Kiao Farming Company:

We visit Lelin Farm in Kaohsiung’s Qishan District, which specializes in supplying Carrefour with fresh vegetables including Batavia lettuce and iceberg lettuce. The owner is not on the premises, and the staff are sitting in an air-conditioned office. It turns out that the owner merely has to access the messaging app Line and send commands to a “control box” to take care of fertilizer application and the supply of irrigation water.

At the back of the farm there are fertilizer tanks taller than a person, each of which is filled with a different concentrated fertilizer formula. The pipes accessing the tanks are complex, but all are connected to wall-mounted control boxes. Bee Wu, the CEO of Kiao Farming Company, which manages the control boxes, meets us to explain that this is the firm’s key technology: a control box with a modular design. Each box can execute two functions, while via commands from a programming language four boxes can simultaneously undertake overlapping multifunctional tasks including starting and stopping pumps, motors and fans, and controlling irrigation and fertilizer application.

Via Kiao Farming Company’s smart control boxes, farmers can use Line to remotely control plant irrigation and fertilizer application.

Kiao CEO Bee Wu (right) helps a customer use Line to apply fertilizer, putting “smart agriculture” into practice.

Changing agriculture with technology

In the past, technology providers would write programs based on farmers’ needs and put all the functions into a single control box. As a result, these devices cost upward of NT$200,000–300,000, and the price became a major obstacle to farmers trying to get into smart farming.

Wu says that his idea to make the boxes smaller was in fact the result of the “empathy” that he had built up from his own past entrepreneurial experience. Three years ago, he invested NT$1 million to become a part-time mushroom farmer, using bagasse (sugarcane waste) as the growing medium. He wrote a program to automate his mushroom cultivation, but things didn’t work out. He realized that the reason he failed was “the arrogance of technology providers.” There are a lot of details and specialized techniques required in agriculture that cannot be dealt with by automation alone.

The transition from arrogance to humility entails genuine understanding of farmers’ needs. Lay Shin-jong, a researcher at the Taoyuan District Agricultural Research and Extension Station of the Ministry of Agriculture, collated knowledge and technical information on the cultivation of fast-growing vegetables and fruit trees, and wanted to use a cloud platform to share these with farmers. But for farmers who get only NT$20–30 per bunch or head of vegetables, there was no way to get a worthwhile return on equipment costing NT$300,000, so Lay could only provide service to large farms at the top of the economic pyramid or those whose crops (such as orchids) command high unit prices.

Bee Wu saw a business opportunity he could take advantage of, and after talking things over with programmer and software tools developer Eric Kuo and marketing expert Carol Yang, the three agreed to form Kiao Farming Company in September of 2022. Kiao, which means “smart” in Taiwanese, invested in the design and production of IoT-enabled control boxes in the hope of not only making a profit from smart agriculture but also of benefiting society.

TaiwanICDF has introduced Kiao’s control-box technology into Thailand.

Tech from a farming perspective

To reduce the sales price, the team at Kiao developed a modular control box, meaning that the system is like the block-based coding used in digital classes for primary school students, with writing programs being like stacking building blocks, without the need to learn a programming language (“no code”). Reducing complexity by using modular control boxes in place of the large control boxes of the past is based on the same principle.

In the cultivation of dragon fruit, if the temperature is too high the plants are vulnerable to early fruit separation, resulting in lower yields. However, excessive spraying of water to lower the temperature can lead to damage from disease or pests. Lay Shin-jong created a real-time control system that sprays cooling water only if the temperature exceeds 35℃ and humidity is below 75%. In this way disease and pest damage can be avoided, while Kiao requires only two circuits in a control box to undertake smart spraying based on the above parameters.

The lower costs for the control boxes plus the fact that any ordinary electrician–plumber can install them have become the keys to their broader use. At present they are utilized in 670 greenhouses. Besides appealing to small farmers, they have also been purchased for the food and agriculture education programs at many schools and for community rooftop gardens. They are especially valuable to schools because there is no one around on weekends and holidays, and with no one to water the vegetables they would otherwise wither and die.

The Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund assists Thai farmers in using mobile phones to operate smart agriculture technology. (courtesy of TaiwanICDF)

Remote-controlled watering in Thailand

In Thailand, where 93% of the population use Line, one of the government’s objectives under the “smart agriculture” part of the Thailand 4.0 strategy is to attract new technologies, and the Taiwan International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF) has selected Kiao’s control boxes, which are recommended by Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture. Bee Wu says that Taiwan is already cooperating with Thailand’s Royal Project Foundation (RPF) on germplasm and agricultural technology. As an IoT vendor exporting to the RPF, Kiao will start its work at five agricultural stations for flowers, fruit, and vegetables in the Chiang Mai region of northern Thailand.

Allison Hsu, a high-ranking manager at TaiwanICDF, relates that Taiwan’s government has many cooperation and development programs with Southeast-Asian countries, and TaiwanICDF introduces startup firms to engage in public–private partnerships, giving the startup sector opportunities to develop the Southeast-Asian market.

Kiao has recently received an infusion of capital from the Business Angel Investment Program of the National Development Fund, and has begun working with Taiwan Sugar Corporation to introduce smart IoT pig housing. From vegetable farms to livestock ranches, from Taiwan to overseas, smart agriculture is using technology to replace human labor. Perhaps a future in which farmers no longer have to toil by the sweat of their brow under a fierce sun is more than just a dream.

Smart agriculture aims for a future in which farmers no longer have to bow their heads as they toil under a fierce sun.