KisanHub Pioneering Supply Chain Platform Integrates with Farmplan’s Gatekeeper Farm Management Solution to Provide a Seamless Experience for its Users

The integration between KisanHub and Gatekeeper is set to improve data connectivity throughout the agri-supply chain, providing a single source of truth to better inform crop management and procurement decisions.

The KisanHub-Gatekeeper integration is available in April 2020. It will enable users to take advantage of the array of functionality found on KisanHub’s platform, without manually duplicating any data. In a few clicks, growers can expressly permission selected crops zones and operations from Farmplan’s Gatekeeper onto the KisanHub platform.

Farmplan is a division of the global Proagrica business, best known for its core integration, workflow and insight solutions and is providing the data exchange capability to securely deliver the grower data.

Key to this integration, is the inclusion of crop boundaries from Gatekeeper into the KisanHub platform, a prerequisite of accessing other platform tools. These tools include a crop monitoring app, quality tracking with market suitability, pest and disease predictions and yield models. 

Another key aspect is the importing of planting/sowing and harvest dates for these crops, which when combined with other platform data, provide the basis for crop management and procurement planning, improving operational efficiency and allowing more informed decisions. 

Jonny Kerley, Head of Product at KisanHub explains: “Software systems in the form of point solutions have been used by the agricultural industry since the early 2000s and this process has accelerated in recent years with a number of agri-tech companies providing different solutions. These point solutions, for example a soil moisture sensor, rarely integrate or talk to each other, reducing accessibility. 

“KisanHub’s horizontally scaled platform brings these data sets together in one place, allowing more accurate and informed decisions across the supply chain. Similar to the computing industry in the early 1980s, agri-tech solutions will transition from vertically integrated to horizontally scaled systems. 

“This will revolutionise the agricultural industry, allowing easier exchange of information and standardisation across multiple systems. We are extremely excited at KisanHub to be an integral part of this journey, alongside precision farming and crop management systems such as Farmplan’s Gatekeeper. With the ease of use provided by Proagrica to connect and move this data between Gatekeeper and KisanHub it becomes easier to create connections saving both time and money.”

Growing up in the industry gave Jonny an early appreciation and affinity with agriculture, attributes that were deepened by 6 years as a research manager in agricultural and horticultural crop trials and a further role as an agri-food consultant. 

Now, Jonny’s role at KisanHub is to steer and design the development of the software, particularly in the crop intelligence and data insights departments, to ensure it meets the 21^st century requirements of the agricultural industry and provides solutions to on-the-ground customer problems. 

Jonny further describes: “Data requires organisation and interpretation to provide information. This information becomes knowledge when the context is sufficient. Robust data, that is not contained in segregated silos is essential to the supply chain, something that KisanHub strives to provide, and is part of the reason for this integration with Gatekeeper through Proagrica. 

“Our cloud-based platform and mobile app can capture and analyse data in context, providing actionable knowledge in real-time to our users. It also allows the platform to consolidate information across a wide geographical area, helping to anticipate and analyse crop parameters such as quality and yield across different fields, growers or regions. Data sets are connected yet secure; spread across remote sites, accessible anywhere and shareable when desired.” 

KisanHub has developed the platform by working closely with our customers, including some of the largest growers and producer groups in the UK and global fresh produce sector: Ian Anderson the Divisional Managing Director at Burgess Farms Produce described: “Our focus is on delivering consistent premium quality at the lowest unit cost possible whilst delivering sustainable returns to our growers. To achieve this goal we need accurate data and advance knowledge of both crop and seasonal developments so that we can ensure optimum crop usage. 

“The partnership between ourselves, our growers and the KisanHub team will allow us to use live data to help anticipate crop size splits and yields, to generate the maximum possible saleable fractions and the best financial outcome for our growers and customers.

“KisanHub’s platform enables us to capture data across a wide portfolio of growers and consolidate that information into one central resource. It provides an opportunity for us to access and analyse our data quickly, transforming the way we make these essential management decisions moving forward.”

Proagrica’s Precision Agriculture Development Director, Alistair Knott said: “This type of collaboration is exactly what is needed to ensure the value from systems data is scalably realised. Growers, agronomists and other service provider systems will, through choice or functionality, be different. Each has its place in the helping growers to be more productive and so more profitable, and so it is our responsibility to make our growers experience as easy and simple as possible. Gatekeeper, as the backbone IT system to so many growers, is ensuring that crop optimisation solutions such as KisanHub can seamlessly fit into that IT infrastructure.”

Press release originally published here.