AgUnity

Project Name

AgUnity

Country

Australia

Project's Website
https://www.agunity.com
Overview

AgUnity empowers small farmers, improving trust and transparency through optimizing co-operatives operation and communication.AgUnity ensures market transparency across the agricultural value chain.

SDGs
SDG 10: Reducing Inequality
SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Category

Sustainable Agriculture and Farming

Targeted Impact

Farmers, Coorperatives

Stage

Pilot

Registered Entity

Yes

No

Impact Areas

The AgUnity platform addresses service delivery and management issues, introduces a new business model and ensures market transparency across the agricultural value chain. Quality optimization ensures a premium price is paid by higher-end niche market and yield as much as three-fold income at farmer’s level. Strengthening value chain affects employment up and down the stream. Men and women take up different roles in the AgUnity/TP cocoa model: women farmers look after the cocoa bud nursery and cocoa harvesting while the males and youths perform the heavy farm work, the fermenters, driers, co-operative, storage, dispatch. Impact to community’s skills, attitudes and knowledge will be significant as it seeks to optimize extension services and utilization of administration, training and resource center for both cocoa production and life skills diffusion.

Quantifiable Impact?

AgUnity primarily is dedicated to empowering small farmers, improving trust and transparency through optimizing co-operatives operation and communication. Through the application of Blockchain, smartphone and IOT technologies, our vision is to create social economy networks for rural societies; a framework to improve trust and increase the efficiency of co-operatives/farming communities around the world. Small holder farmers’ better level of accountability and equity will affect overall supply chain resilience of the respective commodity, and in turn significantly impact their livelihood. AgUnity mission is a vital mission for humanity, an opportunity to impact millions of people in a profound and positive way, on a scale which could be historically significant. The innovation applies for more than one level of supply chain: The AgUnity App is designed for both individual farmers and the cooperatives levels—addressing their concurrent challenges: replacing unreliable paper records with smartphones and using blockchain for ensuring all transactions are recorded in a way that is permanent and immutable. AgUnity approach is a combination of world class technology with on-the-ground expertise—its solution is designed by living and working for months right alongside farmers in remote communities, ascertaining full understanding of their challenges. Beyond farmer and co-operatives level, AgUnity v3 enables further level(s) of transaction to be streamlined in the system, enabling buyers/consumers’ traceability down to farmers’ level—which will in turn present greater opportunity for farmers to leverage their produces in the market. Successful pilot projects of AgUnity v2 in Kenya and Papua New Guinea with wheat and cacao farmers respectively, proved that the AgUnity solution can enable the farmers to generate a material increase in their incomes, in both cases by as much as 3x. The income is achieved because the solution gives competitive advantages to smallfarmers in the eyes of their buyers and internally enables the farmers to trust each other and cooperate better as a group rather than doing everything individually. Not less important than integration of supply chain links, once farmers develop habits of recording transactions through their smartphones, the platform also creates the opportunity for farmers and co-operative to leverage for other enabling factors critical to agriculture such as finance, insurance, logistics, trainings and e-commerce. On this innovation phase, AgUnity app V3 also involves integration of marketplace functions, whereas farmers can collectively access (purchase / rent / subscribe to) products and services pertinent to their agricultural practice and betterment of their livelihood quality. Down the line, the app is envisaged to be an open platform where public APIs allows third party collaborators to provide better experience and space for innovation (I.e. financiers, insurers, warehouses, logistic company, etc).

Problem - Gap

Over 500 million smallholder farmers earn their income from Agriculture, yet up to 50% of a farmer's crop value 'vanishes' between harvest and sale. Huge inefficiencies in planning, and a lack of access to proper farming resources results in poor harvests, spoilage of crops and poor prices at point of sale. Farming cooperatives are the most effective and equitable way to increase farmer's incomes by overcoming these inefficiencies, however poor record keeping and a lack of transparency often results in corruption and graft."

Use Case: Why use blockchain or other technologies?

"It’s true that we could have built a standard database for the documentation of farmer’s transactions with farming co-operatives / other third-party partners. However, the issue we’re tackling is around a lack of trust between a farmer and a co-op, so we would effectively be asking them to trust in the same system that typically leads to corruption and graft, except that they have to trust AgUnity who they know even less well that their existing partners. The use of a blockchain enables us to explain to farmers that once a transaction is agreed to by both parties, no one, not the farmer, not the co-op, not even AgUnity can ever change this record. It also provides an additional layer of security to ensure these transactions cannot be hacked by third-parties who may wish to transfer receipts from the farmers to themselves. So in short, no, we couldn’t do what we do without the use of a blockchain!"

Team Members

STEFAN BARRETT, Chief Technology Officer, Tokyo, JAP Stefan has spent 20 years in finance, working on trading applications for major banks. Currently based in Japan, he has a passion for technology and programming languages. Stefan has also spent the majority of his career working with and managing internationally dispersed teams of developers to deliver high-quality applications and programs for global banks. KEITH NIELSEN, Chief Product Owner, Singapore SIN 20+ years in mission-critical technology (mostly in Tier-1 Investment Banking IT infrastructure) with a more recent focus on startup-/scaleup companies to innovatively solve perennial problems and thereby disrupt the entire paradigm. Absolute “no-excuses” ownership of business-critical streams, including: market research, product R&D, legal, project delivery, and core account management. Most recent role as CPO for BetterTradeOff to deliver Financial Planning solution. AUNGUS KECK, COO Working with philanthropic agtech startup AgUnity, to provide a smartphone and blockchain solution to tackle issues of trust and inefficiency for the 1-billion-plus low-income smallholder farmers worldwide. PETRA SCHNEIDER, Program Director, Bali INDO Petra has 20+ years experience in sustainable development program leadership and producing high-impact behavioral change solutions including campaigns, education kits and training packages. Petra has successfully completed dozens of contracts conceptualizing, planning, developing and producing CIE for the UN, UNDP, USAID, GTZ, AUSAID, the Indonesian National Agency for Disaster Management and others.

Application
Applicant's Name

David Davies, Founding CEO

Protocol

Undecided

Open Source

Yes

No

Concept Definition

AgUnity solves the issue of trust (or lack thereof) between farmers & farming co-operatives in the developing world via a simple mobile app.

Support of B4H Goals

The AgUnity platform addresses service delivery and management issues, introduces a new business model and ensures market transparency across the agricultural value chain. Quality optimization ensures a premium price is paid by higher-end niche market and yield as much as three-fold income at farmer’s level. Strengthening value chain affects employment up and down the stream. Men and women take up different roles in the AgUnity/TP cocoa model: women farmers look after the cocoa bud nursery and cocoa harvesting while the males and youths perform the heavy farm work, the fermenters, driers, co-operative, storage, dispatch. Impact to community’s skills, attitudes and knowledge will be significant as it seeks to optimize extension services and utilization of administration, training and resource center for both cocoa production and life skills diffusion.

External Funding If Any

Agunity is currently opening a round of Equity Crowd Funding ( https://www.agunity.com/invest ) Till date we have raised about ~100k AUD. We are also the one of the recipients of the Dubai's 2020 Expo Live.

Development Stage and Next Steps

In the two completed pilot projects to date, wheat farmers in Nanyuki, Kenya, and cacao farmers in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, increased their incomes by an average of 3x, from one season to the next. This substantial rise in income is achieved simply by getting farmers to cooperate to share equipment, plan farming activities, and buy and sell together as part of a farming co-operative. The cooperation between farmers and farming co-operatives has only been possible with the assurance to farmers that, for any transactions occurring between them and the co-operative, there is an immutable record created that no one, not the farmer, the co- operative or AgUnity, can alter, and that everyone’s record is identical. Once farmers feel assured that they will not be cheated, they begin to trust each other enough to work together, and impressive results follow shortly thereafter."

Join us

Thank you!

Your submission has been received. We will contact you shortly.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
design by Click.Blue