Soil health and traceability for sugarcane and sesame farmers

Who we serve

 We work with farmer unions growing two cash crops at the edge of viability.

 Sugarcane is delivered to the mill within 24 hours of cutting or it loses sucrose. Convoys must be coordinated. Prices follow the FRP formula. Mill payments arrive 30–90 days late, pushing farmers to moneylenders at 60–150% annual. Traders take Rs 150–250 per ton for the logistics glue no one else provides.

 Sesame is a drought-tolerant, rain-dependent cash crop that builds soil when grown well. Small plots, thin margins, volatile prices. Often the first rotation farmers try to escape sugarcane monoculture. No organised buyer, no contract, no price discovery.

 These are skilled farmers. They know their crop. What they lack is everything around the farm: affordable finance, mill logistics, rain foresight, market access for sesame, and — quietly but catastrophically — visibility into what their soil is doing under continuous cane cycles.

The reality eating their future

 Ratooning is failing. Second-year ratoon yields fall 20–40%. Farmers replough after one or two ratoons, tearing up more soil and restarting the depletion cycle. India's sugarcane productivity has dropped measurably over the last decade. The farmer feels the fall but can't see why.

Pre-harvest burning is normal because green-harvest labour isn't available at scale. Each burn cuts soil organic carbon by 20–45%. The trash that would restore the soil goes up in smoke.

Rain is the swing factor. Monsoons arrive later, leave earlier, drop more on fewer days. A 10-day planting window collapses to three. A dry spell at flowering wipes out sesame yield. No field-level forecast reaches the farmer.

Farm skills ≠ finance skills. A good farmer is not automatically a good borrower, scheduler, or negotiator. The trader arbitrages that gap. The union is best placed to close it but has a ledger and WhatsApp.

The carbon value is left on the ground. Trash mulching rebuilds soil carbon and lifts sugar yield (~28% with intercrop). Intercropping with pulses restores nitrogen and adds a second income. None of this reaches the voluntary carbon market — so the economics push farmers back to monoculture and burn.

What we already have

Live with unions in India: a farmer-facing app and union operator workflows; ten years of Sentinel-2 history per field giving soil-health trajectory, yield consistency and timing; a blockchain coordination layer with field-level digital assets tying each field to its crop commitment, loan and certificate stack, plus on-chain mill escrow; trained operators, onboarded groups, live mill conversations; real commodity flows.

This is our TRL 6 foundation: system demonstrated in a real operational environment with real farmers, real mills, real crop cycles.

What we can't do alone

 Three things the farmer and union can't yet use — which is where we need a tech partner:

 1. Soil and carbon that pay the farmer. Convert our satellite soil-health signal plus farmer-reported regenerative practice (no-burn, trash mulching, intercropping) into verified carbon outcomes farmers can sell — so regeneration becomes revenue, not sacrifice. 

2. Farm-level decisions that close the farm/finance gap. Turn field data into practical advice and logistics the union can deliver: when to plant around a shifting monsoon, when to schedule a harvest convoy so the mill queue doesn't cost sucrose, which field to ratoon versus rotate with sesame. 

3. Traceability fit for EU markets. Turn our field-level provenance, practices and soil trajectory into proof EU buyers trust under tightening due-diligence rules — so verified regenerative sugar and sesame reach EU markets at a premium.

Partners can bring software or hardware. Shared starting point: smallholder is the user, union is the operator, outputs survive on a low-bandwidth phone.

What we bring 

Operating farmer unions (3000+ farmers, 4 unions) and live commodity flows; a working satellite + blockchain stack; field-level data at genuine scale and depth; a team that builds for low-literacy, low-bandwidth users; open-source methodology published as public goods. Blockchain Financial infrastructure.

Together under GATE 5.0

A 12-month bounded scope. Integrate the partner's capability. Validate with real farmer unions. Issue the first regenerative-verified carbon outcomes, or rain-indexed advisories, or harvest-to-mill scheduling that survives a monsoon week. Publish the methodology.

Who we hope to hear from: EU-established SME (<250 FTE), ideally outside the Netherlands, with experience in regenerative agriculture, soil carbon, weather risk, EU-traceability. Ready to commit to the GATE 5.0 calendar from July 2026.