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Pride Farms is a leading market-driven agriculture company in Rwanda using professional, climate smart farm management and innovative technology to produce high value goods for both local and global markets.

Pride Farms focuses on organic farming, solar energy for irrigation, cold storage for continuous production and preserving quality, and regenerative agricultural practices and methods. They run their own farms and are starting to build a farming network of outgrowers to meet the demand from local hotels, restaurants and supermarkets as well as the export markets in Europe.

At the heart of Pride Farms operations is their seedling greenhouses which supply both their own farms as well as their outgrowers. The seedlings are the crucial first step in the production and the conditions within the greenhouse are paramount for growing strong and healthy seedlings.

Pride Farms has deployed our IoT remote monitoring system to track conditions in their Kigali based seedling nursery greenhouse where they were experiencing challenges with the quality of the seedlings and the quantity successfully grown for transplanting. The data collected is helping them to control the temperature and humidity within the greenhouse.

The data from our remote monitoring system is accessed by the farm worker responsible for the nursery. She uses her basic smartphone to view the data, allowing her insights in real-time that influence the way that she manages the growing conditions in the greenhouse. The data is helping her determine when to reduce the temperature or humidity for example by watering the floor in the greenhouse, when to start the irrigation in the morning to get the most impact from the water and avoid waste of water.


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The Rwanda-Israel Horticulture Centre of Excellence (HCoE) is a bilateral initiative between the Government of Rwanda and the State of Israel, to reduce poverty and ensure that growth is inclusive.

HCoE focuses on building capacity on agro-technologies and sustainable agricultural best practices, including the introduction of improved quality varieties, production of vegetables in greenhouses, walk-in-tunnels, net houses and open areas. 

The centre provides quality training and consulting and professional training programmes for agricultural professionals from government institutions, NGOs, higher learning institutions and private companies, students and farmers.  

Since September 2017, about 49 varieties of 16 different types of vegetables have been tested in three cycles for adaptability to Rwandan conditions, and over 220,000 vegetable seedlings and 150 tons of vegetables were produced in the 2019-2020 season.

Farmers often over water their crops in Rwanda, washing away valuable inputs, and causing water stress for crops or the farmers under water their crops, leading to stunted growth of the crop. In partnership with GIZ Rwanda, we were contracted to design, develop and test an automated irrigation system at HCoE that could gather real-time data on environmental / soil conditions within both greenhouses and open fields. 

Our system would then use the collected data, and a set of agreed parameters, to automate irrigation processes; limiting waste of costly inputs such as water, fertiliser and pesticides, whilst also optimising production by providing the correct amount of water for the crop. Our system de-risks the irrigation process by removing unwanted variables, helping farms to learn more from their environments, improve yields and lower their costs.

Our solar powered Smart Agriculture remote monitoring system was used as a starting point. It was then further customised to add irrigation automation functionality. The developed solution allowed HCoE agronomists to get a holistic view of both soil and air conditions across a number of different locations, then use this data to develop irrigation strategies which they could input into our system for automation. 

The HCoE agronomists could set watering parameters such as minimum soil moisture and watering duration, then schedule watering sessions when data recorded was outside these set thresholds. This ensured that the HCoE team had a much more accurate irrigation system that automatically adjusted the amount of water for the crop.

Regular automated reports were created for the agronomists to discuss with their peers, showing conditions witnessed over a certain period of time, and how the system reacted to this (eg, less water when a storm is coming or temperature was low, more water if the temperature is high and soil moisture is low).

More on this project can be found here: Smart Farming in Rwanda – How farmers can increase crop yields through an IoT-based irrigation