Digital Innovation for climate-resilient agriculture

Unprecedented deadly heatwaves swept the Indian subcontinent 2022, soaring past 45 degrees Celsius in many parts of the country. With global temperatures rising, such heatwaves are likely to become more intense, occur more frequently, and last for longer durations. Caught in the belly of the beast, millions of Indian farmers are waking up to scorched and stunted produce.

Rapid quality loss in harvested crops from heat stress has forced farmers to settle for prices that barely cover the costs of transporting the produce to the market. Postharvest loss jeopardises even the low incomes they make. Most smallholder farmers, having loaned money from middlemen to purchase seeds and fertilisers at the beginning of the season, are left with spiralling debts. Amid the despair, decentralised and sustainable cold storage solutions can give farmers new hope.

In January 2021, the Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy  and Empa launched the Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant (Your VCCA) project — a two-part solution to reduce postharvest food loss, improve farmer livelihoods, and enhance food security. First, the Your VCCA includes a pay-per-use or servitisation business model that makes cooling more affordable and accessible for smallholder farmers and petty traders. As a second layer, it equips them with pre- and post-harvest intelligence through a data-science-based mobile application to secure the best possible price for their produce and escape the vicious cycle of poverty.

SERVITISATION OF COLD ROOMS IN ACTION

With the pilots launched under the Your VCCA crossing six months in operation, the team visited the cold room sites in Shiladesh (Himachal Pradesh), Muzaffarpur (Bihar), and Rourkela, Sundargarh, Keonjhar and Sambalpur (Odisha) to gather critical lessons from the on-ground roll out of the project. Since the trip’s timing overlapped with high summertime temperatures, the team witnessed the postharvest challenges encountered by farmers, collected their candid feedback on their experience with using the cold rooms, and  will now further finetune the solution to help farmers  adapt to a changing climate.

“There have been times that farmers expect such low prices for their crops that they do not find it worth harvesting them. Last season, tonnes of tomatoes and cauliflowers were discarded on the roads because smallholders in Minapur block did not see the value in bearing the costs of transporting them to the markets. But soon after, the price of tomatoes — which had fetched INR 20 per crate [25 kgs] during the market glut immediately after harvest — rose to INR 500 per crate towards the end of the season. Cold storage will ensure farmers salvage their surplus crops and benefit from these upward fluctuations,” says Chandan Kumar, field assistant with Oorja Solutions, Your VCCA’s local partner in Bihar.

 

Farmers using the cold rooms echoed that prolonging the shelf-life of their crops, even by a couple of weeks, brought them better prices than liquidating their produce on the day of the harvest.

“We were able to store 900 crates of apples for an additional four months from the plucking season in our 20 metric tonnes solar-powered rooms last season. While farmers stored their crates at an affordable rate of INR 1.5 per kg per month, they  received INR 1200-1,400 per crate from delayed sales – almost 1.5 times the typical amount,” reports Srinivas K. Marella, the Chief Operating Officer at CoolCrop, implementing the Your VCCA solution for the smallholder apple farmers in Himachal Pradesh.

STRENGTHENING COOLING BENEFITS THROUGH DIGITALISATION

The app’s first version supports cold room operators by digitalising inventory management, enabling them to move away from cumbersome manual registers. Through mock sessions with the local partners, the operators, most of whom are women employed from the local communities, practised how to check-in and check-out crates and record essential details, such as the initial quality and weight of the produce, the number of crates deposited, and the total amount to be paid by users.

After her first trial run with the app, Rita, the operator of Oorja’s Muzaffarpur cold room, stated, “Keeping track of who has what stored in the room, and how much is owed by them is difficult to manage. The app brings all this to one place. The step-by-step process and pictures with each option make the app intuitive.”

By also taking note of the number of days each farmer intends to store their crops, the app indicates the occupancy rate of the room for the coming days. With this information at hand, operators can advise farmers of the amount to harvest to store all their produce in the cold rooms.

The app’s first release will also include physics-based models, called digital twins, that simulate the ageing of the produce in each crate based on the room temperature, extracted by real-time sensor data. Operators will be able to inform farmers of the remaining shelf-life of their produce, based on which they will be able to store the crop until later for higher prices but be sure of selling it before the quality deteriorates. In a newer version of the app that will be released in 2023, the farmers will be able to monitor the shelf-life of their stored produce themselves, on their phones.

Walkthrough of Check-in and Check-out process on Coldtivate 

During informal chats in the fields and formal discussions with collectives, the farmers affirmed that the app addresses some of the vital concerns that had previously deterred them from using cold room facilities. Without access to decentralised cold rooms in their vicinity, most farmers had previously attempted to store their produce in large-scale commercial rooms in cities. Away from their crops and reliant on intermediaries to check on their crops quality, the farmers complained that they received lower than expected prices due to food spoilage in the cold rooms. Most farmers sent their produce directly to the market without checking if these claims were truthful. The app mends this trust deficit by giving farmers a means to directly monitor the quality of their crop, shielding them from exploitation.

Away from their crops and reliant on intermediaries to check on their crops quality, the farmers complained that they received lower than expected prices due to food spoilage in the cold rooms. Most farmers sent their produce directly to the market without checking if these claims were truthful. The app mends this trust deficit by giving farmers a means to directly monitor the quality of their crop, shielding them from exploitation.

The app deployment is being complemented with capacity bridging sessions by the local cooling companies to encourage further and facilitate the use of the cold rooms. In Odisha, Koel Fresh is conducting awareness-raising sessions to share the benefits of cooling with farmers and teach operators how to perform the daily activities in the cold room using the app. Furthermore, they are exploring possible options to collaborate with C. V. Raman Global University to train members from the rural communities on ways to troubleshoot common cold storage problems.

“We have launched a peer-to-peer learning program, wherein we have selected some ‘cold room champions’ from each village. Once they have learnt about and experienced the benefits of cold storage, these champions carry forth these messages to other farmers and help create a community of practice,” comments Asutosh Nayak, the CEO of Koel Fresh. The Knowledge Hub embedded in the app hosts information on the best temperatures to store different crops, which crops not to mix while storing in a multicommodity room, and other consolidated manuals on postharvest management.

TAKING A MULTIFACETED APPROACH

The potential of the Your VCCA solution’s comprehensive approach, from helping run the cold rooms more sustainably to empowering local communities through capacity bridging efforts, to revive India’s slow-performing cold chain sector was acknowledged by the local stakeholders. Meetings with government officials reaffirmed that cold storage could help strengthen agricultural resilience in the country. Over and above assisting farmers to protect their crops in high temperatures, the availability of cold storage also prevents harvest loss and, by extension, food shortage during the yearly flooding of fields in Bihar.

In Odisha, where farmers have stuck to paddy production due to an assured market, the capacity to prolong the shelf-life and make a stable income from other fruits and vegetables can promote crop diversification. At the same time, by integrating a solar-powered system with thermal storage or batteries, the pilots under Your VCCA exhibit how cold rooms can cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce dependency on India’s already overloaded power lines. In this way, the solution incorporates both adaptation and mitigation considerations and intends to explore further synergies between the two.

WHERE TO NOW?

Despite the positive feedback, farmers also noted that securing higher prices often required them to travel long distances to reach haats (wholesale markets) or mandis (local markets). Flagging the crop damage in transit, they requested the extension of the as-a-service model to include refrigerated transportation and to make these necessities more affordable to smallholders. These comments will help shape the future expansion efforts of the Your VCCA solution.

Indeed, running a cold room is only a small component of the more extensive infrastructure needed for farmers and traders to secure the price they deserve for the crops they produce. Hence, cold transportation seem a natural direction to expand the project, as refrigerated vehicles are crucial to keep the produce fresh throughout the supply chain. When equipped with temperature sensors, they can be integrated into the Your VCCA solution in order to enable quality monitoring across the entire cold chain.

Another possible direction is to transform cold rooms into aggregation centres, informing potential buyers about what is currently in the cold room via the app and allowing them to pick up the produce directly from the room, guaranteeing freshness and sparing transportation costs to the market for farmers.

“Envisaging cold rooms to be aggregator points for fruits and vegetables grown can help with direct linkage of farmers with the bulk market, which is needed for them to negotiate better prices collectively,” remarks Austosh Nayak. The servitisation model would allow these aggregation centres to be owned and run by the local farming communities, and digitalisation would allow for seamless and remote transactions.

 

The servitisation model also allows the ownership of cold rooms to be transferred to the local farming community, a configuration wherein smallholders can benefit from the dual opportunity of storing a portion of their crops at nominal rates and selling the rest to the farmer producer organisations (FPOs) at above-market rates, as the latter aggregate crops and sell in bulk to retail stores.

One of Your VCCA’s pilot sites in Odisha has already implemented this model, where the responsibility to operate the cold rooms has been taken up by FPOs. The FPOs aggregate and sell in bulk to retail stores, helping farmers with forward market linkage and negotiating better prices. Some FPOs hope to engage in postharvest processing, with the value addition giving them a price mark-up. In most cases, the profits are used to cover the operating costs for the cold room and distributed among farmers to purchase seeds and fertilisers for the next sowing season.

The solution is constantly evolving to empower the farming communities, enhance smallholders’ incomes, and reinforce regional food safety. The heatwaves in India have interrupted the flow of produce in global markets, limiting exports and putting food security at risk elsewhere too. The interconnections in our food systems are an important reminder to address postharvest losses together.