Start-up India along with the Department of Animal Husbandry announced the Animal Husbandry Start-up Grand challenge on Sep 2019. The challenge, launched by Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi in Mathura on 11th Sep last year, saw India's most promising dairy start-ups participating in the challenge.
A total of 157 entries were received and were scrutinized by Start-up India experts, AH Department experts and shortlisted finalists then presented to a jury of Senior Officials.
Co-founder Aashna Singh, Founder Param Singh - MoooFarm
The winners were congratulated by the Minister of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairy, Shri Giriraj Singh through a Video Conferencing Ceremony on Friday, May 8th 2020 evening.
MoS (Fisheries & AHD) Shri Sanjeev Kumar Balyan and Secretary (AHD) Shri Atul Chaturvedi were also present on the occasion.
The Challenge categorized the animal husbandry ecosystem issues into 6 categories. MoooFarm, an innovative agri-tech start-up bagged 1st prize for solving the Problem Statement-Ecommerce Solutions and won a cash prize of Rs. 10 Lacs for building innovative solutions to provide advisory services to the dairy farmers across the country. There were total 44 finalists in this category fighting for the position. Apart from the prize money; mentorship support, master classes and Incubation support will also be provided to the winners as told by Joint Secretary Shri Mihir Singh Jee.
MoooFarm is an agri-tech company that combines extension and technology to provide last-mile advisory support to the farmers at the right time, hence saving the farmers and their cattle from issues arising out of delay in addressing them timely. Farmers can connect via voice/video call with a network of qualified and experienced veterinarians using MoooFarm's mobile application, which is available on Play Store.
This has been exceptionally beneficial during these times of COVID-19 Lockdown as farmers are enquiring on cattle-health related problems and getting immediate advisory/solutions. To further support the farmers, MoooFarm also launched a toll-free number 18001237978 and has already provided more than 15000 minutes of free on-call advisory to farmers.
"About 70% of calls are related to cattle health, disease and treatment which clearly tells that E-Vet is the need of the hour," says Param Singh Founder MoooFarm.
"MoooFarm plans to use this money to further build its emerging technologies in order to disrupt the dairy industry and bring in White Tech revolution in India," adds Param Singh.
MoooFarm is also creating a machine learning engine which would be able to give varied solution recommendations to farmers based on inputs pertaining to their cattle and dairy farm.
MoooFarm also won an award from World Bank group in 2019 for their unique solution of 'Facial Recognition of cattle' and is extensively working on this breakthrough technology.
All these technologies will reach each and every small-holder farmer via MoooFarm's mobile based application and its network of Village level Entrepreneurs in a phased-out manner.