Farming 4.0

Dattabot’s Hara plans to revolutionize the agriculture sector and help small farmers with blockchain technology.

- Ardian Wibisono

Regi Wahyu is the CEO of big data analytics company Dattabot, but his real wish is to settle a career in the agriculture sector. The reason is sentimental: raised in a farming village in Sumedang, West Java, he had been exposed to the joys and rigors of a farmer’s life. With that in mind, in 2014 Regi engaged the company to a fireside project on smart agriculture in Lampung involving nanosatellites, sensors, and data to boost yield. Dattabot worked with Vasham, a subsidiary of the animal feed mill company Japfa Comfeed, on a project that covers a 5,000-hectare corn plantation involving 1,300 farmers. In 2016, after three fruitful harvest seasons, Regi claims the yield increased by up to 80% thanks to data knowledge and precision agriculture.

With more data’s, Regi says the information coulde even enable governments to better control inflation, speed up land certification process, and even help enhance food security that is often disrupted by climate change. So Dattabot tries to expand the project to other areas “When we introduced this project in Papua, we were hindered by the most fundamental element: data. There are no data on farmers, land, cultivation and other related issues, all of which we have in Lampung because we partnered with Vasham,” says Regi.

Dattabot, whose legal entity’s name is PT Mediatrac Sistem Komunikasi, has been dealing with big data and analytics since 2010 with Kalbe Farma, Holcim, Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) and others as its clients. So for the project, the company decides to collect data by themselves with the help of farmers. In doing so, Regi says they found out that data availability and asymmetric information contribute to the problems besetting the agriculture sector, not to mention the usual issues such as logistics and financing.