Latin American start-up creates web platform to help worldwide farmers

A small team of developers based in a rural area of South America has spent the past four years building up a web platform known as Tambero, which is dedicated to helping farmers and livestock producers improve productivity.

After reaching thousands of users in multiple languages, the company is getting ready for the next step.

¨About 80 percent of farmers have cell phones which are changing to Smartphones and this is giving computers to many people in the world, changing the countryside in a way that people in the cities cannot now even imagine,¨ said Eddie Rodriguez von der Becke, founder and CEO of Tambero.

Rodriguez von der Becke left a position creating corporate software in 2011 for companies across Latin America and moved to a rural farming community in the province of Cordoba, Argentina.

¨The rural user is new to Internet and this is the great new wave,¨ added Rodriguez, 38 and originally from Buenos Aires.
He added that his relocation four years ago to Morteros, a farming town of 20,000 people located some 250 miles from the closest city has helped him to understand the needs of farmers and develop the new tool.

¨Down the line, farmers are the same all over as they all seek to produce more or turn out better products,¨ he said.

¨If you raise cows, goats, you can insert information such as date of birth, birth labor, and based on that data the system will give you suggestions such as the best time to start or stop milking or for inseminations. Also, based on satellite data, the system analyzes the temperature and lets farmers know if any heat or humidity could be causing stress to animals and gives suggestions,¨ he said.

Following changes in March that allow users to put the text in their own languages, including several just in India, other changes coming to the platform include those to be generated from agreements with institutions relating to information about various issues like diseases.

Before March, information on the platform was only in Spanish and English, but since then it has expanded to include multiple languages, he added. The system now has over 40,000 users, largely in Latin America, but also reaching countries across the world such as Australia and Mongolia. Eventually, through alliances with companies like Facebook, the company expects millions will be reached.

¨Our idea is that starting next month we would be able to sell a premium version. The goal would be to convert 1 percent of our users to a premium version which will not be free,¨ he said. The goal would be to obtain some $100,000 in revenue per each country, he said.

Another source of revenue will be commissions to be obtained from recommending products. ¨We have the capacity of knowing the farmers, like which animals and land they own. We won´t sell that information but through algorithms we can recommend products,¨ he said.