While the country has witnessed tremendous growth in digital infrastructure to support farmers, the innovations have primarily focused on pre-harvest and harvesting phases (advisory on sowing and crop cultivation; knowledge on fertilisers, seeds, and machinery; weather forecasts), or tailored to larger farmers thereby leaving out marginalised farmers and traders. Meanwhile, postharvest losses and commercialisation of crops – a significant step in ensuring farmers’ income is commensurate with the increase in their farm output – have received only limited attention under the app-driven agricultural revolution.

The Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy (BASE) and The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) began working towards addressing this gap in January 2021 under the Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant (Your VCCA) initiative as a part of the data.org global innovation challenge. After a year and a half of interdisciplinary teamwork including strong local partnership development, data collection, user interface design, the development of machine learning and physics-based models as well as of the software back-end and front-end, and on-ground user testing, the team is excited to release the first version of its open-access, data-science-based mobile application called Coldtivate. This version of the app is being tested by our local cooling companies and operators. Updated versions of Coldtivate will be released in late 2022, enabling farmers to access the existing and additional features on their smartphones.The BASE and Empa teams are grateful for the excellent collaboration with Relief Applications for the software development. 

“We have developed an open-source app that enables cold room operators to manage inventories and monitor occupancy digitally, and cooling beneficiaries to track the quality of their crops in storage in real-time. By combining this with the upcoming feature of staying updated on market prices, this information empowers people to make informed decisions on when and where to sell their crops, strengthens their bargaining position to negotiate for better prices, and prevents distress selling.”

Roberta Evangelista, Technical Lead

The app facilitates the implementation of the Cooling as a Service (CaaS) business model, wherein local cold room providers retain ownership and maintenance responsibilities of the infrastructure while farmers use the facilities on a pay-per-crate basis for a nominal fee. The app is a plug-and-play tool for local cold room providers to offer the CaaS model quickly and efficiently. To make the process of tracking the crates entering and leaving the room less cumbersome, Coldtivate is a first-of-its-kind app to digitalise inventory management in the cold room, which is presently carried out manually and is prone to error. Using this feature, cold room operators can check-in and check out the cooling users’ (marginal farmers and small-time traders) produce. Digitalising the inventory management system allows operators to monitor the current and predicted occupancy of the room, notify users of their pickup days and keep track of the prices received by the farmers for their produce stored in the cold rooms in a hassle-free manner. Cold room providers who own and operate a fleet of cold rooms can assign operators to specific cold rooms and keep an overview of their operations.

Even as cold storage capacity is progressively increasing in the country, backed by policy interventions, inadequate trust in the potential of cooling to augment income has hindered farmers’ uptake of these solutions. Coldtivate attempts to bridge this trust deficit with another of its key features, enabling farmers to track the shelf-life of their stored produce in real-time. For each checked-in crate, the app computes the ideal time for farmers to pick up their crops, i.e., it predicts the number of days that the fruit can last under the current storage conditions with a buffer time for bringing the crops to the market at ambient temperature. To make these calculations, the app integrates a crop-specific physics-based model known as ‘digital twins’ developed by Empa, which simulates how crops in a particular crate age inside the cold room in real-time. These calculations depend on factors such as the type of commodity, room temperature and humidity, and the initial quality of the produce. The relevant data is gathered through different means. For instance, the temperature and humidity are recorded by the sensors installed in the room. The initial quality of the produce is determined during the check-in of the produce by noting the harvesting dates.

Since the app’s current version caters to cold room operators, they can monitor the shelf-life of each farmer’s produce and inform them of the ideal check out date as per the app’s predictions via SMS or in-person. In another four months, a new version will be released allowing farmers to see this information for themselves and decide when to check out their crates.

The journey of improving farmers’ welfare through postharvest management goes beyond merely curbing quantitative (decrease in weight and volume) and qualitative (cosmetic imperfections and fall in nutritional value) losses in crops and increasing their shelf lives. Surrounded by uncertainty, farmers make sales decisions in a dynamic environment against many competing short-term tactical and long-term strategic decisions. Although vast amounts of data are available to optimise agriculture sales decisions, the information is typically raw and scattered, offering few useful insights. The next steps for Coldtivate involve empowering farmers with market price forecasting.

The upcoming versions of the app will also feature daily market price forecasts for different commodities using machine learning and open-source data from markets near the cold rooms across India. This information, combined with updates on the remaining shelf-life of the crops, help farmers with better price discovery by choosing the ideal time and location of sales. Processed data represented in actionable formats fixes information asymmetry in the market, mitigating exposure to manipulation by intermediaries and ensuring that the farmers secure a relatively larger portion of the profits.

“It has been a long and exciting journey: from software design, development and testing, to data acquisition, model development and their integration into the app. We’re thrilled to finally make this a reality and bring the power of data science to farmers in an open-source solution. We leverage sensor’s temperature data with our physics-based digital twin models to predict the remaining shelf life of crops in cold storage, and we’re also in the final stages of the development of a machine learning model that leverages public market data to make 2 weeks daily market price forecasts at the market, district and state levels. We believe these tools combined in Coldtivate create a unique added value and have the potential to disrupt the agri-business sector.”

Joaquin Gajardo, Technical Co-Lead

In addition to using data-science to assist farmers in navigating an increasingly complex value chain, Coldtivate includes a Knowledge Hub that contains information about the optimal storage temperature and average storage time for each commodity and will be regularly expanded and enriched to reflect the best practices in postharvest management as per the latest research. To universalise access to this crucial information and create engaging learning environments, the knowledge hub will also be available offline in interesting formats such as comic books and manuals in the coming months. After the addition of further functionalities, Coldtivate will also be tested with cold room operators in Nigeria by September 2022, where the Your VCCA project is deployed in partnership with Coldhubs. 

Coldtivate helps cold room operators and providers to offer sustainable cooling technology under a servitisation business model, and helps farmers to better leverage the benefits of cooling, reducing food loss and securing higher prices.

Coldtivate is now available for download for free on Android and iOS.

Even without the weight of recent events bearing down on the global economy, the demand for food has never been higher. To meet this need, attention has been directed towards digital technology as an efficient tool in addressing the current and future global food security issues. Access to actionable data is a key component needed for implementing digital solutions in the traditional agricultural value chain. However, there is a disconnect between the rising tide of information and the ability of most farmers (and other stakeholders) to use such tools to influence the agricultural supply chain. The Nigerian agricultural sector is no exception to these issues: although there are tangible amounts of agricultural-related data that are openly available and findable, they are difficult to distil or group in a ready-to-use form. The lack of access to such ready-to-use, easy-digestible data results in less-informed decisions that drive postharvest losses.

One way to solve this issue is to use web-based, visually engaging interactive maps and graphs targeting smaller sections of the supply chain, for instance—cooling service providers. That is why teams from Empa and BASE have created a multi-layer, interactive map of Nigeria (view here) using available agricultural data that were sourced openly to aid stakeholders (farmers, cold-storage providers, retailers and policymakers) with decision-making along the fresh food supply chain.

“When we developed a similar map for India, we saw the excitement it generated amongst cold store providers, farmers, and other stakeholders in the fresh produce supply chain. These stakeholders are currently using the interactive map to make better decisions regarding their businesses. Our goal is to replicate a similar if not higher impact than that of India. We hope that the smallholders, the cooling service providers, suppliers, retailers, and policymakers of Nigeria’s fresh produce supply chain will use this tool to make decisions that will drive food loss reduction and improve wealth creation.”  

Daniel Onwude, Scientist at Empa’s SimBioSys Group and Project Lead

Nigeria is one of the world’s largest producers of fruits and vegetables, and the production of this fresh produce is largely carried out by smallholder or marginal farmers who often grow them on farms under 2 hectares. Food losses are exceptionally high within this category of farmers, with more than 40% yearly postharvest losses, amounting to about 1.7 billion tons per year. This also results in more than 30% loss of income each year. This is exactly the challenge that the Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant (Your VCCA) project, undertaken by BASE and Empa, seeks to address. The project aims to reduce food loss and increase farmers’ income by making pay-per-use cooling services more accessible to smallholder farmers. Together with mainstreaming the pay-per-use business model within the cold storage sector, the solution focuses on the development of a mobile application that digitalises inventory management and provides pre- and post-harvest market intelligence, allowing farmers to better handle, store, and protect their crops.

Bringing together Open-Source Data in an Interactive Map

Given the lack of access to easy-to-use agricultural-related data in Nigeria, several attempts have been made to mitigate this issue. One notable example of this is the National Bureau of Statistics survey carried out along with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development annually. The National Agriculture Survey (NASS) was designed to assess the state of agricultural production in the country and understand how the statistics obtained from that observation tied into the National Agricultural Sample Census (NASC) conducted every 10 years. The data from this survey highlights information about crop production, livestock management, land improvement, infrastructure development, rural electrification and other sources of development using conventional and non-conventional means. Despite this data being publicly available, the data is sparse and not distilled into a ready-to-use form. The data has to be processed into a geospatial format and analysed based on that visualisation to maximise its utility. That is where the interactive web map developed by EmpaandBASEcomes in: using Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud, the application offers synthesis by allowing the collation and visualisation of different geospatial data layers related to Nigeria’s fresh produce supply chain. This means that relevant spatially distributed data like fruits and vegetables crop production, elevation, temperature, solar radiance, predicted electricity grid lines, roads, market location, land cover, agro-ecological zones, water scarcity, food insecurity, and mobile band coverage are all visualised at State level or Local Government Area (LGA) level via this map.

What is the purpose of the map?

To help stakeholders in Nigeria’s fresh produce value chain make better decisions! This is the simplest way to put it. The visual representation of the data layers will serve as an effective decision-making tool for stakeholders in the fresh food supply chain across the public or private sector. This includes  cooling providers, farmer-producer organisations and other social enterprises, financial institutions, NGOs and government bodies.

“You look at Nigeria and you see potential. says. Our goal is to collate and transform available open-source data to actionable geospatial insights for fresh food supply chains to drive food loss reduction not just in Nigeria, but  around the world. We believe that this map is part of how we get there, by empowering cooling service providers with the necessary insights to grow their businesses.”

Divinefavour Odion, Computer Scientist and Consultant for Empa’s SimBioSys group

For example, the map shows locations in Nigeria with the largest cooling potential and identifies where future cold storage rooms could be placed. The value of these rooms lies in their ability to preserve the economic value of fresh produce in-between transportation supply runs. Nonetheless, cold rooms can only provide adequate benefits when they are properly, conveniently placed and meet all criteria to properly preserve fresh food. Thus, the team brought some of these factors together and computed a map of promising site locations, leveraging open-source datasets and incorporating key input from our partners. The layer computed by the Your VCCA team is based on the following factors: no more than 2 km away from a market, at most 500 m off the road, and no more than 2 km away from cropland. This marks the first step towards an application where users can compute promising cold room sites by flexibly combining layers based on various thresholds.

A second example is the shelf-life gain layers computed by the YVCCA team. The shelf-life gain layers on the map display the number of shelf-life days gained by storing their fresh produce at colder temperatures compared to ambient temperatures. By representing the shelf-life gain and historical market prices of several crops, including bell pepper, tomato, cabbage, green bean, and carrot on an embedded chart in the map, farmers can access interpretable information on the market dynamics of the crops they produce, such as seasonal trends or cross-state comparisons. These tools provide them and other stakeholders with critical information on the benefits of using cold storage and on market linkage with actionable metrics. 

This interactive map will complement the Coldtivate app, launched under the Your VCCA initiative, by bringing together information to help stakeholders better understand the need for cooling across Nigeria, so that they can identify the best opportunity to positively impact farmers’ livelihood across the country.

The expansion of the project YourVCCA to Nigeria is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It is being carried out by BASE in partnership with Empa on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.

1. Li D., Gajardo J., Volpi M., Defraeye T. (2022), Using machine learning to generate an open-access cropland map from satellite images time series in the Indian Himalayan Region. engrXiv. preprint DOI.

As a part of the open-access map of India on Google Earth Engine, a new layer was developed and documented that identifies cropland from satellite images in India at a 10-meter resolution using machine learning. 

2. Defraeye T., Shoji K., Schudel S., Onwude D., Shrivastava C. (2022), Evaporative coolers for postharvest storage: where to best use them and how well do they work? engrXiv. preprint DOI.

3. Defraeye T., Schudel S., Shrivastava C., Motmans T., Umani K., Crenna E., Shoji K., Onwude D. (2022), The charcoal cooling blanket: A scalable, simple, self-supporting evaporative cooling device for preserving fresh foods. engrXiv. preprint DOI.

4. Evaporative Cooling Potential Map: https://empasimbiosys.github.io/evapo_cooling_map/

A new type of passive evaporative cooler was developed for smallholder farmers that helps them store their fresh produce after harvest. In warm areas, often, a lot of quality is lost immediately after harvest. However, in remote areas, energy to cool produce is not always available. This cooler only needs water to work and is easy to produce using just textile and charcoal. DIY instructions with a video are online now. In addition, the team developed and documented open-access maps to identify how good evaporative coolers work in the world. That way, these evaporative coolers are only used where and when it makes sense to use them.

5. You L., Schudel S., Defraeye T. (2022), Developing of biophysical food for monitoring postharvest supply chains for avocado and potato and deploying of biophysical apple. engrXiv. preprint DOI.

Finally, the team developed a newer version of their artificial food sensor device that helps cooling service providers to monitor better the cooling process in their micro-scale solar-powered cooling facilities. The artificial fruits and vegetables can be packed deep inside the cargo and help detect problematic locations that cool slower than others. Next to apple, banana, mango, and citrus, now also artificial avocado and potato sensing devices were developed.

Food insecurity remains a pressing development challenge in Nigeria. With the agricultural sector forming the backbone of the Nigerian economy, the loss of nearly 40 percent of the country’s national food production annually has far-reaching implications for farmer livelihoods and feeding its growing population inclusively. In addition to being a humanitarian concern, food loss poses an environmental threat, contributing to resource wastage and nearly 5 percent of Nigeria’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions. Your VCCA is a data-science-driven mobile application that addresses the technology and infrastructure gaps that lead to post-harvest handling and storage losses. Firstly, it increases access to cooling facilities by enabling and digitising a pay-per-use model. Secondly, it allows farmers to monitor the shelf-life of the produce in real time and provides them with upcycled market information, which coupled together, helps them make informed business decisions. 

The project is the expansion of BASE and Empa’s efforts in India, which started in January. The project expansion to Nigeria will be marked by piloting the software in various regions across the country, together with several local clean technology providers, starting with ColdHubs Limited.

The project team, composed of Roberta Evangelista and Thomas Motmans from BASE and Kanaha Shoji and Daniel Onwude from Empa, describes the trip as being exceptionally insightful and dense, filled with learnings that are already being integrated into the design of the solution. From Lagos to Owerri and then to Abuja and Jos, each day of the visit unraveled new information, ideas, feedback through site visits, workshops, and conferences. To gather diverse perspectives on the Your VCCA solution, the team interacted with clean cooling technology providers and cold room operators, investors, government associations related to cold chain, nutrition, agriculture and digitalisation, academics, data science entities, farmers, and market traders. The relevance of the project was affirmed by these various stakeholders, who echoed that the solution would solve critical pain points prevalent in the Nigerian fresh food supply chain.

KICKING OFF THE PARTNERSHIP WITH COLDHUBS

The project team kicked off key partnerships in Nigeria, beginning with reconnecting with ColdHubs, a clean cooling technology company. They have previously worked with BASE on their Cooling as a Service initiative and are leading the way, globally, in the provision of decentralised, solar-based cold storage offered under a pay-per-crate model. Together with Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, the CEO of ColdHubs, the team met with the core team to delve into the strategic and technical details of the project. According to Nneameka, “It is a fantastic project. It will be a game-changer.” Chinedu Hardy Nwadike, who will be managing the project from ColdHubs’ side, confirmed, “Your VCCA handles everything we have headaches with.” The discussions on the day-to-day operations of the company and on the cold chain bottlenecks in Nigeria helped the team garner valuable inputs, which have proved crucial for the team to tailor the project design and implementation to the local conditions.

SITE VISITS FOR CUSTOMER-CENTRIC DESIGN

The project team also visited several sites where ColdHubs rooms are located, including the Mile 12 market in Lagos – one of the largest in the country – and other market-gate cold rooms in Owerri, Abuja and Jos. The detailed questions asked to the smallholder farmers and traders revealed the day-to-day challenges they encountered in terms of accessing storage facilities and coping with market uncertainty. With their needs in mind, the team spoke to room operators to gain an overarching view of the cold chain landscape, identifying ways that Your VCCA can bridge the gap between those in need and those that can provide, all while making the services affordable and more energy efficient. Equipped with the first prototype of the mobile application, the team was able to share it with the cold room operators and receive feedback on the user interface. Overall, the operators agreed that the app was simple to use and would make inventory management a lot easier. The functionalities that were primarily tested pertained to the digitalisation of the cold room inventory: the mobile application enables seamless digitalised check-in, check-out, and tracking of the produce in the rooms, serving as an effective alternative to the hand-written register books in use today.

The project team proceeded to identify and visit other clean cooling providers in the Plateau state in Jos, one of the largest agricultural hubs in Nigeria. Nuanced differences exist in ways different cold chains operate, which is important to acknowledge when designing the software solution. Your VCCA hopes to become a tool that can be leveraged by local entrepreneurs tackling cold chain challenges to standardise operational methodologies. BASE and Empa will further bolster this process by setting up an incubator in the near future to offer technical assistance to these companies regarding how they can incorporate the Cooling as a Service business model in their operations.

The team engaged with Infracredit, which is setting up an innovation unit to work on financing Cooling as a Service projects. BASE and Infracredit will work together to design a financial structure that will help companies like ColdHubs tap into commercial debt. This endeavour will include a payment guarantee as well as project finance structures to enable bundling of projects, with the purpose to facilitate the shift from asset-based financing to cash flow-based financing. Such an intervention can be of benefit to clean cooling providers since cold rooms are typically not accepted as collateral, requiring financed companies to own land to access mainstream capital. These hurdles slow down their growth and reduce the scale of their impact. The open-source multi-layered map of Nigeria that the BASE and Empa teams are developing within the project is of particular interest to Infracredit because the data it captures and displays can aid them to better locate and estimate cold room opportunities. In addition, with the use of the digital inventory, Your VCCA can help to better predict cash flows of the clean cooling companies.

Data collection in Nigeria has commenced. Progress on the Your VCCA app is underway, integrating the new understanding of the users’ needs, alongside the development of the data-science-based and mechanistic models required to generate intelligence and recommendations for farmers that use the software. The pilot sites are being selected and set up, and a work plan is being set up with the key partners engaged in the project.

The expansion of the project Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant in Nigeria is commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and is being carried out by BASE in partnership with Empa on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The project is the expansion of BASE and Empa’s efforts in India, which started in January, as part of the DataDotOrg Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge, piloted in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. 

For more information about the project, you can explore the project page on the BASE website or the project fact sheet.