Cropwise Grower

My role

Lead UX

Company

Born Group

Client

Syngenta

Overview

Cropwise Grower is a digital farming super app tailored for smallholder farmers in the Asia Pacific region.This comprehensive platform aims to fulfill farmers' end-to-end requirements, spanning from pre-planting preparations to crop sales. In order to achieve these goals, I led a team of 5 to understand the farmers' requirements and their way of running their farms in order to design a farming app that meets their needs.

The outcome

Positioned as farmers' new best friend in the current agriculture environment, the app received a 4.8 star rating on the google store with 1 million downloads, providing a continous synergised partnership between Syngenta and their network of smallholder farmers.

Key learnings from 1 week of extensive interviews with smallholder farmers from Pakistan, India and Indonesia

1. Transparent market rates are important to ensure fair crop sales
   
2. Critical features like realtime pest and disease identification are made available offline for users in areas with intermittent internet connection.
3. App has to be localised and tailored to regional crops and weather conditions
4. Especially in remote areas, downloadable learning guides and videos are helpful for self learning.
   
   

Armed with our learnings, we set out to design Cropwise Grower as a digital advisor to farmer at every stage of the crop cycle

1. Farmers are able achieve the best crop yield remotely by having access to crop advice at every stage of their planting cycle. This can be done easily by adding their recently planted crop into the app's calendar and following the farming instructions provided by the app.

2. Local weather forecast and the ability to see historical weather trends allow these farmers to learn and choose the right time to plant and to spray their crops.

3. Daily marketplace rates as well as historical data are made available right from the dashboard to ensure fair crop sale pricing and helps smallholder farmers from being undercut.

4. Farmers are able to tap on expertise from Syngenta's partner Plantix, an image recognition AI that is able to detect crop diagnosis and treatments for free offline too.  We ensure that the usage is as simple as how the farmers are doing it then which was to upload the photo of the plant disease in their whatsapp chat with their Sygenta agents.  

5. we ensured that the app is localised.  We went beyond the usual allowance of country/language selection by providing Syngenta's team a guidance on components usage in the app such as those that can switched on or off or rearranged to suit the different localised needs. 

6. Finally, with many of these farmers working in remote areas, they found that a learning hub that is both handy and easily downloadable, a useful tool for their continuous learning and resource sharing.