Building climate resilience into smallholder farmers' soil

Most fertilizers today are produced in large-scale, centralized, and capital-intensive facilities located in Europe, North America, and China, and then shipped via long-distance transport to rural areas. Supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19 and recent international sanctions have only exacerbated this problem. As a result of this logistical and import mark-up, rural farmers often pay 2-5 times the world price for their fertilizers, which to us is wrong. Due to their limited income, these farmers can often only afford the cheapest, synthetic, one-size-fits-all varieties that over the long term may actually acidify and degrade their soil due to over-dependence. Farmers, as a result, often see their post-harvest yields decrease by up to 30-40% in the last 20 years. This is a significant concern for local food security. In a country such as Kenya, there are 4 million farmers, spending $76 million/year on ineffective fertilizers. In the world, by 2030, this will be a $30 billion/year problem.

We use MIT-developed, patent-pending technology to decentralize/downsize fertilizer production, such that it can be carried out profitably on a village-level scale using locally available resources/labor. Imagine small-scale, low-cost, mobile systems that can be latched onto the back of tractors, donkey carts, or shipping containers, and be moved from farm to farm to enable localized conversion of crop residues into a fertilizer base under 2 hours without needing external energy. This base is then mixed with our proprietary recipes to complete the nutrient as standalone fertilizer. Our process reduces the long-distance logistics needed to deliver fertilizers to farmers by producing the bulk locally. In addition, our proprietary control system allows for us to control 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 custom-tailor fertilizer production for smallholder farmers almost at a single-farm granularity. Therefore, our carbon-negative product, Safi Sarvi, restores local soil carbon and improves farmers’ yield by up to 30% for the same cost they pay for inputs. 

We are setting up a network of village-based, mobile fertilizer operations (known as MiniPlants), each serving a radius of ~20 km and 500 farming families. Farmers, by selling their residues to the MiniPlants, earn a $20/ton additional income. The local MiniPlants process the input and add the proprietary recipe at a 40% margin, and then sell the complete fertilizer back the same community to improve local farmers' yields, thereby completing the local trash-to-cash loop. From our pilot project in Kenya, we have verified that such a MiniPlant can be financially profitable, and at full-scale netting around $60,000/year. We plan to scale up by working with local agricultural partners to set up additional MiniPlants in local communities. Once demonstrated at scale in different agricultural contexts, the profit-making potential of the MiniPlant model will drive its further scaling and adoption by village-based microentrepreneurs in additional communities.

As an additional benefit, each MiniPlant, in addition to providing rural smallholder farmers with improved soil health, also creates a network of rural jobs such that underemployed youths from rural, marginalized communities no longer need to migrate to urban slums in order to find sustainable livelihood.

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.

Our team combines the technical depth with the lived experience of the rural, underserved communities of our target.

Samuel Rigu grew up in a poor farming family in rural Kenya and witnessed first-hand the fertilizer access issues that his family members and friends faced. He therefore resolved to study agribusiness in university in order to solve this problem for his communities. He also worked as an agribusiness manager for a few years. He therefore brings in-depth knowledge of how to work with rural smallholder farmers and their influencers.

Vidyut Mohan earned his Master's thesis in decentralized biomass processing, brings industry-specific knowledge in the fertilizer supply chain in South Asia, is well connected with the different stakeholders ranging from the rural farmers to large institutions such as Tata.

Prior to co-founding this company, the team has worked together in other capacity in biomass since 2011, including co-founding a prior start-up that sold more than one million low-toxin mosquito coils. Starting from just a concept that no one believed in back in 2012, the team has convinced MIT (including MIT Solve) to put in more than $600,000 in the foundational R&D, and convinced government agencies (National Science Foundation and Department of Energy) to provide competitive commercialization support of $1M. Our team has a track record of execution and success.

MIT Solve 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. 

We recognize that MIT Solve 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.

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 thermochemical treatment, 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 custom-tailor fertilizer production for smallholder farmers almost at a single-farm granularity.

Recently, we have received a contingent purchase order from the Nakuru County Government for thousands of farmers enrolled in its fertilizer subsidy program, and are crowdfunding to expand our production to that location, as this requires upfront capital.

Within 12 months, we will launch one additional production pilot in South Asia once we finalize the details with prospective local implementation partners. This will expand the number of farmers we serve to 10,000. In order to support this expansion, we need to raise a capital of $250,000, which we are hoping to achieve mostly through non-dilutive sources such as USAID. Concurrently, we will need to make an additional local COO hire to manage the operations, as well as 5 production workers. The first stage will be a limited trial on rice fields, followed by initial rollout of the product within one village. We will also seek fertilizer certification approval from the local authorities.

Within five years, we will expand to six countries in East Africa and South Asia. This will be done in collaboration with regional partners such as One Acre Fund (East Africa), Tata Agrico (India), and BRAC (Bangladesh). 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 2024.

Through soil and crop tests in collaboration with Cornell University, we will track changes in soil characteristics, nutrient uptake, and plant harvest of our intervention in comparison with other controls. If effective, then we will see an improvement in all these indicators over time (less acidic soil, higher nutrient retention and availability, higher yield, etc.) when compared to the data from plots where our intervention has not been adopted. Macroscopically, we also expect interviewed farmers to quantify improved yields, income, as well as the other qualitative changes on their lives (for example, additional income leading to the ability to send children to school). To ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion in our process design, we will track not only the total farmers, but also their gender and ethnic representation.

Financially from our own village-based fertilizer production, the sales revenues indicate willingness to pay as well as volume of adoption over time. If our solution is successful, we expect to see net profitability, defined as having the sales revenue exceed the cost of production and operating expenses. Indeed, we were able to demonstrate for the first time in 2021. But we need to do so consistently, both in the same pilot and in other replications elsewhere.

Based on our carbon tracking in collaboration with PlantVillage, we will quantify the gross carbon sequestered into farms. By factoring in long-term re-emission from the soil as well as the carbon emissions associated with the production process, as well as carbon emissions embodied in the materials (plastics/metals) that we use, we can arrive at a net carbon removal value per hectare per year that can be verified as carbon credits for our farmers.

  Finally, we will track the number of full-time and part-time workers employed by our village-based production in rural communities, as well as their gender and ethnic representation.

From our experience establishing our pilot in Kenya, 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, as well as restoration of elements of soil health, such as microbial activity and nutrient availability. 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 MiniPlant profitability, which also employs more local youths for fertilizer production in order to meet the growing demand.

We developed a new, patent-pending chemical process at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) enabling simplified, small-scale, low-cost, portable biomass (crop/forest residue) treatment systems. These can be latched onto the back of tractors, trailers, or donkey carts. We have tested actual working reactor prototypes and product with 5,500 farmers so far to validate the technical efficacy. These mobile systems can be deployed in remote area farms, processing small pockets of residues on-site, within hours, into a chemically densified form, requiring no external energy. This chemically densified form can then be processed locally as a carbon-rich base into high-quality fertilizer.

Our process miniaturizes fertilizer production, reducing its cost by 100 times. In contrast to traditional capital-intensive, centralized, and industrialized fertilizer production, our systems support localized, village-based, financially profitable fertilizer production. It uses primarily locally available labor, resources, and waste in rural communities, and does not need external energy sources to run. This locally produced fertilizer eliminates more than 90% of the costs associated with transporting/importing traditional fertilizers. Thus, our value proposition to farmers is as follows: for the same price they ae willing to pay per hectare per season for fertilizer, if they switch to our product, we can improve their yields immediately by up to 30% and income by 50%. Our fertilizer blend has received fertilizer certification from the Kenyan government, allowing us and our partners to sell the product as standalone fertilizer.

  Traditionally, crop/forest residues are nutrient-rich, but difficult to turn into fertilizer due to the hard-to-digest fibers. Composting, for example, takes a few months to complete. Our process, using a thermochemical pathway, breaks down the fibers in 30 minutes, without needing external energy or additives. The residues lose hydrogen and oxygen, resulting in a carbon-rich fertilizer base that has three benefits. The first benefit is that on traditionally acidified, degraded soil that we are targeting, this base acts as a liming agent to reverse soil acidity and decrease toxicity. The second benefit is that this fertilizer base acts as an effective carrier that enhances nutrient/moisture retention in degraded soil, reducing leaching. Both of these benefits have been well documented in peer-reviewed literature by third parties and through our own pilot tests in the field (Abewal et al., 2013; Ulyett et al., 2016). These results allow us to blend reduced nutrient inputs while achieving better yield results in our trials. Finally, our patent-pending reaction control system allows us to tune the final fertilizer characteristics (e.g. pH, ionic activity) based on soil test results and identified nutritional gaps, down to a single-farm granularity, in a way that traditional one-size-fits-all fertilizer production cannot achieve.

Currently our technology is at TRL 5, where we have built a low-fidelity prototype and tested it with different types of crop and forest residues ranging from wood chips, pine shavings, hay straw, rice hulls, walnut/almond shells, and coconut shells, under different reaction configurations to produce different output products. The next step is to deploy the entire system in a field-like setting where the biomass has fluctuating incoming characteristics. This will require building out the autonomous control system—informed/optimized by machine learning—to be able to adjust our reactor configurations dynamically to maintain steady state and quality-controlled output products as per end user requirements.

A low-fidelity version of our technology has gone out to the field and has been validated with different types of field-source biomass.

We have published 13 peer-reviewed papers and 2 patent applications on the same technology.

Our solution overwhelmingly benefits/customizes to the rural, underserved communities most affected by climate change (e.g. wildfires), thereby achieving climate justice and building local resilience. Our decentralized process retains 90% of the labor/value within local communities, often also selling the bioproducts locally, thereby reducing communities’ dependence on centralized production of chemicals (e.g. fertilizers) that is not only costly/carbon-intensive, but also vulnerable to supply chain disruptions (e.g. COVID, sanctions). As these carbon-negative activities are generated in rural communities, they also get to access the carbon credits aggregated/verified through our IoT/cloud-based control system.

To engage in user-centric design with these communities, members of our executive team have also these lived experiences. Samuel and Joyce both grew up as rural farmers, for example. Our executive team comprises of an Asian, a South Asian, and two Africans (one female). We retain a dedicated DEI expert as a permanent advisor to help us recruit diverse talent.

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.

As we scale within the next 2 years to 10 communities in Kenya and Bangladesh, 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 expand further, 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. While farmers are the ultimate beneficiaries, our solution will be financed initially by local grassroots agricultural organizations that work with these farmers and whose mission is to improve local farmers' livelihood. Our solution will directly fit into their purview. 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 have demonstrated by early 2019 that our pilot operation is already financially profitable based on this business model at around 1 ton/day of production. At full-scale village production, we project that this will generate around $60,000/year of net profit after taxes. 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. In later 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, our upfront investment cost will be ~$100, which will be affordable for most prospective partners. As some of these projects try our process, see the initial success, and would like to scale to full capacity, the upgrade needed will cost another $5,000. In cases where this is a financial barrier, we can even help finance. However, the majority of our revenue will be based on the proprietary control system necessary to custom-tailor the reaction safely/stably under diverse biomass conditions. We will charge $10/ton usage fee for the IoT-based smart operation of our reactor.

We have already scaled our initial pilot amongst 5,500 farmers, growing to a sales revenue of $156,000 in 2021. After subtracting the cost of goods sold as well as general, marketing, and administrative expenses, we have netted a profit of $10,500, meaning that we have not needed external cash injection to continue operating our pilot.

In addition, we have raised the following grant-based funding through Total ($25,000 in 2017), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($40,000 in 2017), and Echoing Green ($100,000 in 2019) for the initial pilot implementation in Kenya. Tata Trusts have committed around $25,000 for a subsequent regional implementation in South Asia.

For ongoing R&D of our technology in the United States, we have received the following grant-based funding through the Department of Energy Advanced Manufacturing Office ($300,000 from July 2018 to July 2020), California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection ($230,000 from July 2019 to March 2021), Massachusetts Clean Energy Center ($70,000 from March 2018 to March 2019), and the National Science Foundation ($25,000 from October 2018 to July 2019).