Enabling Precision Agriculture with IoT
Liquid Intelligent Technologies Kenya partnered with Twiga Foods to increase agricultural productivity through precision farming, enabled by Kenya’s rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT) network.
Background:
Twiga Foods is a technology enabled business to business food distribution platform that builds fair and reliable markets for agricultural producers, food manufacturers and retailers based on transparency and efficiency. It sources from more than 17,000 producers and delivers 3 times a week on average to over 8,000 retailers. Twiga’s digital platform and logistics network links retailers with farmers and food manufacturers, presenting a convenient and reliable alternative to the current inefficient and expensive farm/factory-to-market processes.
To drive its mission, Twiga has set out to develop technology-driven commercial solutions and is looking to cooperate with existing industry players to solve the challenge of food security in Africa.
Challenges:
Twiga foods was looking to deploy a smart agriculture solution in one of their farms as a pilot, which could be replicated across their many farms in the country. Twiga’s Takuwa farm, which was chosen, had been experiencing restricted growth due to insufficient water. The farm was also struggling with proper soil and fertilization management owing to lack of precise soil moisture, weather and water quality data.
Solutions:
Liquid Intelligent Technologies installed a comprehensive IoT system in Takuwa Farm that helped the 30 acre farm transform to an intelligent farm. The system takes advantage of Liquid Intelligent Technologies’s extensive low-power wide area IoT network using 0G Sigfox technology covering 85% of the population in Kenya at lower costs than other technologies. With a comprehensive weather station, soil moisture and temperature probes, borehole water meters, and sensors for measuring irrigation water acidity and salinity, the farm managers were able to move away from manual readings and historic analysis to automatic and real-time/predictive analysis.
Results:
Twiga Foods is keen on leveraging technology to create reliable markets for agricultural producers and retailers. With Liquid Intelligent Technologies as a partner, Twiga’s Takuwa farm is increasing farm production due to more precise application of inputs and faster reaction time to local weather and soil conditions. In addition, by applying inputs based on data received on hyper-local weather and soil and water content, Takuwa can also save on costs related to irrigation water / pumping, fertilizer and pesticides.
Similar deployments of this IoT technology has resulted in farms seeing up to 30% savings on irrigation water, which translated to direct electricity cost savings, and up to 25% increases in crop yields. Man hours have also been reduced by 50%.
Customer Testimonial:
“Liquid Intelligent Technologies has helped us increase business efficiency through its digital solutions. By using smart devices, we have automated multiple processes across the farm’s production cycle and had positive results. We are proud to have partnered with Liquid Intelligent Technologies to deploy IoT solutions to aid in food security for our country”.
Liquid Intelligent Technologies’s Position:
We understand that agriculture is instrumental to African economies and society and we know that technology is key to driving agricultural productivity. We are committed to working with a number of leading agriculture science and agriculture input companies to apply precision agriculture solutions and support their work with farmers across the country. With this, we aim to support Kenya’s Big 4 agenda that seeks to enhance large scale production, drive smallholder productivity and reduce the cost of food across the country.
