Agenda
Day 1: 11th October 2023
8:30 AM
- 45 Mins
Registration
9:15 AM
- 15 Mins
- Kashti
ThinkAg Welcome Remarks
9:30 AM
- 15 Mins
- Kashti
Rabo Foundation Opening Remarks
9:45 AM
- 15 Mins
- Kashti
Keynote Address
10:00 AM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Smallholder - Centric Innovation
Inclusive Innovation: Empowering smallholder farmers in digitized agri value chains
- Digitized output supply chain solutions have been a core offering to emerge in Indian AgTech – how and to what extent have they addressed the structural challenges inherent to smallholder farming?
- How can smallholders’ access to digitized market linkage solutions be enhanced? What innovations best enable smallholder price realization on account of the efficiency, transparency and traceability gains they foster?
- What institutions and innovations are key for smallholder inclusion in export value chains? How can quality and competitiveness be ensured?
- How does production by smallholders impact the environmental footprint of an agri value chain? What innovations can be linked with digitized supply chain solutions to facilitate their decarbonization?
11:15 AM
- 15 Mins
Coffee and Conversation
11:30 AM
- 30 Mins
- Kashti
Smallholder - Centric Innovation
Innovation Showcase: Solving for smallholders
12:00 PM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Smallholder - Centric Innovation
Promoting Precision: Enabling precision agriculture for improved farm incomes
- Data captured by sensing technologies – local (IoT, drones) and remote (satellite), along with AI models can facilitate informed decisions about input choices, resource usage, climactic and soil conditions, pest and disease management. Mechanization (drones, robotics) can leverage these insights for precise farming. Which precision farming applications have shown promise for smallholder’s productivity and price realization? What are some models that can drive access for and adoption by smallholders?
- How can precision farming tech best be used to help smallholder adapt to ongoing climate variability? What services and support are critical for this?
- Can a payments for ecosystem services (PES) model, carbon market or green credit linkage be leveraged to incentivize or enhance affordability of precision farming technologies? How can the climate impacts be accurately modeled and measured?
1:15 PM
- 45 Mins
Lunch
2:00 PM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Data-driven AgFinancing
Bankrolling Progress: Unlocking farmer and value chain financing through digitization
- The credit needs of agri value chain players have long been underserved due to challenges financiers face in accessing data, executing credit recovery and more broadly, developing credit products that sync with agricultural cash flows.
- What have been the key obstacles in this effort? How can digitization address these gaps? What are some partnership models between financiers and startups or other entities with detailed value chain data and user access that have yielded promising results? What are some institutional frameworks, public good investments that can help accelerate such collaborations?
3:15 PM
- 15 Mins
Coffee and Conversation
3:30 PM
- 30 Mins
- Kashti
Data-driven AgFinancing
Innovation Showcase: Unlocking financing for agri-food systems
4:00 PM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Data-driven AgFinancing
Reaching for resilience: De-risking climate challenges with innovations in technology and climate-finance
- What are the added advantages of data and digitization for derisking climate challenges in agriculture? How can AgInsureTech innovations effectively protect the agri-food ecosystem and its members from ongoing impacts of climate change?
- What role do blended finance solutions have in getting such solutions off the ground? What innovations can help augment the verifiability of such mechanisms? What are some key learnings from geographies that have already implemented these mechanisms at scale? How do they need to be adapted for India? What are some other ways agri-food value chains can be plugged into carbon markets?
5:30 PM
- 60 Mins
- Kashti
Partner Session
Rabo Partnerships: Risk Analysis solutions for a better world
- A deep dive into Rabo Partnership’s Risk Analytics solutions – Automated Credit Decisioning as well as Automated Loan Monitoring and Collection solutions
5:30 PM
- 75 Mins
- Activity Room
Partner Session
Digitising the rural ecosystem holistically- The Mastercard Challenge [invite-only]
5:15 PM
- 60 Mins
Closing Remarks
7:30 PM
Networking and Cocktail Dinner
Day 2: 12th October 2023
8:45 AM
- 60 Mins
- Kashti
Partner Session
Rabo Acorn: Agroforestry meets technology: Connecting smallholder farmers in the carbon market
- A behind the curtain look at Acorn’s remote sensing techniques and carbon accounting methodology to connect smallholder farmers to the voluntary carbon market
10:00 AM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Advances in AgBioTech
Boosting Biologicals: Fostering climate-smart productivity in agriculture
- AgBiological farming inputs have the potential to enhance agricultural productivity while mitigating or actively sequestering carbon – What are the key innovation areas to emerge in this space? In what ways do synthesized and plant-derived AgBiologicals defer? Are they each best suited to specific applications?
- What are the barriers innovators face in developing AgBiologicals, driving their adoption? Are their challenges associated with their comparison to chemical inputs? What ecosystem support and infrastructural access do early-stage innovators need for their – R&D and go-to-market activities?
- Globally, the regenerative effects of using AgBiologicals have begun being linked with carbon market offerings – what have been some key learnings and challenges to emerge? What have some successful approaches to accurately measuring the extent of decarbonisation? In what ways would these approaches need to be recontextualized for
India?
11:15 AM
- 15 Mins
Coffee and Conversation
11:30 AM
- 30 Mins
- Kashti
Advances in AgBioTech
Innovation Showcase: BioTechnology Breakthroughs
12:00 PM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Advances in AgBioTech
Sowing Sustainability: Cultivating seed solutions for health and climate
- What have been some promising breakthroughs in seed R&D? In what ways has the introduction of digital and computational (AI) tools to track phenotypic data and map them to genetic sequences or breeding lines moved the needle forward?
- Are there recommended approaches innovators should take in selecting traits to optimize for? What are the distinctions between optimizing for nutritional composition vs tolerance to environmental conditions? In India, which are the problems spaces that would most benefit from novel seed solutions? How does the India’s agro-climatic diversity aid or hinder?
- How would the introduction of genetic editing technologies impact seed development in India? What innovations will have the first line of impact? What are some persistent challenges? How can innovators, seed corporates and policymakers work together to resolve them?
1:15 PM
- 45 Mins
Lunch
2:00 PM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Bridging India's Protein Gap
Amplifying Access: Advancing technology-enabled access to protein nutrition
- India’s growing population, rising rate of meat consumption and sustained protein insufficiency together highlight the need for advancing protein value chains’ productivity and sustainability. What are some key technology solutions addressing value chain predictability and produce preservation? To what extent have they impacted production, consumption and wastage in these value chains?
- What are some promising innovations to feed technology that can enhance productivity and lower carbon footprint of these value chains? What are some promising ‘agri-waste to feed’ solutions to emerge? To what extent can they decarbonize the production process?
- Precision insights on management of dairy, aquaculture and poultry farms as well as conditions for fishery, are key to enhancing their productivity – how can such technology innovations be scaled? What are some approaches relevant to making them available to smallholders?
3:15 PM
- 15 Mins
Coffee and Conversation
3:30 PM
- 30 Mins
- Kashti
Bridging India's Protein Gap
Innovation Showcase: Promising protein solutions
4:00 PM
- 75 Mins
- Kashti
Looking ahead: Decarbonizing Indian agri-food - A Circular Economy Approach
- Climate-conscious imperatives – the development and deployment of of low-carbon materials, sustainable use of natural resources, the shift to green energy sources and minimization of loss and waste – will be indispensable aspects of agri-food innovation going forward. How should these transitions be approached? Are there applicable learnings from comparable geographies and other sectors of the economy?
- What role can holistic paradigms like circular agriculture play in a low emissions
strategy for agri-food ecosystems? What are some challenges that will need to be overcome for their incorporation? - Which technology innovations can best aid and enable the decarbonization of agrifood systems? How can their development be supported and adoption accelerated?
5:15 PM
- 15 Mins