GreenVisions PH: a soil test that answers in minutes instead of months
A Philippine social enterprise built a field device that reads soil nutrients in seven minutes and prints a crop-specific fertilizer plan on the spot.
The number that stopped me was this one: fewer than one in 200 Filipino farmers has ever had their soil tested. Not because they don't care, but because the official route means drying the sample, pounding it with a mallet, sieving it through a fish net, bagging it, delivering it to a regional lab, and then waiting three to six months. By then the season is gone, so most farmers fertilize by feel, reading the color of the leaves.
GreenVisions PH, a small social enterprise in Davao founded by electrical engineer Lorilyn Daquioag (who previously worked on the Philippines' first university-built nanosatellites), attacks exactly that delay. Its field device, the AID-FMM, goes straight into the ground and measures nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pH, moisture, and temperature. A first recommendation appears in under a minute, the full reading takes seven, and the device prints a plain paper slip: what to apply, how much, and how often.
The clever part is that the recommendation is not generic. The farmer enters the crop and its growth stage (vegetative or fruiting), and the model maps sensor readings against Philippine soil references, FAO data, and crop-specific nutrient requirements, refined through two years of field pilots. The results then flow into a monitoring platform, AIMS, so a farm finally has a history instead of a calendar with scribbles.
The pilot stories are concrete. One banana grower discovered his soil was so acidic that most of what he spread never reached the roots; cutting back to what the soil actually needed dropped his cost per application from about 7,000 to 2,400 pesos. The company reports fertilizer use falling at least 30% across its pilots, though these are its own figures.
What I like most is the go-to-market. Daquioag says plainly that farmers don't care about AI, so the team runs informal coffee sessions with free soil testing before any product is mentioned. Sometimes the smartest AI product is the one that never says the word.
Sources
- Mindanao Times, Hospital for Farms: AI-powered agritech device transforming farming from guesswork to precision: https://www.mindanaotimes.com.ph/hospital-for-farms-ai-powered-agritech-app-transforming-farming-from-guesswork-to-precision/