e-Portfolio
Industrial Talk 3
On 14th January 2024, there was an online talk by Dr Seah Choon Sen titled Unleashing The Power Of Emerging Technologies for Business Growth in Urban Farming Solution, or I-Farm. Dr Seah who is currently an Assistant Professor at Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) received his Doctorate in Information Technology from Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM). In this talk, Dr Seah talks about one of their innovations, I-Farm which is an e-commerce marketplace that offers fresh vegetables for residents obtained from urban farms in residential areas.
Poster for Talk @Technobizz
I-Farm is a solution to help residents during the COVID-19 Pandemic to buy fresh vegetables since people need to obey social distancing. Since there were less options and more difficult to obtain such vegetables, I-Farm helps residents to order fresh vegetables more easier.
One of the main selling points of I-Farm is the quality of vegetables produced. It may be priced higher, but they have couducted a study where out of 290 respondents, among 190 who were living in residential areas, 160 of them are interested to buy vegetables from local micro-farms. Most of them are also willing to buy quality vegetables even though it is more expensive to lead a better and healthy lifestyle.
Costs of running I-Farm initially which includes farming materials, operation costs, marketing and more, is totaled at RM 638,500. The total expenses every month equates to RM 14,144, while monthly income from harvested crops is a total of RM 122,988. Overall, the return of invesment (ROI) is at 17.05%, which according to Dr Seah, is quite high in the agriculture industry.
Cost Structure of I-Farm
To summarise, I thoroughly enjoyed the talk presented by Dr Seah. In order to have a successful innovation, studying the gaps in the market is essential as shown in the talk where I-Farm was initially a solution to help residents to purchase fresh vegetables when movement was limited due to the pandemic that started back in 2020.
For this talk, we have made a newsletter based on the contents of the talk. The following is what we made: