Crop based farming – Cameroon

Geographical profile

Agrix Tech is a high-tech company from Cameroon. The organisation offers technology solutions for farmers to organise day-to-day management of farming activities. The best practices to be adopted based on different crops are promoted using Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. The smart app solution is designed to ease the process of identifying pest infestation that affects the crop quality and growth. Additionally, the application is also used to recommend methodologies and mitigation strategies to prevent the widespread growth of pests. The farmers can select the type of crop being cultivated, and then provide visual samples of the crop growth. The visual analytics algorithms deployed within

the cloud services process the information and offer meaningful insights to mitigate against pest infestation and offer recommendations on the day-to-day activities. Agrix Tech offers its to solution to more than 150 regional small-scale farmers within Cameroon, with a cumulative agriculture area of more than few hundred hectares.

Challenges

An overview of the Agrix Tech product offered to customers is presented in the Figure on the right. The mobile application current lacks integration with environmental data sources, such as soil measurements, humidity monitoring, weather services, forecast model of climate conditions and others. Additionally, the information aggregated and provided by the farmers are manually collected from the field which is a time-consuming activity. Currently, there is a lack of scalability for aggregating large- scale volume of content to be analysed and processed. There is also lack of edge technology integration within the platform. Finally, the mobile applications do not sufficiently integrate with the smart irrigation systems.

Expected benefits

Addressing these challenges, participation of Agrix Tech in NESTLER project will facilitate collaboration, knowledge exchange between the consortium partners and the researchers. The development of algorithms for ingesting and analysing heterogeneous data sources, will offer Agrix Tech an opportunity to scale-up the product launch across Cameroon and also cater to medium- to large-scale farmers from the region. The integration of smart irrigation solutions, will offer new market opportunities to be further explored witin and beyond the scope of NESTLER.

Pilots

The main objective is to evaluate the quality of crop-based agriculture using chicken droppings and cow dung fertilisers, IoT devices to analyse soil nutrients, smart agricultural irrigation and pest control measures. The experiments, P.CMR.1 and P.CMR.2, will be conducted in the two agro-ecological zones where tomato is widely grown, namely agro-ecological zone III (Foumbot) and agro-ecological zone V (Nkoemvone) to ensure full coverage of data collection and to see the impact of environmental conditions depending on the zone.

Setting up the nursery. A-Preparation of the nursery; B-Tomato plants in the nursery

Site preparation. A- Formation of boards and labeling; B- Technical team

Soil analysis and amendment. A- Soil analysis; B- Amendment with chicken droppings

Synelixis’ SynField weather station and soil parameter monitoring device installed on the plot