Students’ innovation promises to make irrigation stress free

When Brian Bett and Taita Ngetich decided in 2011 to venture in agribusiness to supplement their pocket money little did they know they had steered into a path that would see them voted among the best innovators at last month’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

Their wireless sensor irrigation technology emerged the second best innovation and won them Sh1.5 million ($15,000). They are now focused on mass-producing their technology which has the potential of making irrigation stress free.

But the two did not set out to be innovators. On the contrary, after they exhausted all their pocket money within three months of reporting to school for their undergraduate studies they decided to engage something they were familiar with – farming.

“We were brought up in a farming background, so decided to plant tomatoes on a leased acre of land in Loitoktok,” said Mr Ngetich. “When we were just about to start harvesting, we received a call from the farm manager notifying us that we had lost all our crop to floods.”

They decided to focus on their education and Mr Bett dove full time into his economics degree while Mr Ngetich was busy with his mechanical engineering degree. However, this concentration lasted for two years when they decided to give farming a second try, this time choosing to do it closer home in Kericho.

The two had saved some money and, this time around, they got a boost from their parents. They were still farming tomatoes but decided to do it in greenhouses- a controlled environment that would save their crops from bad weather, pests and diseases.

On their second try the two budding farmers broke even with the first harvest of tomatoes they planted in the greenhouse measuring 12 by 30 metres in size.

“We decided to use wooden frames as opposed to metal ones since at Sh280,000 they were three times cheaper,” said Mr Ngetich.

“Our parents supplied us with timber, bringing down the cost by a further Sh80,000.”

The greenhouse and successful first harvest attracted interest from their neighbours and the two realised its potential as a business venture. Mr Bett marketed the greenhouses on social media platforms and other agriculture groups.

That was in June 2013 and, for the next six months, they landed several contracts to build the greenhouses for entrepreneurs from different parts of the country. A year later, they registered their agri-innovation company Synnefa Green Limited and branded their greenhouses as Illuminum Greenhouses.

“Some farmers told us that greenhouses are labour-intensive with one indicating that he lost over 10,000 litres of water after his farm attendant forgot to close the drip irrigation system,” said Mr Taita.

This prompted them to come up with a system that could make the greenhouses more user-friendly. They developed a concept for a wireless sensor that can measure the temperature, soil moisture and humidity of a greenhouse and transmit the same to the farmer via a text message.

The device sends two SMS alerts to a farmer, and automatically dials him if he does not respond to the undesirable conditions in the greenhouse. Thirty minutes after this prompt, the system automatically switches the drip irrigation system on or off, depending on the desired conditions.

“When we finished designing the application last February, we installed it in greenhouses where crops were taking three months to mature to see how well it performed. We worked with farmers in Kisumu, Nakuru and Eldoret to see if the system can work consistently in different geographical and climatic conditions.”

Finding the right technology was however not easy and they encountered a lot of system bugs. Settling on a programmer was therefore not easy.

When they did, the two did not have enough seed capital to mass- produce their equipment and they therefore decided to participate in innovative challenges. The two made it to the semi-finals of the US State Department’s of Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) competition.

They were selected from 792 applications sent in from 74 countries.

Their success gave them an opportunity to participate and make pitches during the Global Entrepreneurship Summit held last month and walked away with $15,000 (Sh1.5 million) in venture capital.

“The award was a nudge in the right direction; we shall endeavour to tackle food insecurity in the country and the region through technology,” said Mr Ngetich.

At the moment the smart mobile farmer is undergoing programming refinement in India. This second prototype will then undergo three months field-testing from October this year. The innovators plan to raise more funds through venture capitalists and a Kickstarter campaign to enable the system go into mass production in January next year.

The automated solar powered sensor will be retailing at Sh15,000 with farmers paying Sh2,300 for installation. “We are hoping to raise $50,000 from Village Capital and another $100,000 from Kickstarter to enable us go to China to mass-produce the equipment,” said Mr Ngetich.

“As much as we would want the technology made in Kenya, manufacturing costs are too high. We are a young business and for us to survive, we need to lower our operating costs.”

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