In addition to its enormous and fertile landmass, the majority of its seas, and favorable climate, Indonesia has been bestowed with a variety of natural resources for agriculture, breeding, and fishery. Despite Indonesia's claims to be an agricultural and maritime country, the long-standing issues in those three sectors have led Indonesia to a critical challenge in achieving food security and sovereignty.
Let's take a look at an agricultural industry example. In a report from the Indonesia’s Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS), while Indonesia's agricultural land area increased, the harvested area declined to 10,66 million hectares out of 25,1 million hectares of productive land area. Not to mention the fact that the majority of Indonesian farmers are small-scale, renting less than 0.5 hectares of land, according to Rusli Abdullah, an INDEF Food Observer, cited from Kompas (2021). Complex complications have arisen as a consequence of these land concerns, notably land ownership issues.
High production costs, capital access difficulties, raw material quality uncertainty, low penetration of technology, gap knowledge, lack of managerial skill and data recording, limited access to markets and long distribution chains are some of the problems that frequently drive farmers into losses. These variables also contribute to a decrease in the harvested area to productive land area ratio.
Agree is the Ultimate Solution for Agriculture's Growth
Since 2019, Telkom Indonesia has made innovations in the agricultural industry. We have talked to a lot of people in this sector, from farmers, breeders, agribusiness companies, fishery companies, agritech, agroinput, investors, and universities to the government. They are actually well-intentioned to strengthen Indonesia's agriculture sector. Unfortunately, they have not yet convened to collaborate. So, Agree is here as an integrated digital ecosystem that connects them in order to meet all stakeholders’ expectations in order and make a larger contribution to the nation.
Agree brings a mission to rapidly grow the agricultural stakeholders to produce excellent commodity goods with high economic values that would hopefully bring prosperity to farmers, fish breeders, and fishermen. To accomplish this, Agree has two goals: to provide a Smart Ecosystem for farming and fisheries through a digital and inclusive closed-loop system, and to provide Smart Technology, which is the application of digital technology, such as IoT, Smart Feeder, AI, Microbubble System, etc., to improve the quality and quantity of harvested farming and fishing.
Agree Features
Inclusion in a closed-loop system allows farmers and breeders to easily connect with agribusinesses and other stakeholders. The Agree Smart Ecosystem is built by providing three services: Agree Partner, Agree Modal, and Agree Market. Each service can be easily integrated with one another through an API and an SDK.
Agree Partner is working in the agricultural and fisheries upstream ecosystem, which has been providing commodity sourcing services from farmers and breeders to agribusinesses through partnerships. As of this writing, more than 36,000 farmers have signed up as Agree Partners and benefited from its features, such as fertilizer and animal feed calculators and price information. The monitoring and SOP systems also allow them to update the progress and cultivation data, which is directly linked to the companies who are partnering with them via a real-time dashboard.
Agree Modal is a platform that connects agribusinesses, off takers, farmers, and breeders with financial institutions for investment purposes. It is also possible to monitor the investment process as well as track how the money is spent.
Agree Market acts as part of the downstream ecosystem and offers two distinct services. Agree Market connects agribusinesses with their wholesale buyers, which include SMEs, hotels, restaurants, cafes, traditional and modern markets, and manufacturing companies. Agree Mart, on the other hand, is a B2C marketplace that links sellers with individual end-customers. All payments in both marketplaces are processed using a quick and secure payment gateway.
The deployment of Smart Technology in Agree is accomplished by the provision of Encomotion, an IoT Smart Farming solution. In the midst of this unpredictable weather, farmers can use Encomotion to improve their productivity by 40% and reduce their operational costs by 40%. Encomotion Controlling technology enables farmers to water their crops automatically and precisely, and it enables them to save 40% of water and nutrition. Encomotion Monitoring, on the other hand, assists farmers in detecting environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, light intensity, rainfall, and wind speed and direction.
To broaden its ecosystem's reach, Agree also has two featured programs: Agree Hero and Agree Assistant. Agree Hero is an Agree’s representative that reaches out to farmers and businesses who have not yet experienced the benefits of Agree. As an Agree Hero, they will spread the word about Agree products and benefits to farmers, give companies and off-takers access to Agree, and provide digital literacy to the community on how to use the Agree platform.
Last but not least, Agree Assistant is there to assist companies and off-takers implement Agree in their ecosystem, such as by verifying partner candidates' profiles and partnering with Agree Hero in providing digital literacy about Agree apps to the community.
With the widespread use of digital technology and the strength of mutual cooperation, we believe that food independence is feasible and that Indonesia may become an important supplier of world food commodities. So let's be part of Indonesia's massive agricultural transformation! Sign up at agriculture.id right now, or contact us at Facebook agree.telkomid, Instagram agreeculture.id, Twitter agreeculture_id, Linked in Agree, or YouTube Agree Update.
