farmbetter - build farmers’ resilience

Smallholders often lack access to actionable and targeted information on how to improve their farms or address specific problems. 

In a changing climate, traditional methods may no longer be sufficient. 

At the same time, there are thousands of proven best-practices that can improve farm resilience but are not easily accessible.

farmbetter works by assessing a farmer’s resilience through a short survey and accessing information from databases based on the farmer’s geolocation. This initial step provides data on environmental conditions (e.g. agroecosystem zone, slope, precipitation, soil), how they farm and what they want to improve. Then, in-depth information is provided in text, voice and visually to the farmer to learn and adopt proven best-practices.

By allowing farmers to improve their climate resilience and in the end profitability, farmbetter has the potential to improve the livelihoods of the over 500 million family farmers in the world.

With around 500 million family farms, we tap into a large global market that will only continue to grow as access to smartphones increase. 

Smallholders in developing countries often lack access to actionable and targeted information on how to improve their farms or address specific problems. Additionally, many of the world’s smallholders are also suffering from hunger and/or poverty.

In a changing climate, traditional methods and techniques may no longer be appropriate or sufficient, and commercial, input-intensive approaches might fail in the face of increasing climate vulnerabilities. 

Development organisations are furthermore plagued by short project cycles and lack of longer term impact beyond the duration of the project. 

For instance, there are only 5,470 government extension service officers in Kenya serving the estimated 4,469,494 farmers. With one extension officer serving over 800 farmers on average, this high ratio severely limits their ability to support farmers in a timely and meaningful way.

Our farmbetter app provides tailored recommendations for farmers to improve their productivity and resilience. Our app works by assessing a farmer’s resilience through a short survey and accessing information from databases based on the farmer’s geolocation. This initial step collects data on environmental conditions (19 indicators including agroecosystem zone, slope, precipitation, soil, etc.), how they farm and what they want to improve. In-depth information is provided in text, voice and visually to the farmer to learn and adopt recommendations. Farmers can use the app to also exchange with each other and rate the practices themselves. 

We are using an Android-based smartphone application capable of running on the vast majority of  smartphones currently in use in sub-Saharan Africa. To code we are using the following software applications: Algolia, Ionic, Firebase. We also have developed a custom matching algorithm  to sort through more than a thousand sustainable land management practices and can provide tailored approaches to farmers.

We have worked directly with a small number of farmers across the developing world to identify their needs, test prototypes and build our solution on their needs. These two farmer personae described below build strongly on our activities and experience in Kenya. Additionally, we are targeting NGO employees who license farmbetter to give farmers they work with, access to the app to support their extension services and training. Below are examples of two farmers who would be our customers.

SMART FARMER “JULIA” 20-35 YEAR OLD EARLY ADOPTER 

Early adopters (both genders) who are farmers, smartphone owners, use multiple apps, and own land. She is a commercial smallholder in loose or tight value chains. Looking for access to recommendations that she couldn’t find herself, offering more stable production and increased profitability of her farming. 

ELDER FARMER “JULIUS” 

45+ YEAR OLD EARLY ADOPTER 

Early adopters (predominantly male) who are wealthier farmers, smartphone owners and own land. He is a commercial smallholder in loose or tight value chains. Looking for new ideas based on proven solutions/approaches adapted to their specific context. Only use Facebook, WhatsApp on their smartphone.

farmbetter empowers smallholders and medium-sized farmers in the global South to become more resilient to climate shocks and thus ensure the sustainability of agricultural production as the effects of climate change kick in more strongly. Additionally, empowering farmers will also contribute to fighting hunger and poverty across the developing world. With access to tailored information farmers will be able to increase their yields in a sustainable manner.

Our approach is innovative in that the knowledge we provide is tailored to the situation of each farm by using our own algorithm to link the farmers’ conditions and priorities with relevant best practices. All best practices are scientifically validated (by using peer reviewed databases of best practices such as WOCAT). We are also using a mobile app, as opposed to most competitors who focus on text messages, which will help farmers to implement more complex best practices. Additionally, the knowledge we provide is knowledge-intense as opposed to many competitors who focus on expensive and capital-intensive solutions. 

The core technologies we’re using include a customised matching algorithm based on one of the founders PhD on multicriteria decision making with a mobile app. We have created an innovative resilience measurement approach that combines qualitative and quantitative measures that avoids a black box matching system and empowers farmers to contribute to preferred solutions. We leverage the use of georeferenced location to determine soil, precipitation, altitude, slope and based on these data points match farmers' conditions with existing best practices that resemble these conditions but may be from anywhere in the world.

farmbetter is based on previous experience gained developing resilience measurement tools and android applications for smartphones and tablets. These approaches have been used in over 20 countries, by thousands of farmers and refined for farmbetter. The approach used has been published in a peer reviewed journal that can be found here:

https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/consilience/article/view/5723

All four co-founders have experience in developing countries working with farmers, including training them on sustainable land management practices. The fully functional application itself can be downloaded on the Google Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.farmbetter&hl=en_US

Lastly, we have used the technology in testing with farmers across three continents to ensure that it works and provides additional value for smallholders and mid-sized farmers in emerging and developing countries.

farmbetter currently serves 30 farmers in Kenya as well as about 20 project managers and partners in NGOs and development organizations. Based on our business & financial plan we are looking at around 11’000 users by mid-2021 and over 600’000 users within five years.

Being a digital model, farmbetter creates scalability and as more farmers use the service and share their best practices with each other the impact of farmbetter also increases.

• June/July 2020: Start project to license farmbetter to an NGO for use in Mozambique

• Summer 2020: One co-founder goes part-time (paid)

• October 2020: 

  • Implement a complete user interface overhaul 

  • Code a payment mechanism into the app 

  • Revise and strengthen solution algorithm and presentations

  • Start second partnerships/project with NGO/development partner

  • One team member goes full time (if funding allows)

• November 2020:

  • Co-founder to go full-time with farmbetter

  • Additional IT support hired

  • Launch the app (v.1.1) in Kenya to reach several hundred farmers; promote and advertise farmbetter in Kenya to 5,000 farmers to achieve traction with customers

• December 2020:

  • Based on our human-centred design approach, obtain additional user and stakeholder feedback on additional functionalities needed and product-market fit.

• Early 2021: Second co-founder to go full-time with farmbetter

• Mid 2021: 

  • Updated app (v.1.2.) to be released with additional functionalities incl. weather, access to relevant input providers, access to markets.

  • Farmbetter enterprise solution for NGOs and development partners launched

  • Additional 1-2 NGO licensing/partnerships

  • Partnerships with access

  • Market-entry to Ghana

• Early 2022:

  • Market-entry into Vietnam and growing Kenyan & Ghanaen markets

  • All co-founders go full-time and team grows to 30 members globally

• Mid-2022

  • Updated app (v 2.0) to be released including market-place functionalities to be tested in one market with high customer numbers

  • Data-based services and cross-selling offered to service providers such as insurances, credit providers, rural service providers etc.

Financial

Our business model only works with sufficiently high user numbers - in order to attain them we need financial investments in terms of grants and equity to pay for staff time as well as further IT development and marketing for our app.

Technical

We are currently working with a functional prototype that provides solutions based on a database on sustainable land management best practices. We will need to add a number of additional features (chatbot, integration of further databases, addition of additional services working with APIs and partners).

Legal

No major legal challenges - just ensuring we have our legal set-up figured out.

Cultural

Traditionally, extension and advisory services for commercial smallholders and mid-sized farmers in emerging countries are heavily based on trust and relationships. An app cannot supplement that, the key challenge is to build trust with users.

Market barriers

The market is increasingly competitive with a few larger players (such as Plantix, WeFarm etc.). 

Our main market entry barriers are around building networks and having sufficient financial resources to run successful marketing and advertising campaigns to get traction with end customers.

Financial

In order to access the necessary financial resources to enable us to get traction and large user numbers we are using a three-pronged approach:

1. Focus on business to business partnerships with NGOs & development partners first to finance further app development and get access to several hundred farmers for testing

2. Apply for grants and research projects to receive funding for our work with partners.

3. Pitch farmbetter to relevant impact investors to gain access to investments.

Technical

We are building a new, more user-friendly version of our app with a Senegalese UX/UI company. We’ve hired additional IT support in Kenya to add relevant functionalities and are actively looking for partners to add APIs.

Legal

We are working with Advocates For International Development (A4ID) and affiliate lawyers to develop our employee handbook, relevant policies (data protection, safeguarding etc.).

Cultural

We are working with local partners in Kenya and farmer groups to build trust - we are also planning to test call centers as a premium service for farmers to build more trust.

Market barriers

See our approach to finances - additionally we are approaching this as leanly as possible to be able to identify winning and relatively cheap strategies to gain new users and traction.

We are four part-time co-founders and two full-time IT developers.

The four co-founders focus on the management of the company, the frameworks to build our system on and to ensure effectiveness of our approach. Our CTO ensures that we have enough in-house IT capacity to develop the app further

We have been working with and for farmers in developing countries over the last 10 years. We have personally met thousands of farmers who are suffering from the negative effects of climate change and are lacking the knowledge on how to best adapt to it. We were frustrated by the short project cycles in development. This is why we started farmbetter to provide farmers with actionable knowledge on how to adapt to climate change. 

John and Benjamin previously developed a resilience measurement tool for smallholder farmers (SHARP) at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Measuring climate resilience across 13 agro-ecosystem indicators, SHARP has been used in over 12 countries with thousands of farmers. 

John has 6 years of experience in resilience measurement in developing countries and holds a PhD in Decision Analysis and Masters in Resource & Environmental Management. 

Benjamin has worked extensively with farmers. He holds a Master’s in International Affairs, and an MSc in International Management.

Daniele programmed the SHARP app and is now the farmbetter CTO. He has worked for over a decade as a full-stack programmer and team leader. He has a unique expertise around IT (web & mobile) in development contexts. He holds a Masters in Statistics. 

Saemi worked closely with farmers in the field across Eastern Africa over 6+ years to empower them to improve their livelihoods using knowledge-intensive, ecological approaches. He has previous experience in coordinating the scaling-out and -up of agricultural technologies across Africa. He holds a PhD in Geography.

The World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT), is a network, hosted by the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Berne is a pioneer around providing knowledge and best-practices on sustainable land management. We partner with WOCAT on how to best disseminate the scientifically validated best practices they have collected over the last three decades. Solutions from the WOCAT database are at the heart of farmbetter’s best practices. 

iDE is a global effort that spans offices in 14 countries, encompassing 4 social enterprises, employing over 1,200 people directly, and indirectly enabling many more through our market-based approaches in agriculture; water, sanitation, and hygiene; and finance to improve livelihoods and improve resilience.

We work with iDE in Mozambique to bring best practices to farmers and support iDE in their effort to measure climate resilience and support input trade fairs with their farm business advisors.

YUX is a Senegalese user-interface & user-experience company working based on a human-centered approach. We partner with YUX on ensuring farmbetter is built to serve farmers as user-friendly as possible.

Smallholders in developing countries often lack access to actionable and targeted information on how to improve their farms or address specific problems. 

In a changing climate, traditional methods and techniques may no longer be appropriate or sufficient, and commercial, input-intensive approaches might fail in the face of increasing climate vulnerabilities. 

Development organisations are furthermore plagued by short project cycles and lack of longer term impact beyond the duration of the project. 

When information is available it is often generic and either not specific to the farmer or not presented in a user-friendly manner. There are thousands of peer-reviewed and proven activities that can improve farm resilience but are kept in journal articles, printed in newsletters not accessible to most farmers, or large databases. There is no user-friendly way for smallholders to search through these resources and implement them on their farms. Furthermore, many of these best practices have been developed in other countries and contexts (sometimes in different languages) and are thus not readily available to farmers in a user-friendly manner. 

Farmbetter fills this void by providing user-friendly, actionable best-practices that are tailored to the farm’s agro-ecological conditions. Our business model builds on providing services to farmers directly as well as licensing our technology to relevant development partners such as NGOs.

Based on our identified challenges we are looking for three things:

1. Expertise from MIT & partners on scaling a mobile app in developing countries especially in Kenya to support our launch later in 2020

2. Access to a network of potential partners as we are expanding the functionalities of the app we would like to connect with providers of weather data, credit, insurance and relevant inputs to strengthen our app.

3. Access to development partners who would be interested to test farmbetter in their activities with farmers

4. Access to a network of funders both on the grant and equity side who are interested in pre-seed & seed funding of around 150,000 USD for an impact venture.

Based on our challenges and mitigation strategies we would love to partner with organizations that have a strong track record on building traction for a consumer-facing app in developing and emerging markets.

Secondly, we are currently looking for both grant and equity funding and could strongly benefit from partners who have been through this process and could advise us.

• We’d like to partner with MIT faculty, esp. MIT Sloan School of Management regarding the successful scaling and gaining traction in Kenya;

• We’d love to work with VEON on how to work with a mobile telecommunication provider on providing services to farmers;

• We’d love to partner with Alphabet on how to integrate additional functionalities into our app;

farmbetter focuses on climate resilience and improved livelihoods of smallholder and mid-sized farmers in developing and emerging countries - thus targeting over 500 mio people globally.

Additionally, we are using a for-profit, technology-enabled and highly scalable approach. We offer a three-year break-even and are currently looking for 100'000 - 150'000 USD of grant and equity investments. farmbetter thus perfectly fits with the Future Planet Capital Prize.

The Prize would advance our quest to reach as many farmers as possible, enabling us to scale to Kenya, Ghana and Vietnam and build a profitable business.