Cultivando Futuro Take Home the TFF Challenge Grand Prize!
What a weekend it’s been! From Innovation Tours through Amsterdam, to drinks on the water, to two days full of inspiring people, sensory reality, biohacking, morning raves, midnight frites, and summer heat!
Cultivando Futuro were named the Grand Prize winner of the Thought For Food Challenge! This team from Colombia has created an information and agro-commerce platform that leverages open data to analyze market trends and provide key information to farmers, wholesale buyers and organizations, while facilitating direct sales between farmers, buyers, and exporters. Co-Founders, Dario Gonzalez, Carlos Castellanos, Edisson Ballesteros launched the platform three months ago and we can’t wait to see what they do in the coming three months!
Edisson Ballesteros, says; “With this money, we aim to register 1000 farmers on the Cultivando Futuro platform. We will also use the money to collect all the data NGOs and farmer unions in Colombia need to make informed decisions about the future.”
ICYMI: Here are the top 10 TFF Challenge Finalists for 2017!
And in a TFF Global Summit first, two of Thought For Food’s core values, collaboration & openness, were brought to life when TFF Challenge Runner-Up team Agrospheres, chose to split the $7500 entirely between fellow finalist teams Sparky and Climate Edge in a surprise announcement! Agrospheres, who have developed an enzyme delivery system that allows farmers to degrade pesticides in a matter of hours, also won the $5000 Kirchner Food Prize.
Payam Pourtaheri says; “We became so close to every team during the TFF bootcamp. We decided it’s better to share among everyone because we feel like a family. After spending one week with the teams, we understood how Sparky and Climate Edge could benefit their customers with the prize money in the short term. We were not surprised by the support at the Summit because of all the support we received in the weeks before the summit. TFF is probably the best week in Agrospheres’ career. TFF literally invests in the companies - it’s so much more than many other competitions.”
Team Sparky from Uganda will use the money to finish the prototype of their thermo-dehydrator for fruits and vegetables, and begin customer trials with smallholder farmers in Uganda. Climate Edge from the United Kingdom will use the money to finance the latest hardware production of weather sensors to boost their number of paying subscription smallholder farmers in Latin America and Africa.
Winners of the $2500 Borlaug Foundation “Take it to the Farmer” Prize are team From Challenge to Opportunity, from India, who will use the money to fulfil the administrative requirements to sell their seaweed-based fertilizer and nutrient-rich cookies. Wastebusters, from Malaysia won the $5000 Syngenta Open Business Model Prize and will use the money to increase their manufacturing capabilities and refine their production process.
We will have more updates and recaps from the TFF Summit coming up over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
Photos by Ferdy Damman