Mark Cheung

A team of four Yale graduate students and one Stanford University student won the 2021 Geneva Challenge for their pitch of “Buyby,” an app offering Indian farmers a platform to sell — rather than burn — agricultural byproducts. 

The Geneva Challenge, hosted every year by the Graduate Institute, Geneva, focuses on the theme of “crisis management” and seeks to inspire an interdisciplinary approach to human development. This year, there were 83 entries submitted by 333 graduate students from across the globe. The winning team receives $10,000. This year’s winning pitch offered a solution to reduce air pollution in the Punjab region in India, approximately a third of which is caused by burning stubble, the remains of a crop field after harvesting. The pitch also helps increase farmers’ financial autonomy by offering a platform for them to directly sell their produce to big companies.

“We really wanted to create a market-based solution instead of one that relied on government policies because in the past … the government would not deliver what they said they wanted to do,” Viviana Li SOM ’22, a member of the ‘Project Buyby’ team, told the News. “The government said they would provide money for farmers to use other tools to not burn their crops at the end of the season, but were not able to deliver that monetary policy, so farmers stopped using the tools and burnt their crops.”

Li explained that this burning process produces greenhouse gases, contributing to air pollution. Her team’s app provides monetary incentives that connect small farmers with larger market players who are looking to purchase this stubble for various industrial applications. 

She said that a digital solution to the problem would be widely accessible to people in the Punjab region because of the increasing access to mobile development as well as low-cost internet devices in rural India. 

The “Buyby” app also addresses the distrust farmers have with the government by incorporating the e-wallet “Paytm” into their platform, which uses traceable electronic payments to minimize concerns about corruption, according to the team’s report. 

Li added that a major issue the team discovered in its regional stakeholder interviews was the high illiteracy rate among smallholder farmers in India; a report by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized sector showed that over 45 percent of small and marginal farmers in India are illiterate. 

To mitigate this challenge, the “Buyby” app uses mobile audio features and pictures to reduce the need for reading and writing, according to the report. The app also uses artificial intelligence to determine the crops and byproducts available from images that are uploaded by the farmers. 

“There is a growing market for ‘agritech’, which is the intersection of agriculture and technology,” Venu King ENV ’22, another team member, told the News. “We thought a solution in this space might actually be able to get movement on the ground and even if someone else were to take it up in India, they could implement this. Also, we chose to recognize that this issue exists in a lot of other areas, so we wanted our solution to not just be applicable within India, but outside of India, as well.” 

King explained that the team selected India because its technology industry is growing quickly, as Silicon Valley and the European Union are outsourcing more to India. This trend, she said, provides a stable foundation for the emergence of ‘agritech.’ Additionally, the area was of special interest to the group given that members of King’s family are farmers from the area. 

To ensure fair prices, the “Buyby” app sets a minimum level based on byproduct prices retrieved from publicly-available databases and current Indian crop prices.

However, the team is struggling to secure investors to make the pitch a reality. Li and King said that the app is not currently in development, but they hope it will be in the future.

“We’re talking about potentially very small margins and a very distributed market, which makes the app tricky for investors,” Todd Cort, a lecturer in sustainability at the Yale School of Management, told the News. “You’re probably having to negotiate contracts with a large number of farmers to get a significant input, so I think that there’s likely a challenge of scale and cost with negotiating these contracts. The plus side, of course, is that you can offer the biomass incredibly cheaply because there is no other market for it.” 

Each year, approximately 84 million tons of stubble is burned on fields in India.