How Indian farmers trained world's top 'plant doctor' app

When Simone and Rob Strey walked into a Goa bar sometime in March this year, heads turned. Ravindra, a local farmer in his 30s, couldn’t help but ask the German couple what they were doing in India in the middle of a pandemic.“We’re working here, we have programmed this application for farmers where they can take pictures of their crop and diagnose any disease within seconds,” Simone recalls telling him. “Plantix?” Ravindra’s eyes lit up. “My family and our whole village use it.”For Simone and Rob, Plantix has become an ice breaker, a badge of trust. It opens doors and hearts wherever they go in India. A few weeks before they met Ravindra, a group of women in a Nagpur village was curiously eyeing Simone, who is blonde. When she told them she was the founder of Plantix, they gathered around her and inundated her with their experiences of using the app in the Varhadi dialect.“Somehow, we have made an impact in the grassroots,” says Simone, who made India her home in April to be close to her customers. With three million Indian farmer-users who access the app in 12 languages, including Hindi, Telugu and Marathi, this paneer-tikka-loving CEO has much to be proud of today. medium83834030How Simone and Rob made Plantix the top image-based crop diagnostic tool for small farmers in not only India but the world, ahead of competitors like Scouting app, AgriApp and BharatAgri, is quite a story. And the best part is, they owe much of its growth to their India operation.New life from ‘sudden death’The app followed from an idea Simone and Rob had in 2015 while working on their PhDs in soil science in the southern Amazon – Brazil’s biggest region for crops such as soybean, maize and cotton. The farmers they worked with came to them with questions about not only the soil but also crop diseases. “We would throw up our hands saying we could not help there, but maybe if they gave us the name of a disease we could look it up on the internet,” Simone recalls. But their Google searches mostly came up short.“If you type ‘mort subite’ in Portuguese, you get ‘sudden death’ as the search result. Something about car accidents and stuff like that, not the crop disease,” says Simone. “We were like, if this happens in Portuguese, what about all the other languages?”The solution was to capture images of crop diseases and use a machine learning algorithm to tell farmers what pathogen, pest or nutrient deficiency threatened their crop. Back in 2015 it was quite a challenge though. Even Google’s reverse image search had been around for just four years. “There are no blueprints for how this could work since everything we do is new,” says Simone. To show image recognition for crops would work, they roped in a gardener in Germany. He tended to their 150 tomato plants in a greenhouse with different nutrients, and regularly sent images. Once the app hit the 10,000-downloads mark in Germany, they decided to take it to markets where it was truly needed. That’s how they arrived in India in 2017. medium83974898From greenhouse to India’s fields“We finally launched in India in May 2017 because that’s where millions of farmers needed a digital crop doctor like Plantix,” says Simone. It was a time when 4G data rates in India had crashed after Jio’s entry and an app-based crop diagnostic tool was within the reach of even small farmers. Still, Plantix’s early growth in India depended equally on data and shoe leather. They hired “picture hunters” – local agricultural students accompanied by another team of retired professors for snapping and labelling the images across different categories. Rice and potato were among the first crops for which they offered image-based diagnoses.But the app’s results were of no use if farmers couldn’t read them. So the Plantix team had to make them accessible to illiterate-to-semi-literate farmers speaking 22 different languages and dialects. This can be hard for even local experts as crop diseases often have different names in different dialects. medium83834161“I didn’t even know the Telugu names for some diseases. It was scary to start with because even a Google translation didn’t seem to solve the issue,” says Srikanth Rupavatharam, a digital agriculture scientist with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad. In four years, Plantix has added 12 Indian languages. “Every time we added a new language in India, it was like adding a new country. Madhya Pradesh is as big as Germany, right?” says Simone.Bumper harvest in IndiaDespite these challenges, India was the right market for Plantix, which was made for the small farmer with little or no access to crop experts. About 80% of Indian farmers own less than 2 hectares of farming land. Even one damaged crop is a big setback for them.In Maharashtra, for instance, pink bollworm damages 20-30% of the cotton crop every year. An app that can diagnose the disease early and prescribe a reliable cure is a blessing for small farmers. Tanaji Dhule in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district uses Plantix for early detection of pink bollworm. “I can send images over WhatsApp and receive advice on what to do next within a minute, without having to travel around. Also, my neighbours who don’t have smartphones come over and we read about different diseases and prepare for them through this app,” he says. Balasaheb K Dhame, a farmer from Nangaon village in Daund near Pune, grows wheat and sugarcane on his three acres. He uses Plantix as not only a diagnostic tool but also a record of his farm’s crop yields and diseases. “Other apps also diagnose crop diseases but Plantix alone lets users build their own understanding by matching their issues with results from the app.” medium83834491Walking encyclopaedia benefits allFor farmers, a big benefit of knowing how to fight crop diseases is that they don’t have to depend on agro-chemical sellers for advice. “For a disease that resembles a nutrient deficiency, retailers often foist soil nutrients besides pesticides on unsuspecting farmers. So the farmer ends up putting unnecessary chemicals in the soil,” says Rupavatharam. As a handy encyclopaedia of crop diseases, Plantix also serves officials such as crop scientists and crop protection officials who work with farmers. Most of them have narrow specialisations, but “When you go for a farm visit as an official, farmers don’t care about your specialisation, all they want is the solution to their problem,” says Rupavatharam. With Plantix installed on their smartphones, the officials are now able to educate farmers better. “If you ask people from the department of agriculture, most of them carry this app as a backup because not everyone knows everything.”Rupavatharam remembers the day he first saw a demo of the app in “April-May 2016” – when Simone and her team were scouting the Indian market. “They showed a proof-of-concept powered by AI that could detect a few crop diseases, including for tomatoes, in just a few seconds. It looked magical.” Five years on, the magic has been democratised. In fact, Plantix’s user base increased in the lockdown as farmers were not moving around much. They are now ordering and looking for solutions online, says Rupavatharam. medium83834591Improving with every searchLike doctors, Plantix gets better with experience. Every photo farmers upload sharpens its diagnostic algorithm. But there’s more that it can do with its growing pile of data. For instance, if dozens of farmers start reporting a problem in an area, it could spot a pattern and alert other users in advance. In Nangaon, Dhame says a predictive tool would be “priceless.”“I would like Plantix to share advanced inputs about my crops, everything I have been recording over the years, and help me identify patterns so that I can plan accordingly.” Simone says they have prediction on their mind too, but they need funds to implement it. “It’s like, we are just collecting data and we know it’s a big treasure. But so far we haven’t had the capacity to really throw money at it and say, okay, now we hire data scientists and they just look into the data and analyse all that.”As for monetising user data – as many agritech startups do by sharing it with companies focused on rural markets – Simone says they are not into that. “When we work with data it is always anonymised and we cut the last digits of the GPS coordinates so that we only give our information on village level or taluk level. If users want to delete their data after deleting Plantix, we do it.”For Plantix, she says, keeping users’ trust intact is more important. “I think it’s fair to use more detailed data to optimise the individual service but not if you work with third parties on the data. And you need to be transparent to your user, I think that’s the most important point.”To fund its growth, Plantix has raised €17.2 million from investors, including Atlantic Labs and Index Ventures. The paid version of its app is adding about 400 farmer-users every month. It has also invested in retail for farmers. “We wanted farmers to buy good products,” says Simone. In 2020, Plantix acquired Salesbee, an online B2B exchange between agricultural retailers and farmers. In April this year, it also partnered with FinBox for offering credit lines to agricultural retailers. “We also decouple credit and prices, which is not normal for this industry. Normally, a retailer gets different prices whether they pay cash or need to use credit.”Next year, Plantix wants to expand in countries around India – Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, where it estimates a market size of 66 million farmers.Untitled Carousel 68951960