Safi Organics COVID-resilient fertilizer

Samuel Rigu serves as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Safi Organics. His responsibilities involve managing a team of ten full-time and four part-time employees on the pilot project and expanding the customer base, and being the spokesperson for the company. Samuel grew up in rural Kenya, where he witnessed first-hand the challenges of rural farmers such as his grandmother and neighbors for accessing affordable, high-yield fertilizer, and resolved to solve this problem. He studied agribusiness at the University of Nairobi, and worked at the Turning Point Trust Farm, where he implemented organic practices and turned the farm’s finances from loss to profit in 6 months. Before co-founding Safi Organics, Samuel co-founded a prior company in Kenya that sold more than one million low-toxin mosquito coils to the market. Samuel is a Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Fellow and a University of California Global Food Initiative 30 Under 30 winner.

Most fertilizers today are produced in large-scale, centralized facilities and then imported to rural farmers, who often pay 2-5 times the world price for their fertilizers. The lack of income often forces these farmers to use the cheapest, lowest-quality varieties that end up acidifying/degrading their soils over the long term, causing yield loss. Recently, COVID-related fertilizer supply chain interruptions have further exacerbated this problem, causing widespread unavailability and food insecurity.

We decentralize fertilizer production, such that it can be profitably implemented at the single-village level using locally available labor and resources. This makes the fertilizer supply COVID-resilient for farmers and eliminates the long-distance logistical cost. Therefore, at the same price farmers pay, we offer a higher-quality, customizable, and carbon-negative fertilizer that improves their yields by 30%.

More than 60% of the world's population is agriculture-dependent. We elevate them by transforming key barriers against food production into widespread rural economic opportunities.

I remember when I grew up with my grandmother in rural Kenya, as we harvested a few maize cobs from the field, she said words that I will always remember: “Son, twenty years ago we were harvesting double of what we harvested this year. I am afraid that in twenty years, we may not have any food from this land.” This scared me and caused me to find out why.

I found that most fertilizers today are produced in large-scale, centralized facilities and then imported to rural farmers, who often pay 2-5 times the world price for their fertilizers. The lack of income often forces these farmers to use the cheapest, lowest-quality varieties that end up acidifying/degrading their soils over the long term, causing yield loss. In particular, during COVID-19, a disrupted world fertilizer supply chain has left many rural farmers without access to fertilizers, and vulnerable to a food security crisis.

In Kenya alone, there are an estimated 3 million vulnerable farmers, spending about $85 million/year on ineffective fertilizer. In the world, this is a ~$30 billion/year challenge.

We license technology developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to decentralize/downsize fertilizer production, making it feasible to implement profitable, localized fertilizer production in rural villages using only locally available resources, labor, and crop residues in 30 minutes. Because localized production eliminates the long-distance fertilizer transportation/importation as well as the global supply chain vulnerability (e.g. due to COVID), we also drastically reduce the fertilizer cost in remote areas while offering farmers a much higher quality product at the same price that they pay for fertilizers per hectare per season. Our product is a locally produced carbon-negative, customizable fertilizer blend that help smallholder farmers improve their yields by up to 30%, and reduce irrigation needs by up to 15%. Compared to conventional fertilizer production, our process is ~1,000 times cheaper to install, and is not prone to international supply chain disruption. Compared to organic composting, our process is ~100 times faster.

Farmers, after harvest, coordinate with our portable units to process crop residues in their fields into the bulk of the fertilizer in <30 minutes without needing any energy/chemical inputs. Based on soil test results, our reaction process is adjusted to custom-tailor the fertilizer that is optimized for the local soil/crop type.

Our primary beneficiaries are smallholder farmers. Meet Mr. Kibuchi, who holds a one-hectare rice farm. Over 15 years, he had seen his yield decrease by about 40% due to inappropriate fertilizer use. After switching to our product, his input costs has remained consistent, but he has seen his crop yield increased by 30%, and net income increased by 50%. This was sufficient to send his two children to school, and last year, for him to afford a second-hand tractor for his farm. Amongst the 3,500+ farmers that we work with, these economic gains are widely reported, even after one season of using our product. For them, our fertilizer not only restores their soil health, but also leads to better economic outcomes.

In a new community, we find it most effective to first engage a small group of farmers in a small demonstration plot to better understand the local soil/crop conditions and to adapt our chemical reaction parameters accordingly. Once the product has been demonstrated, we find it most useful to expand the farmer reach through local agricultural input suppliers ("agrovets"), who often maintain personalized relationships with groups of farmers and who represent their needs/requirements.

Smallholder farmers do not have a prominent voice in the world today, and we are often unaware of the biggest challenges they face, even as they support 50-70% of the world food supply. Our work brings to light one of the most difficult issues today, in decreasing food productivity due to long-term land degradation for these farmers who are often left behind. By decentralizing fertilizer production, we empower these rural communities to be self-sufficient and food-secure while driving local circular economies that will transform the way food is produced and consumed.

Co-founder Samuel Rigu grew up in a rural area in Kenya where their parents were peasant farmers and witnessed first-hand the issue of fertilizer access. He resolved to solve this problem, and studied hard to get to university (with a scholarship) to learn agribusiness. In 2015, Samuel met Kevin Kung, a researcher from MIT working on small-scale technologies for rural communities, and the two partnered, one bringing the technical expertise and one bringing the smallholder farmers’ perspective. Initially the partners saw the immense crop residues being burned by farmers after harvest, and thought that if the residues could be turned into useful products, it could give farmers an additional income source. So Samuel and Kevin co-founded SafiCoils, which turned the residues into low-toxin mosquito coils, and sold more than one million coils to the market. Eventually, the economics of the business model did not work out, and we had to pivot. Samuel, well aware of the fertilizer accessibility problem, began investigating the potential to turn crop residues into fertilizers. Initially Kevin was skeptical of the idea, but after a few seasons of crop trials and raving farmers’ testimonials, Samuel convinced Kevin about the potential, and the two co-founded Safi Organics.

When I grew up with his grandmother in a maize farm, I remember distinctly one day that as I was helping her harvest maize from the field, she told me, with tears in her eyes: "Son, 20 years ago we were harvesting double of what we harvested this year. I'm afraid that in 20 years, we may not have any food from this land." This really scared me.

For me, as I grew up in rural Kenya myself and witnessing our friends and family members suffer, my passion is to see my community break out of the poverty cycle. Food insecurity made a lot of our schoolmates not finish even the primary level as they would be busy working such that they could have food on the table for their families. This is what troubled my heart, and as I was one of the few fortunate ones to go to university in Nairobi, I devoted my effort to studying agribusiness in order to understand how I can change lives of my own communities. Many of the Safi Organics team come from the same rural background, and are also driven by this vision.

Our team combines the local knowledge and cultural intimacy of smallholder farmers with the technical prowess of MIT engineering. Co-founder Samuel Rigu as well as most of our employees grew up in rural Kenya and witnessed first-hand the issue of poor fertilizer access first-hand, and understand the specific needs/challenges that smallholder farmers face. On the other hand, co-founder Dr. Kevin Kung spent 7 years developing the company’s core technology initially as his PhD thesis before he joined the company and licensed the technology from MIT. Both co-founders have worked together previously in Kenya building a company that supplied more than one million low-toxin mosquito coils and understand what it takes to build a business in this challenging market.

The team has shown itself capable of attracting other resources/expertise to fill the missing gaps that it identifies. For example, for continued research and development needs, the company has convinced Dr. William Orts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Professor Daniel Sanchez from University of California Berkeley to sit on the technical advisory board, in addition to local University of Nairobi collaborators. The team has also attracted more than US$900,000 in initial R&D funding to build and scale the technology out of the MIT laboratory, often in very challenging environments in rural Kenya where there may be no electricity or running water. So far, more than 150 units of the preliminary technology have been deployed in the field, most of which are still operational and maintained/repaired entirely by local unskilled laborers.

In 2019, our region in Kenya faced severe drought, and as local farmers were not planting that season, we made almost zero sales of our fertilizer in the first four months. We gathered the team and reasoned together what would be the best way to handle the challenge. Everyone was tasked to research on the next strategy that the organization can adopt in the market in order to survive. We discovered that there are some farmers near our neighboring county doing irrigation farming alongside Masinga Dam. Together with our local marketing lead, we went to engage these farmers and better understand their needs. With strong referrals from our local farmers, we were able to sell at least 200 bags within two weeks and keep the company running. As these new farmers are horticulturalists, they also demanded a foliar to go with the fertilizer. As we had no experience with foliar, this pushed us beyond our comfort zone. But we innovated and developed an organic foliar which is now another add-on product the company offers for the farmers.

After our company had some initial success, we noticed a few copycats in our region using similar packaging and colors to sell a cheaper, inferior product that looked almost indistinguishable from ours. Some of my employees immediately raised the alarm with me, but I thought that the best strategy is to calmly carry on, and to continue doing our best work with the farmers and inform them our product's advantages relative to our copycats'. To better distinguish ourselves, we also acquired the equipment to enable us to conduct free soil tests for new farmers interested in our product, which none of these copycats are doing. The soil tests offered a valuable baseline dataset for us to know more about the local farmers’ needs, and at the same time allowed us to develop customizable strategies that will optimize the fertilizer formulation at an almost single-farm granularity. While our marketing costs are higher, many of these farmers—who have never had their soil tested before—loved our service and also loved the crop yield results they were seeing after using our product. After a year, most of these copycats have died off, and we are the one left standing.

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Current fertilizer production technologies rely on centralized, capital-expensive (~$500,000), and large-scale (100 tons/day) equipment, optimized for delivery for large-scale agriculture (e.g. the U.S. and Europe). The status quo makes logistical cost daunting for delivery to rural areas in emerging markets, often without reliable transportation infrastructures. Many large-scale fertilizer companies we have interviewed have wanted to reach out and better serve these rural smallholder farmers, but have not been able to figure out a cost-effective way to serve them in a custom-tailored, user-centric manner.  

Our technology is based on a new chemical concept called oxygen-lean torrefaction (developed as company co-founder Kevin Kung’s PhD thesis at MIT), which can lead to a new class of patent-pending, small-scale, low-cost, and portable reactor designs that can be deployed in a decentralized manner, with a more flexible range of feedstock options. This technology allows dramatic downsizing of the minimum capacity and capital investment of the current production process by a factor of 1000, allowing fertilizer to be produced in rural villages using locally available labor and crop residues in just under 30 minutes without needing any external energy or heat. Thus, in contrast to organic composting, our process is faster and requires less land by a factor of 100.

Furthermore, due to our proprietary control strategy, we can modify the reactor operation autonomously in real time based on the local soil and crop context, thereby achieving high-performance precision agriculture that allows us to customizer fertilizer production for smallholder farmers almost at a single-farm granularity.

From our experience establishing our pilot, it is easiest to start in a new community by recruiting an elderly farmer (as the champion) with a larger plot whom the younger farmers aspire to be. This champion, being more affluent, can afford to bear more risks. We start by demonstrating our product (for free) on a small section of his plot. By comparing that plot with the rest of his land, it is not difficult to observe improved harvest yield due to reversal of soil pH to more neutral level, and restoration of elements of soil health, such as microbial activity and nutrient availability (whose underlying mechanisms have been demonstrated in scientific publications made together with MIT and UC Berkeley).

This typically causes the farmer to purchase more of our product to apply on a larger area of his farm the next season, until he/she becomes a repeat customer. As local farmers are a tightly knit community that tend to imitate each other, generally our product will spread through word of mouth once the early champion confirms the positive results. Many of the farmers using our product choose to sell the surplus harvest to the market, leading to increase in income. The effects are felt even one season after using our product. Most farmers, seeing these benefits, return the next season for our product, expanding the use on their fields and increasing the community's confidence in using it as a standalone fertilizer. This drives the profitability of the localized fertilizer production plant, which also employs more local youths for fertilizer production in order to meet the growing demand.

Finally, to scale widely in local communities, we use the growing demand for our fertilizer from farmers as a bargaining chip to negotiate a distribution agreement with local agricultural input distributors ("agrovets"), who maintain personalized relationships with farmers, sometimes even extending credits to farmers who could not pay for fertilizers upfront, to be repaid at harvest. Working with these agrovets allow us to penetrate even the poorest farmers who would otherwise could not afford our product upfront, without us bearing the financial risks.

Currently our pilot serves 3,500 farmers. Within one year, we expect this to be 10,000 farmers in at least two locations. By late 2022, we will reach 300,000 farmers by deploying around 500 systems in the field. This will involve working with 50 local agricultural organizations like the KALRO network in Kenya, and BRAC in Bangladesh, which will operate our systems profitably and sell fertilizer to local farmers. Further corporate partnerships with existing fertilizer manufacturers such as OCP can help us scale to more than 60 countries. Letters of intent from at least 5 similar organizations are available. This expansion assumes each system, at full capacity, produces ~300 tons/year of fertilizer blend that can serve the needs of a village and its 15 km radius, or ~500-1000 farmers. After initial scaling with a manufacturing partner, we intend to further scale by collaborating with existing agricultural equipment companies such as Mahindra and Mahindra, having already been actively approached by the organization. We will use their existing equipment distribution network and dealership to get product to market. Our product is also complementary to their existing tractors and harvesters. This will enable the processing of around 1,100,000 tons/year of raw biomass into fertilizer for around 1.5 million farmers.

Furthermore, widespread adoption of our systems in rural fertilizer operations will lead to creation of around $10 million/year of additional income opportunities for 1 million underemployed youths in rural communities, who may otherwise have to migrate to urban slums to find jobs.

During COVID-19 supply chain disruptions, we have been overwhelmed by demands from farmers as imported fertilizers disappear from local shelves, and our locally produced fertilizer become the only available product. Our first priority has been to make our staff and customers safe by implementing health/safety measures, even if this means we needed to reduce our production capacity. Over the next year, we aim to double our production capacity (in a COVID-safe manner) to 5 tons/day that will adequately address the increased needs of our local farmers due to disrupted fertilizer supply chains.

We are also in corporate partnership discussion with OCP, world’s largest fertilizer manufacturer. Within 12 months, we will launch an OCP-sponsored field pilot amongst its farmer network in Kenya. This will expand the number of farmers we serve to 25,000. Concurrently, we will need to make an additional local COO hire to manage the operations, as well as 5 production workers. If successful, OCP can help us subsequently scale to more than 60 countries.

Within five years, we will expand to three countries in East Africa and South Asia. This will be done in collaboration with regional partners such as One Acre Fund, Tata, and BRAC. These partners will host the production sites and introduce us to the local farmers and their fertilizer distributors. We will provide the equipment and expertise, and train the local operation team to set up profitable village-based fertilizer production. This will enable us to reach 1.5 million farmers by 2025.

In terms of technical challenges, we need to demonstrate, in multiple locations and agricultural settings, that our systems can operate under highly stringent requirements in remote settings, often without reliable access to electricity/energy or high-end maintenance services. In rural areas, when things break down, they need to be easily repaired using locally available materials, or else costly shutdowns will follow.

In terms of behavioral change, farmers and prospective implementation partners can be risk averse. They must see proof before they change products. Through our initial pilot with the local farmers, we learned quite a few things. For example, in a new community, we found it most effective to first engage an older, more affluent farmer who often can afford new products and some risk-taking. This farmer is also someone that other younger farmers aspire to be. Once the product is demonstrated to produce benefits with the initial farmer, he/she often becomes the influential champion who will multiply our customers rapidly.

In terms of IP risks, although our technology is patent-pending, it is conceivable that patents do not completely protect us against local copycats. Since our hardware is cheap and meant to be widely distributed, we will actually be flattered if these copycats start helping us scale our equipment too, but our fear is that they create substandard solutions. However, because the hardware technology cannot operate without our proprietary control system, we can tightly safeguard our control and data as trade secrets, without which the copycats cannot operate.

In terms of the technical challenges described above, while we already built a working prototype and financially profitable pilot in Kenya that can address the requirements named above, we plan to expand to other regions (i.e. Tanzania/India/Bangladesh) to demonstrate the robustness and versatility of our solution, which will be key for achieving successful scaling. We have already raised $900,000 to be specifically used for R&D to make our core technology and process more robust and scalable in partnership with  University of California Berkeley (Dr. Daniel Sanchez) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Western Regional Research Center (Dr. William Orts).

In terms of the behavioral change challenges described above, as we scale beyond this initial community, we may encounter challenges reaching out to other geographically disparate communities. We foresee the need to conduct additional localized pilots. Fortunately, our equipment is relatively low-cost and can be operational within a few weeks. In the medium term, working with an existing equipment manufacturer (such as Mahindra) with long-standing credibility in many communities is essential to our scaling.

In terms of the IP risk described above, we have already filed multiple patents and are exclusively licensing the fundamental invention from MIT. The goal here is absolutely not to exclude farmers from accessing our services, but rather to prevent poor-quality copycats from offering substandard services to farmers. Ultimately, it will be through a combination of patents, locally-tailored nutrient formulas (trade secret), and branding that we will achieve best impact.

In Kenya, to grow our pilot and impact more farmers, the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organization and the local Kirinyaga County Government have provided us access and training curriculum to the 5,000 farmers in their jurisdiction. As of last month, the Nakuru County Government issued us a purchase order in order for us to serve the 2,000+ farmers under the government's fertilizer subsidy program. In Kenya, we plan to continue to scale by working with these strategic partners, including One Acre Fund.

In scaling our work beyond Kenya in the medium term, we have been selected by Groupe OCP in Morocco, which is world's largest phosphate fertilizer producer, in corporate partnership discussion in its inaugural Impulse program. OCP is interested in sponsoring a field trial of our process amongst its farmer network in Kenya and Northern Tanzania over the next 12-24 months. If successful, OCP has the ability to scale our solution to more than 60 countries around the world. We will work with similar potential scaling partner, such as Mahindra and Mahindra, which has proactively approached us.

Finally, for R&D, to de-risk our technology, we rely on ongoing technical collaborations with Berkeley and U.S. Department Agriculture (under a Collaborative Research and Development Agreement, wherein the company retains all intellectual property rights developed using our partners' resources). Locally in Kenya, we have similar arrangements with the University of Nairobi for local crop trials and customizable nutrient formulations.

Initially, we own/operate our village-based fertilizer production. We purchase crop residues from local farmers at $20/ton, process using our technology into the fertilizer product, package it, and then dispatch it to the farmers via existing agricultural input distributors at $225/ton. Farmers are willing to pay because this is the same price as what they have been paying per acre per year for conventional synthetic fertilizers, yet they see their yields improve by up to 30% using our product. Initially, we directly sell to farmers. But increasing, we are selling through distribution partners (existing local network of agricultural input suppliers known as "agrovets").

As we scale within the next 2 years to 10 communities in Kenya and beyond, we will continue this business model, as this gives us maximum control and learning as we iterate our process/solution for diverse crop types and agricultural contexts.

As we form scaling partnership with organizations such as OCP, we will shift away from this labor-intensive business model into a business model resembles that of a Canon inkjet printer: we sell the hardware cheaply but charge an ongoing usage fee for the proprietary automated control system necessary to operate the equipment safely and consistently for customizable fertilizer output. As this initial group of early adopters show the profitability of our model (around $60,000/year in a full-scale village-based operation), we expect that additional village-based fertilizer production facilities will be set up elsewhere by local microentrepreneurs who wish to derive the same profit.

In our initial own-and-operate model, we have proven through a pilot in Kenya that we can sell the product at $225/ton. With the production costs (input feedstock, labor, packaging, logistics, distributors' cut, etc.) of $138/ton based on actual financial figures from the pilot operation, this gives us a 40% gross margin. We demonstrated by 2019 that our operation is already financially profitable at ~1 ton/day of production (with $100,000/year revenue). At full-scale village production, we project that this will generate $60,000/year of net profit, against a capital investment of $25,000. The majority of this profit will be reinvested into our scaling efforts to other communities in order to accelerate our impact.

In initial scaling, we plan to finance through a combination earned revenue and grants. As we scale, we will add impact investment as a component.

In the longer term, as we shift away from this own-and-operate model to an equipment-and-service-based model described above. We will initially partner with deep-pocketed organizations (e.g. OCP) in a position to finance the hardware upfront in different countries. However, the majority of our revenue will be based on the proprietary, IoT-based control system necessary to adjust the reaction safely/stably in real time under diverse biomass conditions for customizable fertilizer production in different soil/crop contexts. We will charge $10/ton usage fee for the smart operation of our reactor, against an estimate cost of $5/ton, yielding a gross margin of 50%. As we scale, we will also contemplate carbon credit as an additional revenue stream.

We have raised the following grant-based funding through Total Kenya ($25,000 in 2017), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($40,000 in 2017), and University of California Berkeley ($15,000 in 2018) for the initial pilot implementation in Kenya. The company, as of 2019, is also beginning to generate profit, which is being reinvested into the company's expansion plans. To help cushion the company's financial liquidity (as many grants are only paid in arrears), the co-founders have also chipped in some personal sources as loans over time.

For ongoing R&D of our technology with our U.S.-based partners, we have received the following grant-based funding through the federal agencies ($325,000 from July 2018 to March 2021), State of California ($370,000 from July 2019 to March 2021), Commonwealth of Massachusetts ($70,000 from March 2018 to March 2019). These funds, while seemingly significant, are meant for initial research and development to scale up the laboratory prototype, and cannot be used for implementing in the field or growing our impact.

Our expansion goals in the next 24 months include: (a) increase the production capacity by 2 times in 12 months and by 5 times in 24 months in a COVID-compliant way to better serve local farmers facing fertilizer supply chain disruptions, (b) build and operate a portable prototype for field demonstration with potential scaling partners such as OCP in its farmers' network, and (c) develop more rigorous impact assessment techniques to track baseline soil nutrient and yield data, as well as changes in economic status from farmers who switched to our product. The total budget needed to accomplish these three tasks is $600,000.

Currently we have received a grant commitment from a foundation for $320,000. We are seeking to raise the remaining $280,000 by Q3-2020. We prioritize non-dilutive funding as this allows us to remain in focus of the company's social/environmental mission and in commitment of growing our impact for the most vulnerable farmers worldwide.

As a for-profit company, we project $110,000 in revenue for 2020, and a profit margin of $10,000 this year, if we limit ourselves to running our customary business (one village-based pilot production).

Beyond our customary business activities, we anticipate executing part of the expansion activities described in the previous question in order to maximize our impact. The expenses for carrying out this expansion are broken down as follows.

We will conduct new hires for a Project Engineer who will carry out the technical prototyping work, a Project Operations Manager, an Impact Assessment Specialist, and four locally hired laborers.Their salaries and fringe benefits will be around $84,000 in 2020.

The new equipment/facilities are as follows. By Q3-2020, we aim to modify the workplace to be COVID-compliant and begin expanding the production capacity. This includes setting up work partitions ($1,600) to minimise worker-to-worker contact, and a second pelletising machine ($8,000) to overcome production bottleneck. We will also begin designing and implementing a portable prototype ($7,000), which will also require a SolidWorks software license for one person (4,000). In order to implement more rigorous and expanded impact assessment, we will regularly take soil samples at least every quarter, which is expected to cost us $5,000 extra.

Therefore, the total anticipated expenses for 2020 is $106,000. Part of this will come from our reinvested profit ($10,000). The remaining $96,000 will be part of the $600,000 sought for expansion work over the next 24 months.

The Elevate Prize will give us the connection and resources to help scale up our work, and address key barriers in behavioral change in different communities with different contexts beyond Kenya that we are not yet familiar with. 

As discussed before, a key mitigating factor in addressing the behavioral change barriers is through local partners who know the farmers and contexts well. This includes prospective partners such as OCP (in Africa) as well as Mahindra and Mahindra (in South Asia). However, beyond that, we will also be looking for additional regional partners in Southeast Asia and Central/South America, in order to begin to understand their and their farmers' requirements, and how to adapt our process to best suit their local needs. Through the Elevate Prize network, we aim to establish potential partners and mentors familiar with these specific regions so that we can start this conversation early on as we plan our scale-up strategy. A successful outcome will lead to additional agreements for initial field trials/demonstrations in these regions beginning in 12-24 months' time.

We recognize that the Elevate Prize is a community, and we also look forward to contributing to this community our knowledge and connections that we already have. We have been fortunate to participate in other entrepreneurial ecosystems, including Impulse in Morocco (OCP’s corporate partnership accelerator), Social Alpha in India (Tata Trust’s social enterprise incubator). We are happy to connect these different communities to the Elevate Prize as appropriate.

In identifying potential scaling partners through the Elevate Prize network, we will first seek to understand how they work with local farmers, as well as the farmers' needs (in broad strokes). This will be followed by local visits to better understand these farmers and the soil/crop requirements. If successful, within 12-24 months, we plan on carrying out additional field trials/demonstrations with these partners in the relevant field context.

Furthermore, a field trial/demonstration is only complete if it is accompanied with rigorous impact assessment. While we have made some progress on both in our pilot in Kenya, our knowledge/expertise in this area is very limited, especially in other contexts. An ideal partner will also work with us (and our research partners in the U.S.) to implement rigorous impact assessment procedures from the onset of the field trials (e.g. experimental design for correcting collecting baseline and quarterly soil samples for analyses).

We have already made contact with Groupe OCP (a fertilizer manufacturer in Morocco) and Mahindra and Mahindra (a farm equipment manufacturers in India). Both organizations work with farmers and have vested interest in seeing farmers succeed. We are looking for additional farmer-facing organizations like these two. Some examples include: International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC), One Acre Fund, and BRAC Bangladesh. In the medium term, these organizations will be in a position to help us understand farmers' specific needs/requirements in their existing network, and conduct field trials/demonstrations in these other regions beyond Kenya. As fertilizer certification is needed locally, these partners will also help us overcome the regulatory hurdles of getting our process/product certified in the different countries. In the case of a successful pilot and impact assessment outcome, these partners will also be in a position to help scale our process widely amongst smallholder farmers worldwide. 

In addition, these regional pilots will require financing to establish. To that end, we are also looking for connections with grant-making organizations interested and willing to support these pilots. This includes program managers at international aid agencies (e.g. USAID, UKAID, GIZ), local government agencies supporting local agriculture development (e.g. Indian Agricultural Research Institute), as well as private philanthropies (such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).