Digital Farmhand
Fiji
Developed in 2018 by engineers of University of Sydney, the Digital Farmhand is a modular low-cost platform designed to assist smallholder farmers in improving their productivity and yields, and ultimately provide a more reliable income amidst changing markets and climates. It is a small electric tractor-like vehicle that can tow a variety of implements such as seeders, weeders and bed preparation tools. The Digital Farmhand can also use accessible smartphone technologies along with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide crop analytics such as yield estimation, pest and disease identification, as well as precision automation of many labour intensive farm tasks, e.g. weeding, spraying and seeding. After field trials in 2018 in Fiji and 2019 in Samoa, the platform is being used by smallholder farmers in the two states.
Digital Solution (DS) Category
Digital Agriculture
Digital Solution Type (sub-category)
Farm management services, AI-Big data based solutions, Pest and disease management
Delivery type (format)
Web based platform
Mobile app
Artificial intelligence (AI)
DS supplier-user category
Business to business
Business to consumers
Type of entity (ICT developer-supplier)
Academic/research
Name of supplier/developer
University of Sydney
Primary Users
Farmers , Agribusiness / private company
Digital Solution Development Stage
Commercial stage (broad use use locally)
Number of users or subscribers
Measurable positive impact(s) by Digital Solution (DS) on target users and/or audience
Digital Solution Geographic scope
All over Fiji
Name of Digital village(s), districts, communes where DS is used/deployed
On-line resource links (Web-page links, links to videos, links to reports, etc)
DS Links to FAO, UN and other Development agencies projects, initiatives and programmes