Farmer develops a crop diagnostic application
Thabo Momoti, a hydroponic farmer that started farming with the help of the City of Johannesburg food resilience unit, has developed a crop diagnostic app to help emerging farmers.
This groundbreaking app has the potential to simplify farming by allowing farmers to upload a diseased crop image and the app will provide the farmer with a report on the disease and the different things a farmer can do to remedy that problem.
The first phase of the app went live on March 4, intending to introduce farmers to it and build relationships with the farmers.
Eventually, the app will provide farmers with e-commerce opportunities, where farmers will be able to network with other farmers to buy and sell.
Thabo is very passionate about farming and started crop production in Dobsonville. With the help of the City of Johannesburg his agribusiness grew and birthed 5ARM-TECH, which is a startup with the sole mission to simplify farming throughout the life cycle of crop farmers by leveraging different technologies.
“What makes 5ARM-Tech innovative is that currently, farmers in South Africa need expert plant diagnosticians/agronomists that are expensive to diagnose their crop diseases and then they have to travel long distances to get remedies from retailers that sell farming inputs at a mark-up. This is expensive for smallholder and rural farmers,” said Thabo.
5ARM-TECH solves these problems for smallholder farmers by providing them with expert information. This also saves costs.
“Automation and simplification of farming will make farmers more effective in their trade.”
Farmers can access the crop diagnostic app on 5ARM-TECH.
