. Mai grew up in Hanoi and quickly realised that there was no transparency in where food comes from and how certifications were mostly suspicious.

So Mai and her husband created Naturally Vietnam, a platform that provides traceable food products, sourced from six farms in the city’s Soc Son district. To make it happen, the startup even helped build the farms up from scratch by offering startup loans of over US$2,000.

In an article by Forbes, Naturally Vietnam claims that the livestock farms are veterinarian-supervised, use chemical-free processes and are easily traceable in terms of food origins and processes.

Naturally Vietnam provides an online grocery shop and within-24 hours delivery allowing customers to shop from a total of over 300 products of fresh fruit, meat, and poultry paid with direct bank transfer or cash-on-delivery.

It puts the name of the farm they sourced from on the packaging and equips their staff with products knowledge to assist customers. The farms are also open for visiting.

Hachi

Hachi helps vegetables planting via smartphone using an IoT system. The crop app was founded by CEO Dang Xuan Truong, claimed to be suitable for customers living in the city.

The IoT-based application helps reduce risks in the planting process, such as drought and a lack of soil nutrition. “By controlling these aspects, productivity increases from 30 to 50 per cent compared to traditional planting methods,” said Truong.

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Hachi works by allowing Farmers entering data about the status of their rice through a smartphone app. The data is sent to the processing unit that will cultivate information about soil, climate, and plant growth into a quick summary with advice.

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Image Credit: Abbas Jamie on Unsplash

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