Are smart farms the future of agriculture
[Music]
rewind a few years
and never in a million years would you
have found me
showing up to an event in a city at a
bar
or a restaurant with a whole bunch of
people i had never met in my life
and honestly even if i did
i don’t think i’d have gone
i was the epitome of a shy kid growing
up
i was either shy didn’t talk to anyone
or i sought attention by being the class
clown
and for some reason not raising my hand
and shouting obscene answers
seemed like a logical way to go about
making friends
and every time i crash walked by
my head became irreversibly good to the
floor
throughout my life shyness has affected
almost everything i have done
and so i understand the impact it can
have
from keeping you away from opportunities
for growth
to turning you away from nearly all
valuable chances
of developing a human connection
as a child i played
a lot i had so much fun
i learned skills and develop
self-confidence by spending time
in the garden tending to plants
and growing my own food
my grandfather was a farmer
he would grow maize and groundnuts and
sell to neighboring villages
in a small town monze
just in southern zambia
life in the village can be industrious
we never had to buy machinery because we
made our own
and in an attempt to make farming
efficient
i learned how to make holes from iron
and wood
while this only solved half of our
problems
we had a challenge water management
to my grandfather every drop counted
and we were counting every one of them
farm life in rural zambia is exciting
but there are times it gets challenging
as well
climate challenges poor infrastructure
poor resource management undermined
productivity
profitability and sustainability
there’s a need for a system that makes
this process easier
for farmers in our country
an article that was published by
fao on the future of food and farm
on the future of food and agriculture
predicts that the world we need to
produce 50 percent more food
feed and biofuel in 2050
than it did in 2012 and
in zambia there are about 600 000
small-scale farmers of which a small
fraction
are emerging farmers
problems arise during farming and the
natural watering well of our crops
gets disturbed we all know that
this industry uses a lot of water
and maybe just maybe in the near future
these wastes will represent a lot of
money
enough to pay the debt our country has
small-scale farmers like my grandfather
cannot afford irrigation computers
because they’re expensive and so i
thought to myself
what if i could design something cheaper
something better one that understands
the needs of the farmer
and the plants remember growing up as a
kid and wanting to play around
when no one taught me how to use my
imagination
i asked questions the wise i’ve always
asked
gave me the drive to turn a passion
turn a hobby into a passion a passion
that would change the industry in my
country
i was never born an exceptional student
but it did not stop me from finding
solution
to my grandfather’s problems
by the way i’m a forester an agronomist
a software developer i design
a smart chip system to minimize
input water input and human intervention
i call it netergrow
powered by powered by an arduino
a simple microcontroller that enabled me
to create
this innovation
and you may ask yourself how does this
work
it has sensors such as temperature
humidity soil moisture
the information gathered is sent to the
heart of the system
and the decisions taken by the system
depend on the sensor’s response
what makes this innovation better is
that
it is targeting over 10 million
users in zambia
because it uses sms music notification
to control and automate the farm
now you may ask yourself what does the
future hold for this innovation
is the grass greener
this innovation will be used in farming
sports
such as climate management farm animal
management
and fireplace detection at the same time
it will be used in conjunction
with the mobile solar plant designed to
track the sun
for effective energy harvesting
they say inventions become perfect by
slow improvement
and each tape is an invention
i was never free from challenges i had
no idea how to
put this idea together and i turned to
my friends
my colleagues who suggested ways to make
this idea better
i now believe that life is easier
when you share the idea it even gets
better when you expand the circle
because anything is possible when people
support you just as my parents taught me
morals etiquette discipline safety
what if we could teach children the
lifelong ability
to innovate can children learn
systematic creativity
at such an early age
absolutely the role of young people
in shaping the world’s economy is clear
we are the largest generation of youth
in history
and given this young labor force there’s
a need to explore other ways for job
creation
this technology is important now than
before
because it is encouraging and inspiring
people
to shift from passive consumers
to active creators while at the same
time
prompting people to spend their money on
handmade
locally crafted items that are perceived
as being of higher quality
this also redefines employees as
creators
and therefore innovators and i believe
to make african creators
we need to give them platforms to create
such innovations
neta grow is changing the perception of
africans from billion users to billion
creators
in agriculture thank you
[Music]
you