DenizBank promotes intelligent agriculture across Turkey

In response to the growing need to safeguard the future of the country’s agriculture, DenizBank launched ‘Deniz’den Toprağa’, its ‘Augmented Agriculture Intelligence’ app in 2017. “With this project, we wanted to transform agriculture into modern technology-based and profitable work without increasing the manual labor done by farmers,” says Gürhan Çam.

DenizBank’s Agricultural Banking department and Innovation Committee collaborated on the solution, which was awarded First Prize in the Best New Product or Service category in Efma’s 2017 DMI Innovation Awards. The ‘Agri app’ focuses on features that help boost users’ productivity and yield, and decrease their workload, without sacrificing quality or increasing costs.

“The most critical of these features are: the ‘Phenology Engine’ that simulates growth and reminds and advises farmers on how to get the best yield, and the ‘Ask an engineer’ section, which allows farmers to ask any question they wish to agricultural engineers with just one click,” says Gürhan Çam.

While the app was designed with future generations in mind, DenizBank had to ensure it would serve and appeal to the current generation of farmers, working in the fields right now. “Unfortunately, a 53-year-old farmer does not have the digital proficiency of a young adult. Furthermore, they do not believe that a mobile app can actually help them. That brought about another challenge for us – how to convince our customers that a digital application can aid them in what can be described as ‘hands-on’ work,” says Canan Aytekin.

Faced with such resistance from older users, DenizBank’s Innovation Committee called upon the bank’s Agricultural Banking department, the market leader among the private banks in Turkey and an expert in defining their users’ needs.

“Together, we decided to embark on a journey that will help us understand the digital needs of our agricultural banking customers. With the help of our third party partner, we designed an approach method and service model that will convey our intent and help us reach our customers. In this project, we decided to use ‘digital change agents’ from within the farming community to inform and lead digital transformation of agricultural production in rural areas. Since the new generation is digitally native from birth, choosing them as drivers of digital change was the obvious choice,” says Gürhan Çam.

“Our third party partner set off on a journey to meet and learn about our customers in various villages across Turkey. Three professionals (a social anthropologist, a sociologist, and a marketing strategist) talked, worked and lived with farmers in Turkey for two weeks and returned with incredible insights that can only be observed by participating in everyday life in a village. That was the difference compared to standard research or surveys,” says Canan Aytekin.

According to Gürhan Çam, this shift towards more modern and sustainable farming comes at a time when entire industries are transforming, ‘going digital’, and facing threats from the natural world. “The world is changing, the tsunami called digital has disrupted nearly every industry one way or another. There is also the changing climate, overpopulation and decrease in farmlands. These are our challenges we face as the world.”

“Yet we also have incredible opportunities in front of us: incredible applications of the internet of things (IoT), use of drones for thermal imaging and irrigation, use of satellite images to analyze crops and so on. We cannot sit by and wait while these opportunities and challenges are right in front of us. For the sake of our country, our organization and Turkish farmers in general, we have to take action and start our transformation to achieve more modern and sustainable farming,” says Çam.

Looking beyond the business opportunities inherent in these challenges, Canan Aytekin sees the project as the perfect occasion to kick-start a sustainable future for the new generation of farmers.

“As a bank we are often seen as ‘profit-oriented’. However, neither bank nor the customers can survive if their relationship is not mutually beneficial. That’s why we aim to educate and create the new generation of ‘digital farmers’ that will effectively use all of the technologies mentioned and more, in their production process. This initiative also might help us solve a longstanding social pain point: internal migration and overpopulation of metropoles,” she says.

Throughout the course of the project, DenizBank got to know its customers better than ever, even uncovering results they could not have foreseen. “For instance, in some regions of Turkey, young people were excluded from decision-making processes by their elders, while in a different region, they were the decision makers. We did not expect such stark differences in approaches to inclusion of young people in agricultural work,” says Aytekin.

“We also learned that when we mention the word “technology”, most farmers only think about mechanical vehicles or tools such as tractors. Digital technology is too intangible for them. This is an incredible insight for us,” reveals Gürhan Çam.

“But we were right about choosing young people as our change agents. The younger generation is eager to learn about their families’ line of work, but they are discouraged by labor intensiveness, low-profitability, un-predictability and the low recognition the work receives from the society. Yet, they are hopeful, and so are we,” he adds.

“The research also provided us with some unexpected potential allies: women. Women in rural areas are much more proficient in the digital world. They are accustomed to using social media in their lives and in some cases, for work. Thus, they can see the benefits it could provide more clearly than men.”

After a successful launch, the project promises to receive further recognition as DenizBank consolidates its research in the future. “We hope to expand our research into more regions of Turkey and start collaborating with our selected change agents in the future,” concludes Canan Aytekin.