BioMio: Profitable Smallholder Farming

Despite Colombia’s extraordinary biodiversity, market forces have promoted fewer and less nutritious crop varieties that benefit agroindustry while excluding small farmers. Without access to a secure income, millions of smallholder farmers are unable to plan for the future.  

BioMio creates a subscription-based digital platform that offers urban consumers the chance to rent their own personal vegetable garden tended to by small farmers, men and women, that deliver a healthier, sustainable harvest to consumers at a lower price. Farmers families enjoy the peace of mind of a guaranteed purchase of their produce at a fair price allowing for long-term planning. 

BioMio is a platform replicable in most developing countries. It only requires that major urban markets are close enough to agricultural communities. A characteristic common to many. It transforms rural economies by securing fair incomes and promoting sustainable agriculture while providing healthier produce and food security to consumers.

In the outskirts of Colombia’s capital Bogotá, smallholder farmers are persistently unable to climb out of poverty.  Poor marketing, limited access to information and low capacity to negotiate denies them a stable and profitable income. Choachí, an hour’s drive from the Capital, has 92% of its 12,000 inhabitants working in small scale farming but the majority make less than USD 100/month from their harvests, or less than 50% of the national minimum wage. This is the case for more than half of Colombia’s smallholder farmers.

These farmers live a lottery, a plentiful crop does not guarantee a profit. The return for their efforts is affected by price fluctuations, intermediaries, the cost of agro-chemical inputs, and transportation.  This situation is leaving rural communities bereft of younger generations as they migrate to the city in search of better opportunities.

Despite the steady growth of urban consumers seeking healthier produce, small farmers are reluctant to switch to sustainable food systems since such methods are subject to the same risks and intermediaries who pocket most of the profit. There is no adequate solution that provides farmers with a decent and above all, a secure and constant income while supplying consumers with sustainable, fair-priced produce.

BioMio creates a digital platform managed by a specialized team that links the consumer in the city directly with the farmer growing their food. 

Smallholder farmers rent 20 m2 and 40 m2 vegetable gardens, the areas required to provide for a two and a four-person household respectively. BioMio also manages a communal garden meant to serve as insurance to offset production setbacks and grow crops that require additional infrastructure such as tomatoes.  

Consumers choose crops to be planted from a selected offer.  The products are grown with sustainable methods, high levels of diversity, free of chemicals, and are delivered to consumers weekly with local delivery networks.  

BioMio consumers sign up with a minimum six-month commitment providing farmers with a long-term guaranteed purchase of their produce and a secure income. Farmers earn for both the rental of the land and for the care and harvest of each garden. Even very small landholders can provide for several customers.

Through the BioMio App and Website customers receive individualized updates on the development of their garden, the life stories of those who help grow their food and become part of network that transforms rural economies.

Our pilot will be carried out in the valley of the Rio Blanco, barely an hour’s drive from Bogota, a capital city of 8 million people. More than 90% of its 45,000 inhabitants are smallholder families owning, on average, less than 2 hectares.  Lack of business opportunities have driven many of the younger generation to migrate to the city.  

Despite its unique geography that spans several microclimates, enjoys temperate weather, and produces 80% of Bogota’s fresh water supply, land for agricultural activities rents at less than USD 300/hectare per year, a reflection of the region’s agricultural crisis. Farming and pride of land is still deeply woven into the social and cultural fabric of this community. 

BioMio takes advantage of the region’s proximity to the nation’s largest commercial market, Bogota, where, following global trends, consumers have an interest in high quality, sustainable produce. Long term rentals of micro plots of land to serve as individual vegetable gardens for urban consumers turns the current rural economic system on its head. A small landowner can easily provide for 20 customers using only a fraction of their land. This would net USD 600 monthly for land rental and garden care and harvest.

Small scale producers need to compete through price and quality with the agro-industrial food system.  Our rental scheme delivers a much better price for their produce by avoiding intermediaries and creating a direct contact with the consumer.  The higher price encourages the use of sustainable agricultural practices that add value to their produce. A steady and much higher income encourage formalization that leads to access to credits from local banks that can further improve value added processes and encourage new generations to stay in the countryside attracted by the new business model.

There are a number of platforms in Colombia (and other countries where our solution is applicable) that aim to provide consumers with farm to table produce at a competitive price. However, none of them address the core problem of smallholder farmers in such regions that being the lack of a long term secure income and stable market prices.  

For smallholder farmers, growing crops, especially ones that involve some degree of risk such as organic crops and those that make the most of seed biodiversity is always a gamble.  They have no idea if consumers will buy them once and then buy elsewhere the second time around, or if market forces will reduce the price once they are ready for harvesting.  

By renting a regenerative agriculture vegetable garden for a minimum of six months, a consumer is allowing for diversity in cropping, eliminates intermediaries, provides a secure return and a higher yet fair price for the produce that values the cost of the land and the farmer’s efforts. This successful business model naturally promotes the use of sustainable practices that strengthens and the region’s land and unique biodiversity while attracting younger generations to stay in the rural economy.

The key to reducing intermediaries between small farmer and consumer is to reduce the risks associated with selling the produce at the point of market, reduce transportation costs, reduce storage and refrigeration requirements and provide a means to develop a strong personal bond between consumer and producer. By creating a digital platform that in effect replaces the city supermarket and creates a personal bond between consumer, land and grower, we guarantee monthly sales, direct delivery and a real farm to table relationship. 

Our digital platform includes a website and a proprietary app (both under construction) that serve four purposes. They raise interest and acquire clients. They strengthen the interaction between consumers, land and grower, by creating an individualized up-to-date experience that tracks each vegetable garden’s growth and evolution, as well as that of the human story of each farmer. It has a backend database and algorithm that will track production cycles to determine sowing and harvesting needs and plan ahead. The database will grow with farmers’ digital training and direct input thus helping to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban communities. 

As BioMio evolves and our offer grows with locally produced artisanal products, consumers then will enter a live virtual supermarket discovering where and how food is grown and processed. Supermarket aisles are replaced by real orchards, farms and artisan workplaces, the selling point of produce and other products is no longer and advertising campaign but proof of how it is raised and made with sustainable agricultural practices.

Today we do almost anything online and the pandemic has reinforced the industry of e-commerce.  We hire cars, offices, choose holidays and partners with one click.  One of the last barriers to e-commerce in Colombia was food purchases but the pandemic has also replaced supermarket visits with ordering online.  

But as urban populations carry on with their lives online, rural communities have been left behind. We will build a two-way relationship, not just using a digital platform to provide a service, but to build a relationship where the customer gets the story and witnesses power of their purchase through its impact on a rural community.

Uber has turned 4 million people into drivers, Air B&B has created 6 million hotels and today 40% of couples meet online.  The pandemic has created a massive 235% rise in online shopping and groceries account for 45% of that. Yet many would argue that it is the platforms that are earning the lion’s share of the benefit, and if not the platform, that the services are based solely on customer satisfaction without a fair reward for those providing the service.  BioMio intends to redress this imbalance, increasing and guaranteeing potential revenue for the farmer, delivering produce at a fair price, create awareness on food production and train our rural population to bridge the digital divide.

Our pilot scheme has already attracted considerable local interest, the active participation of local government and the confirmed enrollment of 50 consumers when we start in late August 2020.

Farmer Inputs

Small holdings of local farmers

Sustainable agricultural inputs, seed, fertilizers

Digital platform and services

Training and capacity building of farmers

Consumer Inputs

Client list

Delivery network

Farmer Activities

Learn to connect and share information to feed digital platform 

Land recovery and tending of vegetable gardens using sustainable agricultural practices

Consumer Activities

Access to digital platform and list of products

Rental of personal vegetable gardens 

Weekly deliveries of fresh produce

Farmer Outputs

Number of orchards and farmers participating

Type of products and volume sold

Consumer Outputs

Number of clients and growth per month

Farmer Outcomes

Incomes improved, reduced inequality

Economic formalization and organization of financial planning

Youth attracted by business model preventing migration

Consumer Outcomes

Consumers have access to healthy food and build a closer relationship with farmers

A more resilient food supply implemented

Access to educational tools for the family

Our pilot will start with five farmer families who will care and harvest the first 50 vegetable gardens.  Rural communities in our area are reticent to change and we need to provide an example of how the model works.  

For the first year we expect our customer base to grow by 15% every month.  By the end of the first year we expect to have 232 customers and 25 farmer families. By the fifth year, our initial 15% growth rate we revise to 5% after the second year, we would have over 10,000 customers and 500 farmers involved. 

Small farms are usually family enterprises.  A dramatic increase in income impacts everyone allowing for future investment, better education and health, and an incentive for younger generations to stay on the land.  With an average of 6 persons per household in the region, we would improve the income and future outlook of 250 people in total during the first year and 3,000 or more by the fifth year. 

In the region of Choachí, by the fifth year, BioMio vegetable gardens would cover an estimated 200 hectares supervised by the BioMio team. This means 200 hectares of land following principles of regenerative agriculture. This transformation would positively affect the entire population of Choachí.

For customers we would be providing a more resilient supply line of healthier and more nutritious food and an opportunity to develop a closer understanding of how food is produced.

As small farmers continue to struggle around the world, we are looking for an opportunity to change the equation.  For decades our food system has dictated that bigger is better and that the pursuit for cheaper food depends on large scale agribusiness and monocrops at the expense of crop diversity and smallholders.  There is no doubt that agribusiness has indeed reduced food costs but at the expense of resilient supply chains, the environment, health and nutrition, and millions of smallholders around the world.  

In our first year we would prove this model works for communities near large city markets in developing countries. In Latin America we estimate more than 100 regions dominated by smallholders near large urban centers and we would hope by year five to be exploring opportunities to establish this model in some of these.   

With more investment we would provide training in processes that add value to smallholders' products and offer those to our customer base. Local government has committed to work with BioMio for capacity building in dairy, fruit and meat transformation processes that create high quality artisanal products.  In the future we aim to become Bogota’s pantry as a virtual online supermarket where aisles become the smallholder farms and advertising displays are replaced by the artisanal processes that create products with an added value that directly benefit producers’ families. With more than 678,000 residents in Bogota with the consumer power to purchase sustainable produce, there is a large, initial customer base for BioMio.

BioMio requires an initial investment in preparing the land of small farmers and training them in growing produce using sustainable methods and regenerative agriculture techniques.  Many small farmers have been using chemical fertilizers and pesticides in an effort to increase yields and compete with large producers.  Technically we need a steady supply of better adapted varieties, good seed and organic compost, and the establishment of a cost efficient delivery network. We also confront cultural barriers at both supply and demand.  

Change is always complex and we need to encourage smallholder farmers to use sustainable practices and the natural crop diversity available to replace traditional single crops.  We also need to build trust amongst consumers ensuring prompt delivery of higher quality and more nutritious products.  This will require a change in their daily planning and replacing traditional visits to the supermarket with deliveries of fresh produce that require careful packaging and transportation to the city.  

Once we have a solid and large enough customer base we need to begin training in value added processes that require overcoming cultural barriers, and changing very traditional methods of production to create products of higher value desired by consumers in the city.

Our financial model aims to reach sustainability in six months with only a small initial investment.  We will start working with five smallholder farmers that already use sustainable practices and have experience in diverse crops, so once the project has its first fifty customers we can achieve proof of concept and other farmers will want to follow suit.

We have established a strategic alliance with the local government of Choachí, and have advocated for the inclusion of a number of policy measures aligned with BioMio goals which have now been incorporated as part of the town’s Plan de Desarrollo (Development Plan), a legally-binding three year municipal development project.  

These measures include training and technical upgrade of 250 small farms in sustainable practices, the creation of a regional brand and certificate of origin that identifies artisanal and sustainably sourced produce, a large-scale organic compost production center, more than 12 agricultural fairs focused on sustainable and artisanal processes, increasing internet coverage in the more remote regions of the municipality, a strategy to include smallholder farms from the entire valley at different altitudes thus increasing the diversity of produce, the commitment by local authorities to purchase a minimum of 50% of their needed produce from sustainable agriculture and the construction of a high end market place built with sustainable techniques that will serve to promote local, sustainable produce.

Full-time staff: 3

Part-time staff: 3

Contractors: 7

The BioMio team is a multidisciplinary group that brings a wealth of value and experience. 

As documentary filmmakers working for channels such as BBC World, NatGeo and Discovery, we focus on social and environmental issues acquiring on-the-ground knowledge of societal challenges. 

As strategic communications experts we created Soy Capaz, Colombia’s largest peace-building campaign enlisting 182 of the country’s largest private sector enterprises. Along with global campaigns promoting food biodiversity, we mobilize support and create strategic alliances across diverse social groups.

As bio-construction builders, we built Colombia’s first recycled tire house in Choachi where we now set up shop. This sustainably-built project has become a symbol of the region’s future. Widely covered by international media, it has grown into its own with more than 17 structures nation-wide and responsible for introducing bio-construction in China by building the Beijing Expo 2019’s CIP Pavilion. Our local entrepreneurial efforts have created a strong relationship with local community and government. We established an independent movement that participated in Choachi’s 2019 local elections gaining a seat in the Town Council.

As restaurateurs with running a high-end restaurant in Bogotá, we have the knowledge of the market and techniques to teach artisanal product processes for city markets. 

As consultants in corporate financial management and specialists in environmental financial services with our “Green Objective” brand we develop environmental financial services such as carbon credits and sustainable funding alternatives.

Links to our work described above:

www.idafield.com

www.finanzasobjetivas.com/green-objective

Local government of Choachí 

In rural areas of Colombia, as in many countries in Latin America, local government is the most important institutional presence that has a daily effect on communities. It controls education and technical programs from the National government, tax incentives, use of land and other potential investments.  We have presented the BioMio model to the recently elected Mayor, the highest authority in the region, and have established a strategic alliance to work in tandem to ensure that the model is successful and understood by the community.  

Despite the financial crunch from the pandemic, local government will promote BioMio and invest in processes that further the model as a potential solution to the problems faced by smallholder farmers but will have no financial or administrative stake or say in its running. All these processes have been included in its legally-binding Choachi Municipal Development Plan 2020-2023.  

BioMio’s executive team is made up of different specialists in various fields that bring key partnerships such as:

Objective Finance by Lulu Inversiones

Objective Finance brings a wealth of financial knowledge and risk assessment to the BioMio platform by working on the structuring of the project and running day to day finances.

Idafield

As filmmakers and strategic communications experts, Idafield produces BioMio visual content for our digital platform and consults on local relations with farmers and local government.

SuWeb

Our digital platform partners, SuWeb, are in charge of developing the BioMio website and app, as well as managing all social media channels.

BioMio Business Model

Key Resources

Digital Platform

Smallholder farms 

Organic inputs (fertilizers and biological pest control)

Branding

Seedling nursery

Delivery Network

Key Activities

Smallholder participation

Sustainable practices capacity building

Planting and harvesting

Deliveries

Building customer base

Digital marketing and engagement

Type of intervention

Direct sale of produce

Segments

Beneficiaries:

Smallholders and their communities

Customers:

Urban families and consumers of produce

Value Proposition

For beneficiaries:

Capacity building in sustainable practices and marketing

Income growth for smallholders

Regenerated land and environment 

Loans and financial planning 

Impact measures:

Percentage growth in customers and smallholders 

Income growth in smallholder accounts 

Involvement in capacity building workshops

For customers:

Better, more nutritious, low price produce 

Resilient food supply

Direct, Educational and Emotional link to food production

Impact measures:

Percentage growth in number of customers

Visits by customers to individual gardens

Percentage of new customers by word-of-mouth

Online interactions 

Partners and Key Stakeholders

Smallholder farmers 

Smallholder Farmer Associations

Local Transport

Choachí Municipal Government

SuWeb digital developer

Lulu Inversiones financial consulting

Idafield Strategic Communications

Channels

Digital media

Word-of-mouth

Free Press

Cost Structure

Smallholders land rental

Smallholders work pay

Staff

Packaging

Accounting

Deliveries

Digital platform 

Online advertising

Sustainable Agriculture Capacity Building 

Surplus

Marketing and platform development

Capacity building in value-added products

Revenue

Income from customer rentals

In-kind investment by local government (workshops and organic compost production)

Grants

Private investment 

Smallholder farmers can play a crucial role in establishing sustainable food systems. Ninety-eight percent of the world's agricultural holdings are 10 hectares or less. Almost all of these small farms are in developing countries, where they support around 2 billion people. Our experience filming development projects around the world has left us with one clear lesson: there is a vast amount of knowledge and experience, yet having access to that know-how is often difficult.  

For example, our work with organizations like the International Potato Center, part of the CGIAR network, showed us how a potato scientist on a consulting visit to southern China was quick to point out to local farmers that the main problem they had with their crop was a lack of potassium at the right part of the growth cycle.  A simple solution that increased their harvest by 30% and made the difference between profit and loss.  Knowledge and experience applied to a local context is often the difference between success and failure.  Good ideas are not difficult to come by, but applying them successfully requires application and lessons learnt from others.  Solve is an ideal platform to share such experiences, hit upon the nugget of knowledge and experience that can reap multiple benefits and overcome seemingly difficult challenges, and open doors to our own experience to help benefit communities in other parts of the world.

Additional support in Solutions Technology would help us improve user experience in our platform. Real-time updates and high-end visual content would allow users to travel through and learn about the living ecosystem that produces their food.

Support in Monitoring and Evaluation would allow us to have third-party impact measurements of how BioMio processes allow for land regeneration when compared to traditional agriculture techniques. 

Marketing, Media and Exposure support would strengthen our presence and credibility amongst consumers. A media presence with a stamp of approval of organizations such as MIT would definitely allow us access to free press to grow our customer base.

We have explored partnership opportunities at a local level with Municipal Government, farmers' associations, financial consultancy and online developers. We would very much welcome partnerships and support from international organizations that would allow for capacity building in regenerative agriculture, sustainability and organic certification, and digital platform development.

There has been a dramatic increase of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia as of late. Many have settled in rural areas such as Choachí. We believe that our model could include such populations given that farming is a talent that comes natural to many in this population. We would be interested in exploring how to extend BioMio opportunities to such groups with a partner or organization with experience in this field.