THREE innovative ideas emerged as the big winners in East-West Seed (EWS) Innovation Olympics. Dubbed as the “hackathon” of agriculture, the EWS Innovation Olympics is a competition that challenges the next generation of leaders to develop new technologies to increase productivity of vegetable farmers.
The Olympics held its awarding ceremonies on September 29 at the University of the Philippines (UP) Los Baños. Eight teams went through a rigorous process of pitching and refining and repitching their ideas with the help of mentors and guides from EWS. After the training, mentorship and final pitching, three innovator teams emerged as the best.
Team Agriviz of the the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) wants to create an agricultural e-commerce platform that aims to incorporate data analytics and disseminate information to improve the productivity and profitability of Filipino vegetable farmers. Their e-magsasaka business model converts farmers’ mind-set to being market-driven rather than production-driven.
Team i-Agri Ventures of UP Los Baños effectively defended their innovative idea of a “multicrop dryer” that hopes to significantly increase farmers’ revenue by increasing the market value of the crop and reducing postharvest losses.
Team Oppa, also of UP Los Baños, came out with a technology that could increase the yield of farmers by as high as 87.5 percent, using the very popular text messaging. Their contraption makes use of the weather, predicting rain pattern and effectively informs the farmers information in 30 seconds, which normally takes two to three hours.
Teams Agriviz, i-Agri Ventures and Oppa bested five other student groups who vied for the top 3 positions and the honor of implementing their innovative ideas with an initial seed money of P150,000. For 120 days, they will implement their project in their selected farming community.
In January 2018 the team with the project that exemplified entrepreneurial innovation and made the most significant impact in their adopted farming community will be declared as the EWS Innovation Olympics Grand Champion and receive P250,000 cash prize.
EWS established in 1982 as the first integrated vegetable company here in the Philippines, celebrates its anniversary this year with the theme “Growing Opportunities”.
“When my father, Dutch seedsman Simon Groot put up East-West Seed with Filipino seed trader Benito Domingo in 1982 in a humble 5-hectare lot in Lipa City, they had a common vision—to help smallholder farmers increase their income by providing high-quality seeds and training them on more productive and sustainable vegetable farming techniques,” said Maaike Groot, public affairs manager of EWS.
To date, EWS has trained and enabled 46,782 smallholder farmers on proper vegetable-farming techniques.
“Farmers represent the second-poorest sector in our country and it is so sad that, because of this, our young people shy away from pursuing a career in agriculture. What people do not know is that vegetable farming is a lucrative profession and could be a key for our people to get out of poverty. But we need to address several challenges which we, at East-West Seed, continue to help,” added Dr. Mary Ann Sayoc, public affairs lead of EWS.
The major challenge, Sayoc added, is farming practices in the country are outdated and the majority of the farmers are yet to adopt modern techniques that makes farming labor intensive and unsustainable.
To help in addressing this, EWS launched the Innovation Olympics this 2017 as part of their 35th anniversary celebration.
“Through the Innovation Olympics, we harness the minds of the youth to come up with their own innovative technological intervention. Students from different multiple backgrounds come up with sustainable solutions to improve productivity in vegetable farming, effectively addressing two major farming concerns: integration of technological innovations to improve vegetable production and to inspire the youth to consider farming as a professional goal and be ambassadors of modern-day agriculture,” said Martin Hinlo, project lead of Innovation Olympics.
Hinlo said Innovation Olympics started out as an idea to create a project founded on “learning and innovation,” one of the core values of EWS.
That “idea” blossomed into a four-day Innovation Week for the young innovators to perfect their technological ideas under the mentorship of experts and the eventual implementation of these bright ideas in select farming communities.
“At the end of the day, this all goes back to how East-West Seed as a company aim and work for the continuous development of vegetable farming in the Philippines, one seed, one farmer at a time,” Hinlo said.