WayCool Foods, an agri-tech platform, has partnered with Bagalkot’s University of Horticultural Sciences, Bagalkot (UHS) to support farmers and implement a Package of Practices (POPs). This collaboration will bring together a repository of over 125 crop-specific PoPs under the Outgrow App, making it easier for farmers to access the information at their fingertips.

Additionally, the partnership aims to nurture the future talent pool in the agriculture sector by offering internship opportunities. As part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), students will also be offered training and a Certification Programme for Outgrow Crop Advisors and Outgrow Network Partners.

Commenting on the partnership, Sendhil Kumar, head of outgrow and farmer engagement at Waycool, said, “Through this collaborative partnership, we want to bring in our technology edge and make the information accessible to farmers at the touch of a button. Our AI-based engagement platform, Outgrow, has the existing tech infrastructure and we want further to enhance it with the addition of this PoP digitisation. I am confident that this move will benefit many farmers and help them make better crop decisions, making agriculture profitable and sustainable.”

Dr. T B Allolli, registrar at UHS, added, “We are thrilled that our institutions’ rich work in the PoP space will now be available to all farmers across the state and country, making it easy to access for them. Our students also get a great opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the industry through this MoU and get hands-on experience.”

The MoU also establishes the scope for installing Outgrow’s AI-based weather stations at the grape orchard of UHS-B under the National Agricultural Higher Education Program, where collaborative research and training programmes will be conducted. Students at the University will benefit from live demonstrations at Waycool’s ‘Outgrow Agricultural Research Station’(OARS), a model farm near Hosur, Tamil Nadu, for research purposes.

Outgrow is the agricultural and farmers' engagement arm of WayCool, established on 4th March 2020. Its AI-based Outgrow app, which has over 2 lakh downloads, offers advisory solutions to over 1,50,000 farmers. This includes services like crop information health, automated soil testing, climatic condition real-time mandi price and holistic farm advisory for the farmer's network in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana.