VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Lecturer at the UGM Faculty of Agricultural Technology, Bayu Dwi Apri Nugroho along with the RiTx Bertani startup team won an award at the Hannover Messe Germany event. They made an achievement as the first winner in the Startup category at the 2020 Hermes Award at the event. The Hannover Messe is the world's largest industrial and technology fair. The Hermes Award is a competition that is open to all exhibitors at the Hannover Messe. Besides being able to help increase farmer productivity, this startup, which has the concept of Smart Farming, is also expected to make changes in farming behaviour in Indonesia, based on structured data.

The presence of RiTx Bertani originated from the results of Bayu's research while studying S3. At that time, he found a decline in the productivity of the agricultural sector by 20 percent in the 1980-2010 period. This is due to the lack of access to information for farmers on climate and weather uncertainty. Meanwhile, the prediction made by BMKG only reaches the district or city level, which according to Bayu is not quite accurate as a reference for agriculture considering that within 2 kilometres, the weather can be different. RiTx is equipped with a sensor that can take real-time data on agricultural and plantation land. The data obtained is in the form of weather, temperature, humidity, wind strength, soil pH and fertility.

The data is translated by algorithm into accurate information for farmers, that can be accessed through the application in the form of time information to add water and fertilizer to the current weather information. In addition, RiTx Bertani also provides pest identification features using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and educational features starting from the planting process to end-to-market (the process of selling agricultural products). According to Bayu, currently his startup can be used for 38 types of food and horticultural commodities and only takes 1 hour to install sensors in the field. Moreover, RiTx Bertani has been implemented in 22 regencies in Indonesia in collaboration with ministries and institutions, such as Bappenas, Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Communication and Informatics, Ministry of Health, Bank Indonesia, BNI, and several private industries. The target is that by 2021, RiTx Bertani can be applied in 76 regencies in Indonesia.