New Vision of System Integrator: Nibiaa Brings LoRaWAN® IoT Solution to Precision Agriculture
Beginning with a simple conversation, Nibiaa goes from just an idea to the ambitious company it is today. Professor N. Irabanta Singh, an agricultural researcher for more than 40 years, had authored numerous research papers and knew first-hand that farmers rarely read or implemented the findings from his research and others. And his son, Aeroshil, who has a background in technology, discussed with Singh how his research can be implemented through simple technology solutions and provided to farmers for adoption. Thus, Nibiaa was born. With its base in Northeast India, the home of 2nd largest Tea production in the world, it was decided to focus specifically on Tea Industry.
Challenges in the Tea Industry
The tea industry as a whole is facing a lot of challenges due to climate change, mounting costs of input, usage of traditional agricultural practices, and unscrupulous usage of pesticides and fertilizers. These resulted in the reduction of tea quality thereby rejection during global export due to traces of such unwanted chemicals. With global industries going towards green and sustainable practices under SDGs, even in the tea industry, there is a high need for regenerative farming practices and modernization of the whole industry towards SDGs. The tea industry is a high carbon sequestration industry but tea planters are not utilizing the benefits of Carbon Credits which they can earn if reporting of data and validation is done correctly.
Nibiaa is working on three major objectives, remote tea garden monitoring using IoT solutions, proper data tracking and reporting for data-driven decision making, and carbon accounting & carbon credit calculations by collecting raw data through IoT Sensors.
Field Trial with the Tea Gardens of North Eastern Part of India
Nibiaa conducted field Trials and pilot project Installation of LoRaWAN® based environmental Devices in 3 Tea Estates in North Eastern part of India. Some of the Data Collected during the Trial are:
- CO2, Temperature and Humidity Sensor
- Soil Moisture, Temperature and EC Sensor
- Light Intensity Sensor
- Optical Rain Gauge Sensor
Based on the Data collected Nibiaa built dashboards for Tea Garden Managers to access from anywhere across the globe and remotely monitor conditions in the Tea Garden.
Benefits of Precision Agriculture Solution
Reduce:
Labor management cost
Irrigation cost
Pesticide and fertilizer application cost
Optimize:
Help certify carbon credit generation
Better supply chain visibility with IoT sensors and blockchain traceability
Detect opportunity areas to increase margins and premium pricing for the tea manufactured in the region
Improve Data-Driven decisions
Optimize the use of resources for regenerative agriculture to add a revenue stream to farmers and Tea Planters faster, cheaper and greener
About Maintenance
Minimal Maintenance Cost: power-conscious battery, IP66 rugged enclosure, and Bluetooth for remote data acquisition and device management
Excellent Aftersales Service：
“SeeedStudio has been a great Hardware Partner who has supported the execution of our IoT Enabled Smart Tea Garden Monitoring System in providing us excellent after sale service, the necessary hardware like SenseCAP Data Only M2 Hotspot and sensors like SenseCAP S2101 – Air Temperature and Humidity Sensor, SenseCAP S2102- Light Intensity Sensor, SenseCAP S2103 – CO2, Temperature & Humidity Sensor, SenseCAP S2104 – Soil Moisture and Temperature Sensor, etc. which were actively used during our Tea Garden Monitoring Solution.” – Nibiaa
End-to-End Agritech Solution
Nibiaa is building an end-to-end Agritech solution from farm to retail to achieve its 3 major objectives of Remote Environment Monitoring, Data Driven Decision Making and Carbon Accounting and Credit calculations during the entire supply chain of Tea production.
New Vision of Nibiaa
There are more than 1,500 large tea estates that include an average landholding of 740 acres each. There are also 45,000 small tea growers with an average landholding of 25 acres in North East India. For these small farms, every 25 acres would require about 10 Helium-compatible sensors with a full-scale deployment including approximately 295 sensors across 740 acres.
And that would be just the beginning, as these IoT solutions can be applied in multiple precision agriculture areas all over the world.
In the future, Nibiaa hopes to expand its vision of connectivity and technological advancement to other areas, including coffee, rubber, and so on, which is forecasted to be worth 122 billion dollars in India by 2026.
It’s no surprise that Nibiaa has already been recognized for its commitment to innovation and technological advancement, including being selected as:
1. Top 30 Startups selected through NERES 1.0 Competition Organized by IIE
2. Top 5 Startups selected for Octane IoT in Agriculture Competition by STPI- Guwahati
3. Top 15 startups selected for Land Accelerator Program 2021
4. Top 10 Startups selected for BIRAC BIG 19 Call for Innovation in Agriculture and Allied Category with a Grant Amount of 50 lacs( 70K USD)
5. Recipient of Helium DeWi Alliance Grant
To make it even easier for you to have a quick view of this smart tea farm system, our design team has created an immersive web 3D scenario using Spline for you to explore how it works.
To learn more about Nibiaa’s history and Seeed Studio, please visit https://www.nibiaa.com/ , https://www.nibiaa.in/ and https://www.seeedstudio.com
About Author
