Tun Yat

About

Tun Yat (means tilling in Burmese) is an on-demand farming-as-a-service (FaaS) platform connecting farmers to machine suppliers, fertilizer and seeds, solar water pumps and agri-lenders. It focuses on how to use mechanization and other inputs to improve farmer yields. 

Tun Yat offers a standardized service across a fragmented market, offering affordable, reliable and high-quality tractor and harvester rental services. Tun Yat enables greater yields through machinery, provision of inputs, crop buy-back, linkages to agri-lenders, and food ingredient sourcing and production. 

Capability and features

Tun Yat provides mechanization and FaaS using American, Japanese and European tractors and combine harvesters. Tun Yat also offers specialized implements including laser-levelers, bean headers and peanut pickers. They match market pricing and provide well-trained machine operators. Farmers pay a market-rate per acre to rent machines for land preparation and harvesting crops including rice, maize, sesame, groundnut, and mung beans. 

Farmers pay for machine bookings or orders using a mobile wallet provider that is integrated with Tun Yat’s Facebook platform. This transaction data is shared with NBFIs, MFI, and banks for lending against farmer transactions, credit-scoring and receivables. Tun Yat’s IoT sensor devices attached to machines collect accurate machine utilization data, which tractor dealers and banks providing tractor loans can analyze. Tun Yat offers a buy-back scheme for its maize farmers and is now sourcing rice, groundnut and sesame from its harvester and tilling farmer customers, working with their partners in food processing to help farmers convert these ingredients into value-added goods.

Progress to date

Tun Yat’s Service Hub have offered services to over 20,000 farmers, and after five years has harvested and tilled over 16,000 hectares with over 100 machine owners matching to the platform and service delivery each year. 

Tun Yat has steadily built up a close-knit value chain to source machines and parts (John Deere), offers credit terms to farmers and collates data points from farm plots into a single platform for credit-scoring analysis and reporting to agri-lenders. Overall, the company saves their customers an average of US$ 120 each season by using more reliable and careful harvesting and tilling services and provides gains of more than US$ 750 for those that use multiple farming services including machinery, fertilizer and crop buy-back.

Tun Yat has partnered with several development organizations including USAID and World Bank, and INGOs including ICCO and Cordaid to conduct research into digital agriculture technology solutions for smallholder farmers across Southeast Asia – including Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. The company has co-authored reports on rice, fisheries and pulses food-systems and actively engages in pilots with agri-lending institutions to explore digital agriculture solutions and business models that can be applied and scaled. It also works with corporate partners including John Deere Asia-Pacific.

Tun Yat is now expanding regionally to leverage its experience learned in Myanmar across Asia-Pacific.