KUALA LUMPUR: Agrocloud Sdn Bhd and Malaysian Cocoa Board (MCB) will collaborate and assist Malaysian cocoa smallholders in utilising the latest available technology to improve their efficiency and productivity to achieve better earnings from the crop.
Both parties have inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in the recently held Expo Dubai 2020 in United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Agrocloud managing director Marcus Hon said other than increasing the productivity and income of smallholders, traceability and sustainability are key information that consumers look for as assurance that the cocoa product they are consuming are of the highest quality, ethically produced and environmentally sustainable.
“Our precision agriculture advisory tools in place today for paddy smallholders are working well.
“Thus, we have extended the technology to other crops, in this case for cocoa.
“We are partnering MCB to develop a Cocoa information management system (CIMS) so that cocoa plantation can be managed similar to an airline managing its fleet,” Marcus said in a statement today.
Agrocloud, a subsidiary of Key Alliance Group Bhd, through its exclusive partnership with Austrian agritech leader Pessl Instruments, are extending their technology to support smallholders that are planting cocoa after initial successful test run with rice smallholders in Malaysia.
The technology, deployed in certain rice farms in Malaysia, has seen promising results, thus deploying in cocoa farms can provide better datasets, in a holistic approach to deliver a system that solves crop monitoring in Malaysia.
Marcus said the CIMS is not only for small smallholders, but large plantation smallholders can also benefit from the technology to fully digitalise their operations.
Agrocloud is in talks with a major cocoa company in Malaysia to adopt the CIMS to its operations.
Source: New Straits Times
