By Catherine Cheney
November 20, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — When agribusinesses buy crops from smallholder farmers, they tend to send agents to the field, who walk the periphery of plots, take pictures of crops, and identify issues such as pests, in an effort to predict what the harvest might look like.
The ground-to-cloud SmartFarm app digitizes this process. On Monday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that its Strategic Investment Fund is investing $4 million in CropIn, an agriculture technology startup based in Bengaluru, India, which is behind the app.