The Agriculture sector is extremely dynamic and very sensitive to Climate Change. Sourcing reliable climate data and making farmers resilient to climate change while increasing food production is one of the key challenges.
Agrigate Global’s Saura Panigrahi spoke with Paul Daintree, Co-Founder and CEO of Climate Sense, about his startup and the experience at The Sustainable Agtech Challenge brought to you by The Yield Lab Institute and UNEP.
Congratulations on making it to the Final-8 of The Sustainable Agtech Challenge by the Yield Lab Institute. How has the experience gone?
Thank you! We couldn’t be more motivated. Since the start, everything has been a great experience for the team. The Challenge is a unique opportunity, which we are very grateful, to show our startup and scale. Since we started with the application and got to be finalists it woke up a feeling that the world is needing our technology to make a better world. Every day has been a great experience and would also like to use this opportunity to thank you for making this Challenge possible.
How would you like to introduce your startup/innovation? Tell us more about the core area of operations and your team.
Climate Sense aims to improve production processes in a more sustainable way in the agricultural sector, through climate data in real-time. Our hardware and software use the data collected from a low-cost weather station that has more than 8 sensors that feed our algorithms. We designed our solution to help farmers obtain better insurance for their production and financial services.
Our interdisciplinary team has different backgrounds, I come from the Agri sector, James is a hardware developer, and Rodney is a software programmer. We have a nice history because we are friends since childhood. When Paul noticed the need for climate data for farmers he immediately called James and Rodney to provide a solution. Combining our know-how in each sector we could build our own hardware to have clean and reliable data that would be processed by our software.
Our objective is to take care of our farmers, for them to be resilient to climate change, and to produce more food taking care of the environment and human health. We aim to be the largest provider of farm climate data to size the climate change.
The Agriculture Sector is very dynamic. What are the major challenges you are facing?
Some of the challenges we face are to:
- Stay near our clients because of the dynamic agricultural sector. If we stay near of our clients we will be able to satisfy their needs. The agricultural sector is changing rapidly and we have to be able to adapt and perform successfully.
- Capture the climate change for farmers and help them face it. Obtain reliable and clean climate data to provide solutions for them (Insurance and financial tools)
- Need communication to reach the rural areas.
- Provide precise forecast
- Provide environmental and human health footprint
- Provide Carbon footprint
- Use more 3D printers
- We would like to offer hunger insurance to certain regions where they depend on their yield crop annually. If we can offer them insurance for their crops it would be a way of reducing hunger in those regions.
- Be the biggest provider of farm data in the Latam and Caribbean region.
In recent times, agri-tech has become one of the favorites for investors. What would be your pitch to a prospective investor?
It’s time to invest in food production and take care of our planet. Agri-tech tackles both problems. The result will have economic return but will also have environmental and social meaning. We are providing a revolutionary way of taking care of our farmers, making them produce more and in a more sustainable way. Agri-tech is a worldwide sector, our products and service are scalable globally.
Agritech is booming with innovative ideas. What would be your advice to young entrepreneurs who would like to venture into this segment?
I advise them to be open to changes, adapt rapidly. Always try to focus on making life easier for farmers so that they can produce more food, help them do it in a more sustainable way, and look for solutions that have sustainable development goals. Very important to have a good team to get success.
Finally, tell us more about your plans.
We want to capture part of the Argentinian region to validate our product and service and then expand to Latam and possibly the world. Our project is scalable and brings a solution for every farmer in the world. We aim for an investment to work on a certain region and then start growing to different regions. This first step will allow us to show the benefits of using our platform.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the views of Agrigate Global.