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Pastoral

Pastoral

Pastoral: A low cost precision livestock farming platform that works over chat services.
Category
Business Description
Pastoral is the worlds first precision livestock farming (PLF) product built specifically for the needs of livestock farmers in low-and-middle-income (LMIC) countries. Pastoral modifies the fundamental features in common digital PLF platforms in wealthier countries (IoT animal tracking, virtual fencing, water availability, animal health, etc.) tofit within the price point and technical limitations of livestock farmers in lower-income countries, balancing affordability with long-term sustainability, putting people over profit.
Long Business Description

Pastoral is an IoT chatbot-based precision livestock farming platform that aims to give livestock farmers in low-and-middle-income (LMIC) countries access to the same basic levels of information about their land and animals that livestock farmers in the global north take for granted. Designed by Karakoram Innovation in partnership with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Pastoral is the world's first precision livestock farming platform which combines land-based 2G and LoRA based sensors and open-source satellite data with a Telegram chatbot based interface, resulting in a tool for farmers in low-connectivity and low-tech environments.

Many smallholder farmers in global low-and-middle-income (LMIC) countries do not have consistent and secure access to pasture land, resulting in the unsystematic and illegal use of pastures, made worse by a changing climate and competition from the global market, without the benefit of the technical tools commonly used by livestock farmers in the Global North. This is further compounded by environmental, technical, and operational limitations that these farmers face, including those around limited technical knowledge, low connectivity, lack of funding, and rugged terrains that are not easy to map or measure using sensors.

Combined, these result in livestock farmers in LMICs falling further and further behind those in the global north, with little research and development of tools for their specific needs.

Incubated as part of the UNDP ‘Cultiv@te’ programme for Innovation in Sustainable Agriculture, Pastoral was further developed in August 2021, as the team travelled to Uzbekistan for in-depth field-based user research and iterative prototype development and viability tests.

Based on field research with end-user Uzbek livestock farmers and IoT viability tests, the project pivoted from being app-based to chat-bot based, largely based on feedback from farmers that chat-based applications, particularly Telegram, were the only technologies that the majority of our end-users were comfortable with and reliably worked in rural farms.

When presented with a simple conversational chatbot, livestock farmers in Uzbekistan involved in the Pastoral trial are able to use Telegram to ask where their animals currently are located (using a combination of bespoke LoRA and 2G based GPS trackers, designed by Karakoram), overlaid on top of satellite imagery provided by FAO and Google. Offering unprecedented access to previously inaccessible data, such as groundwater saturation, grass growth rates, vegetation cover, and land trends and desertification over time, the Pastoral application offers the minimum data required to drive more sustainable farming practices, leading to better animal product yield, and ultimately more profit for their work. Future iterations of the platform will add additional sensors to the platform, such as animal weight, water intake, and feed sensors, all available through the chatbot interface.

Based in
London
Tags
Agritech, Agriculture, AgTech, Precision Livestock Farming
Total Funding
Between €1-€100K
Founded
2020
Website
https://pastoral.ai

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