CDMX, Mexico
Sept 7-16 2017
I attended the Global Entrepreneurship Summer School in Mexico City from September 7th to September 16th. The theme was FOOD and during this 7-day program, we worked in teams to learn to develop ideas that have both a sustainable impact for society as well as a self-sustaining, profitable business model.
Some of the challenges/problem areas were to:
- establish a stable food production system while maintaining soil diversity
- balance consumption and production
- encourage optimal production and distribution
- reduce waste in the production process
Our team developed its first value proposition based on detecting pests on fields using drones (spectral stress analysis) and then connecting farmers to producers of insecticides/fertilizers like GreenBTS:)
Tortillas, Tacos, enchiladas, tamales, huaraches, quesadillas, —- how many of us have eaten these delicious foods over the last week?
Mexico is the fifth largest corn producer in the world, and its a natural heritage; it represents our culture, our way of living, and our way of sharing.
Unfortunately in 2012, Juan, a low scale corn producer, lost 50% of his entire crop production due to a crop disease, and just like him, 2 million of corn farmers in Mexico been through that also., which represents a lost of 500,000 dollars per year in terms of money.
If he had access to a good diagnose service, this wouln’t happen. Thats why we are here.
Let me introduce myself, my name is Andrea and I represent GESSadilla, our purpose is to help low scale farmers to prevent crop diseases by providing access to high quality detection technologies and decreasing treatments cost.
How do we do that:
By using collaborative technologies from various startups we help the farmer diagnose the crop problem and empower him to reach out to social busniesses like Green BTS that offer organic services. GESSideas also collaborates between government like SAGARPA and other farmers in the region to create a holistic pest/disease management system at a subsidized cost.
Although organizations like SAGARPA provides crop disease diagnosis to its local farmers, but they only accept a 10% of them.
GESSidea will EMPOWER the majority of these farmers to maximize their corn production
Lack of diagnosis and expensive agro technologies create a $14 billion loss of crops worldwide.
