Israeli Agricultural-Tech Start-Up Are €100,000 Winners Of The Better Cotton Initiative Global Sustainable Farming Challenge
Image Courtesy of Agritask
The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative are delighted to announce that Agritask Ltd., an Israel-based agricultural-tech start-up, has won the Better Cotton Innovation Challenge.
CropIn Technology Solutions, an India-based agricultural-tech company, was awarded with second place.
The winning teams will now receive cash prizes of €100,000 and €35,000 respectively.
The Better Cotton Innovation Challenge, initiated by BCI and IDH and organised by Dalberg Advisors, launched in November 2019 to find new and innovative ideas to scale more sustainable cotton production. The challenge focused on two areas:
Customised training: Innovations to bring customised training on more sustainable farming practices to hundreds of thousands of cotton farmers.
Data collection: Innovations to reduce the time and cost of data collection to enable more efficient BCI licensing processes.
The challenge received close to 100 applications, 20 of which were shortlisted after a rigorous review process.
Of the shortlisted applicants, five finalists – Agritask, CropIn, Ricult, WaterSprint and eKutir – were selected to trial their sustainable solutions in the field with BCI Farmers.
Following the eight-week pilot period, a jury composed of BCI, IDH and Dalberg representatives, assessed the finalists and selected the winners based on a six-point criteria: impact, technical performance, likelihood of adoption, scalability, financial sustainability and team capability.
Agritask: winner
Agritask offers a holistic agronomic platform that enables agricultural stakeholders, including farmers, to capture and make use of a range of data in a highly flexible manner. The Agritask mobile app is customisable, allowing farmers to adopt digital solutions intuitively in a way that works for them. In addition, the platform enables remote monitoring via satellite and virtual weather stations and supports interaction with third-party systems. Data that is captured through the app is then aggregated and processed to provide actionable insights, tailored to each user.
Arsira Thumaprudti, Head of Business Development at Agritask commented, “We are proud to work with global leaders in sustainability such as BCI. We are coming out of the field trials with a deeper appreciation of the complexity involved in implementing and monitoring sustainability programmes in the field, and this is exactly the type of challenge we were looking for.”