🌏 The Biodiversity Accelerator+ 2022 Cohort Company: SmartAgro Sustainable Innovations Co.
Restoring farm profit and soil health through a full-suite regenerative agriculture product and service solution
TL;DR - SmartAgro provides a full-suite solution for farmers and development agencies in South East Asia to increase profits, enhance the resilience of agricultural soils, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Their offerings include cropping system design, technical agronomic assistance, diverse crop and cover crop seed supply, bio-inputs like biofertilizers, and machinery for regenerative agriculture. What’s more - they’re piloting a Payment for Ecosystem Services scheme in a coalition that includes CIRAD. See their full range of products here!
Like many farmers across the world, farmers across South East Asia - many of whom are Smallholders - have adopted many of the practices advocated during the Green Revolution. That means things like highly intensive monocropping techniques, heavy use of synthetic chemical additives, like pesticides and fertilisers, and mechanised tillage.
Unfortunately, these approaches have come at a longer-term cost, as farmers become trapped in a vicious cycle of dependence on agri-inputs. The benefits they yield are usually temporary, depleting the natural resilience of soils and necessitating more and more agri-inputs to maintain even the original baseline. Soils leach nutrients and are eroded more easily, become water clogged, release greenhouse gases into the air, and become filled with weeds and pests that develop more and more resistance to synthetic chemicals. Profits from higher yields are quickly spent on astronomical production costs and risks.
One of many landscapes in Cambodia experience intense soil erosion, with both extreme social and ecological consequences.
Landscapes regenerated by Smartagro through the adoption of no-till practices.
Many are looking to regenerative or conservation agriculture as the solution to industrial agriculture. Regenerative agriculture (also one of Silverstrand Capital’s core theses) focuses on the rehabilitation and preservation of soil health through techniques such as no-till farming and cover cropping, where soil is not disturbed by machinery, and where the seeds of the main crop are sown directly into the mulch and residues of cover crops that protect the soil from erosion. Soil fertility, water retention capacity of the soil (which prevents excessive runoff and erosion) and biodiversity are all improved through such practices.
However, the transition requires both a large shift in how farmers think about agriculture and their practices, as well as many physical pieces to be pulled together to create whole systems change at scale.
While regenerative practices are not new (often rooted in indigenous knowledge dating back thousands of years), many of the inputs and instruments to aid in the transition have not been readily available for smallholder farmers, creating a bottleneck for a more sustainable agricultural system.
🌱 A one-stop shop for designing and implementing regenerative agroecosystems in South East Asia
Enter SmartAgro. Based primarily in Cambodia (but servicing other markets in the region as well), SmartAgro couples the know-how with the supplies of products and services in order to enable the widescale transition to regenerative practices, serving both large farms, as well as aggregated smallholders who are supported by donors. They provide everything from:
👉🏼 Regenerative farm designing services,
👉🏼 Technical agronomic assistance to farmers for implementation,
👉🏼 Diverse crop and cover crop seeds
👉🏼 Organic inputs such as biofertilizers and biopesticides, and
👉🏼 Specialized machinery.
Arachis repens as a cover crop on the inter-row of a pepper plantation, part of SmartAgro’s intervention to regenerate soil fertility and life.
They even go a step further and reward farmers with their Payment System for Ecosystem Services (PES) based on blockchain technology, remote-sensing monitoring and verification of measured ecosystem health gains. This system is currently in its pilot stage, and is being rolled out with a consortium of partners including CIRAD.
Early adopters of their no-till, cover cropping and minimum input approach have already seen benefits, with up to 2.61x profit increases over 5 years for crops like cassava.
SmartAgro is filling a critical gap in the market for South East Asia, and have already worked on 6,000 hectares managed by early adopters of their products, involving 2,000 farmer households - no easy feat, given the challenging context in which they are working.
Want to learn more? Check out the SmartAgro website, Facebook, and Twitter for more updates!