Foster Farms

State of the art:

Agriculture represents the biggest water user, with irrigation accounting for 70% of global water withdrawals. It is expected that, without improved efficiency, agricultural water
consumption increases by about 20% in few decades at global level.

With the water requirements in irrigation being large, there is a need for a smart irrigation system that can save about 80% of the water. This prototype aims at increase the productivity of crops by providing the optimum water to the crops.

We truly believe that in today’s hi-tech world Agro-industry should need to develop as other industries therefore, The idea is to develop an automatic irrigation system that estimate and measure diminution of existing plant moisture in order to operate an irrigation system, Restoring water as needed while minimizing excess water use and provides quantitative and qualitative crop.

Nowadays, the world is facing the major problem of water and food scarcity; still many regions are not getting proper food to eat with lack of crop yield due to improper amount of water. Irrigation is very important to agriculture to get high yield. With appropriate irrigation, the crops can be qualitative as well as quantitative and water can also be conserved.

Foster Farms is an adaptive plant and crops irrigation system. The purposes of our smart water irrigation system are to provide a water delivering schedule to the crops to ensure all the crops have enough water for their healthy growth, to reduce the amount of water wasted in irrigation and to reduce manual intervention.Our system takes in real time data of the water content of the plant as input argument (with moisture sensors)and compares with the threshold value of that crop, also checks the weather forecast and starts the water pump accordingly. These values are send to the cloud and an algorithm written for this purpose will decide the working(whether to turn the valves on or not). The customer can keep track on all these ongoing activities on the field through an application on his tablet. He can monitor the statistics regarding water flow, soil moisture & threshold values of crops, which valves are on/off, weather forecast, source of water.

Smart Irrigation brings wide benefits. Among them are the following:

1. Water Savings- The main goal of Precision Irrigation is to apply the precise amount of water according to the plant water needs. Being able to irrigate plants more selectively and precisely according to individual plants needs would save water. Studies have shown that it is possible to have significant water savings of 20 to 25%.

2. Economics- Water costs will continue to grow along with the decreasing availability of freshwater. Providing the plants with the right amount of water, money can be saved. Yield can also be increased, and with it, its business profit.

3. Crop quality- Providing the plants with the exact amount of water they need, would not only save water, but would also improve que crop quality. Ultimately the water savings would not bring big benefits if not combined with the improvement of the crop quality.

Business model:

Customer segment:

The pivotal change brings through this business by focusing on reducing the water consumption and measuring the diminution of existing plant moisture would target on Agro
industry, Private field owner & Government Organizations.

There is a pressing need and excellent commercial opportunity for such a system in agriculture, which is the largest industry in the world and (according to the WWF), wastes
60% of the 2,500 trillion litres of water it uses each year – which is 70% of the world’s accessible water – a huge threat to the environment. A major culprit is inefficient irrigation systems. Therefore, Initially we decide to focus on agricultural sector because obviously it is the biggest consumer of water all over the world.

For now, We are targeting the country India because there are very less efficient irrigation solutions exists currently in India and agriculture is the most important sector of indian
economy. It is reported that , only about 35% of agricultural land in India was reliably irrigated.

Our targeted customer segments are mainly farmers, with small and medium farm areas. The customer segment can be further quantified by targeting Farmers having lack of resources and who cultivates crops like sugarcane and rice as both crops are water-thirsty and requires constant monitoring. There exist some areas in india where there is no constant electricity supply. So could not target those geographical areas.

Other than that, for our B2B model we sell our products to interested third parties.

Through the partnership with government, we can promote our product and farmers can get rebates / subsidies to buy our product.

Value proposition:

Our system facilitates water and electricity economy and therefore saves costs and simultaneously conserves water. The system also promotes high crop yield for commercial
farming, due to the way the system detects over and under irrigation which can damage crops due to drought.

Moreover, this project make to focus irrigation automation with electronic sensors and its control with smartphones were aimed. In this context, temperature and soil humidity
measurements of the area irrigated were obtained by temperature and humidity sensors. The irrigation system could automatically be worked according to obtained measurement values. Thus, the irrigation system can be remotely controlled. Not only can we observe whether the irrigation system is working or not via developed special android application but also we can see temperature and humidity measurement values. Our product provides efficient irrigation to our customers and contributing to environmental sustainability.

Through our product, we promise our customers to deliver irrigation with less human intervention. Other than that, Watering the plant at exact time and at exact amount is our
main value proposition which leads farmer to do proper management of water resource. So through this value, Farmers can reduce the annual water consumption which not only
benefits to farmers but to world as well. Moreover, Keeping plant condition optimum results into healthier crops and can also increase crop yields by 20% to 40% , So that farmer can earn more. And the last but not least , Although our product is fully automated, but if farmer wants to control the irrigation kit, he can start/stop pump manually too. By this, we provide fully user controlled environment to our users.

Revenue stream:

FOSTER FARMS main revenue stream comes from acquisition and the installation of the irrigation kit and that we will provide after-sale to our customers as we propose a solution to install a network of sensors for our customers therefore sensors should need to be maintain.

The pricing is based on the length of the farms. More larger farms leads to install more sensors. basically we require approximately 20 sensors per acer. Since each sensor costs us 100 euros, our Estimated Cost of whole system including sensors, Irrigation Kit and Web/App platform is 3500 Euros/acre.

Foster farms have basically 2 types of policy to sell the product:

1. Pricing Policy:
It is basically a One shot policy, where a customer can buy our product once and can use it lifetime. We take 10% commission on total price of the product and as mentioned earlier, this cost will be vary from customer to customer (numbers of sensors installation).

2. Leasing Policy:
If our customer could not afford to buy our product at once, Foster farms also provides leasing policy for them. Customer can buy our product on some down payment and can pay monthly installment for the duration of one year. In leasing policy , Foster farms generates revenue by taking 6% interest.

Another revenue stream is created from After sales services and recurrent services, as our system consist of lot of IOT devices , that should be maintainable.

Team:

Joshi Harshil

Komalpreet Kaur

Kiranpreet Kaur

Shastri Pariti