Safi Organics

Using technology to decentralize fertilizer production, supporting networks of village-based fertilizer plants that create sustainable and profitable rural employment.

In emerging economies such as Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a lack of rural employment opportunity. As such, many rural residents have to migrate to urban slums to find work. Not only is this a rural talent drain, but it also leads to unsustainable megacities. Meanwhile, most agricultural inputs such as fertilizers are processed/produced near urban areas before being shipped to rural communities, and this is logistically expensive.

We use technology that has been developed based on new biomass chemistry and licensed exclusively from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to downsize/decentralize fertilizer production, thus supporting village-based, small-scale, and profitable fertilizer plants ('MiniPlants') utilizing only locally available resources/labour, instead of importing fertilizers from the outside. Each of our 'MiniPlant' creates rural job/income opportunities worth ~US$250,000 per village (about 10% of the entire village's GDP), encouraging rural youths to stay rather than migrating to urban slums. Additionally, our process produces a carbon-negative fertilizer blend that also restores the health of degraded soil, improves farmers' post-harvest yields by up to 30%, doubles their income, and sequesters 3.4 tons/acre/year of CO2 equivalent. Therefore, our solution develops the rural work economy in a carbon-negative way.

We have set up a pilot in Kenya, demonstrated a positive production gross margin, and have acquired 1,000+ paying customers. We will scale through a franchise model, where we provide farming cooperatives and microentrepreneurs the training and equipment to help them deploy and operate MinPlants in their own villages and create village-based jobs in exchange for a franchise fee.

Our MIT technology relies on a new thermochemical process that is 100 times faster than composting and can complete fertilizer production in under 2 hours. This reduces operating costs by 1/10, and makes it possible, for the first time, to support profitable and self-scaling village-based enterprises that also scale rural livelihood with it.
One prominent competition is organic composting. However, the biological process of composting is excruciatingly slow, requires significant land and labour, and often the operating costs are too high to be profitable/self-scaling.

We rely on a new scientific concept developed at MIT as the PhD thesis of the company's co-founder (Kevin Kung) to enable decentralized production of high-yield fertilizer using locally available resources/labour in rural villages. The concept, called oxygen-lean torrefaction, is a simpler method of processing biomass into upgraded products such as fertilizer. Dr. Kung demonstrated how it can work with variety of input feedstock; drastically simplify the fertilizer production technology and downsize its scale; require no external energy to operate; and can be repaired using locally available parts when broken. These discoveries make the technology suitable for village-level deployment.

We are working on scaling and expanding our operations to 5 villages in the next 12 months, allowing us to create around 150 jobs.

By scaling our production to 5 tons/day, we anticipate becoming profitable in the next 6 months. Each new village-based operation will take about 12 months to reach break even.

In the next 12 months, we will expand this impact assessment to 3 villages involving 200 farmers, such that we obtain a more robust set of impact data over a larger range of agricultural contexts.

We imagine a dense network of decentralized and profitable fertilizer production plants in various rural villages, each serving a radius of ~15 km (500-1000 farmers). Each of these plants will produce around 5 tons/day of fertilizer for the local farmers, and will create (in receipts/profits) an additional 10% to the village's total GDP. At full scale, each of these 'MiniPlants' can support ~50 casual workers, and the post-harvest income the local farmers. By 2023, we plan to engage 5,000 villages in such endeavors, creating US$200 million/year in additional rural job opportunities.

We have already deployed 150 preliminary reactors in rural Kenya, each unit costing ~US$20 to manufacture. We have set up a pilot production with a capacity of 2.5 tons/day. This enabled us to hire 6 full-time and 4 part-time employees, and engage in 35 village-based workers. Based on the audited financial figures in the past 12 months, our production proved to have a 40% gross margin and is profitable at 2 tons/day.

We have expanded to more than 1,000 paying customers largely through very positive word-of-mouth reviews.
We predict that a full-scale production at 5 tons/day will create $250,000 in value in a village, or about 10% of the village's GDP. We have begun training local microentrepreneurs, such that they can run and expand the operation in their own villages, creating even more rural jobs/impact.

Samuel Rigu and Kevin Kung worked on the project full-time since 2013. Samuel grew up in rural Kenya and became an agribusiness manager interested in how to decentralize fertilizer production to bring jobs back to his village. He developed several proprietary recipes that, combined with Kevin's MIT technology, became the core of this company.

Kevin, with background in engineering design in resource-constrained settings, conceived the technology on his 2012 visit to Kenya. He worked on it as his MIT PhD thesis (completed in 2017). The technology resulted in two patent applications that the company will be licensing exclusively from MIT.

We create a dense network of village-based, locally-run fertilizer production plants called 'MiniPlants', each serving a radius of 15 km and around 500-1000 farming families. Initially we own/operate our first pilot production in Mwea to prove its technical and financial effectiveness, and plan to own and operate the first 5-10 as we expand in other communities in Kenya, so that we become familiar with how our solution can be adopted to different soil/crop conditions and retain such learnings in-house. As we expand, we will undertake a community franchising model. Initially, we will target community-based organizations/youth groups working on behalf of local farmers' welfare. These organizations will help provide the initial financing to set up the village-based project (US$50 in upfront capital cost to start a small operation), and will hire the local operation team. We will provide the training and licensing to use our technology and recipes for a franchising fee based on the profits from the local production.

As these village-based production becomes profitable and attract other microentrepreneurs to invest in their own villages, each village will also create 30-50 new job opportunities. Therefore, as these enterprises scale, driven by profitability, they automatically create more rural livelihood.

We will use the validation/publicity we receive to cement the ongoing partnership discussion with the 3 prospective community-based organizations such that the replication of our pilot can commence in the planting season of 2019. 50% of the prize money will also provide us with our side of the funding to purchase the equipment and conduct community training in operation in order to set up these 3 additional village-based operations that will then triple of current impact (the partners will cover the local labours initially). The remaining 50% of the money will be invested in initial batch-manufacturing of our technology.

The manufacturing/distribution of our technology at scale to many villages remains a challenge. To reduce the complexity, we have designed our equipment such that more than 70% of the components can be locally manufactured/repaired. The remaining 30% requires specialized machining and distribution. To lower this risk, we will work with a reputable local distributor of agricultural equipment (e.g. tractors) to leverage their distribution network to deliver our equipment and training. We are already in close partnership discussion with two prospective distributors (whose names cannot be disclosed yet).