Imagine owning an agribusiness and having all aspects of your production endeavours from pre-production to post-production efficiently managed for you to obtain utmost yield and profit. You get to cut costs, measure sales and marketing efforts, and make data-driven agricultural decisions because you are working with an agri tech company whose resources are utilized for your benefit. Sounds like quite the mitigated way to run a business, doesn’t it?
For some farmers and agri businesses, this is not just an imagination. It is their reality because Farmcrowdy is empowering farmers with technology to increase food production and food security in the nation. Founded by Onyeka Akumah in 2016, the company began as a crowdfunding company, focused on connecting rural farmers with access to funds for their farming endeavours. As time went on, we have moved from just raising funds to also increasing productivity, storage, and access to the market for agribusinesses. Today, Farmcrowdy handles other aspects such as core production, trading, and market access.
Our Founder and CEO, Onyeka Akumah explained the transition. “We identified technology as the bedrock of our services. We then repositioned Farmcrowdy first, as a technology company, then, a technology company for agriculture.” True to our words, we have been utilizing technology to create innovative solutions. In February 2020, Farmcrowdy acquired Best Foods Livestock and Processing facility to increase meat production through meat processing technology. The facility currently has the capacity to process 80-120 bulls/day and provides 30% of some of the meat consumed in 3 out of the 5 major eateries in Lagos.
Farmcrowdy also collaborated with Hello Tractor and Traxi in Kwara state to ease Farmers’ access to mechanization necessary for increasing productivity and reducing human labor on the farmlands. We have also worked with Beatdrone for crop monitoring to facilitate real-time crop vegetation and track developments in crop production. With a network of over 424,966 farmers across the country, Farmcrowdy is bringing technological solutions to agriculture to increase food production.
Farmcrowdy is also creating technology solutions for farmers. Some of the solutions include:
Some of the solutions include:
- An Aggregation Model – each lender has the capacity to do between 15MT-30MT of grains per centred powered by tech. Over 100 aggregation centers that are within 2-3km from the farmer.
- A Trading platform built to provide access to buyers and sellers and we currently have demand for commodities of over 20,000MT. We are also connecting farmer’s harvest with these buyers.
- Farmcrowdy Foods – our retail market access driven on a B2C model that provides access to farmers for their harvest.
- TFS App created to help field specialists make data driven decisions.
Beyond using technology to empower farmers in agriculture, Farmcrowdy is also using technology to help agribusiness and everyone involved in the food value chain across the country to gain access to the technology needed to further their production. To efficiently manage this, the company has three products tailored to cater to agribusinesses.
- Farmcrowdy Structured Finance: A platform built to provide small-scale farmers and low income earners in the agriculture value chain with access to adequate capital and financial inputs to make key investments. Farmcrowdy structured finance has successfully raised $15 million for 182,000 rural farmers, cultivated on over 17,000 acres of farmland, raised 3,000,000 broiler chickens, and processed 2,000 fit-for-slaughter bulls.
- Farmcrowdy Aggregation: A platform which grants farmers access to superior markets through a network of tech-enabled centers sited in rural communities. We currently have 101 commissioned aggregation centers in Nigeria and each center has a minimum aggregation capacity of 12,000 metric tons of commodities.
- Farmcrowdy Foods: An avenue for a working digital food ecosystem that lets you conveniently purchase fresh food products and groceries directly from the farm.
The Farmcrowdy tech journey has just begun and we are working tirelessly to empower farmers with technology to attain our vision of enabling everyone to participate in the achievement of global good security.
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