Farmchef

Drought, extreme heat, and other shifts in weather patterns driven by climate change are already putting our global food systems at risk. Droughts, unusual rainfall patterns, and heat waves have become more common, resulting in lower yields and even total crop losses. A recent analysis found that climate change has already reduced agricultural yields by 21% globally (Ortiz-Bobea et al, 2021) – and the impact will only get worse as temperatures rise.

Africa is the region most vulnerable to these changes. Features of its climate make it more prone to desertification and drought as temperatures rise. On top of this, African agrifood systems are particularly vulnerable to the coming crisis. 70% of Africa’s food comes from smallholder farmers who tend to lack access to capital, knowledge of best farming practices, and quality inputs. Not only are their yields well below global averages, but these farmers rarely have access to irrigation or improved drought-resistant seeds, making them highly vulnerable to drought, heat waves, and other climate shocks.

Climate change is already a top-of-mind problem for smallholder farmers. Studies of smallholders across the continent consistently >90% are already feeling the effects of warming. In the last few years, multiple droughts and heat waves across the continent have caused significant reductions in yield and income, total crop losses, and even famine – for example, the horn of Africa is currently suffering from its worst drought in recorded history, which has left 23 million people food insecure. Without intervention, this crisis will continue to worsen and have dramatic effects on human life. According to the IPCC, malnutrition could increase by 25-95% in Africa by 2050 depending on the level of warming, with agriculture becoming completely unviable in some regions.

Agriculture is also a contributor to the climate crisis, partially due to inorganic fertilizers. Inorganic nitrogen fertilizers are made from fossil fuels and also gasify into NOx when applied to fields. In total, they contribute over 1 gigaton CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions per year, more than the air transport industry. Inorganic fertilizers also damage soil, changing the pH and killing microbes. Over time, soil becomes infertile and unresponsive to fertilizer use, eventually becoming unusable for agriculture and in some cases desertifying completely.

Our first product is Farmchef, a crop treatment that makes plants more resistant to drought and heat and improves yields. It is a blend of organic compounds inspired by plants’ internal stress response systems. It reduces water loss without slowing growth, regulates the plant’s stress response, and aids damage recovery and photosynthesis. The result is that plants are more able to survive shocks like drought and extreme heat, and farmers need less water to grow food.

It also significantly increases yields as plants can continue growth in dry conditions rather than slowing growth and focusing on mounting a stress response. Farmchef is based on our Chief Science Officer’s published research in Ghana which showed that in high-stress environments like the African savannah, eliminating stress can increase yield even more than providing additional nutrients through fertilization (Atta-Boateng and Berlyn, 2021). In this study, a prototype of our current formula increased cowpea yields by 45% in Ghana versus 15% for nitrogen fertilizer. It has been designed to be affordable and easy to adopt for smallholders. It costs only a few dollars per acre to apply, a fraction of the cost of fertilizer, providing a strong return on farmers’ investment.

Farmchef reduces the environmental impact of agriculture. Unlike inorganic fertilizer, It is not made from fossil fuels and does not kill soil microbes critical for natural nutrient production and uptake. Our solution allows farmers to get equivalent or better yields with less (or no) fertilizer, allowing them to replace some or all fertilizer use with more sustainable inputs.

Our solution is targeted at farmers in Africa, especially smallholders – farmers with small plots (usually <1 hectare), often family owned and operated. More than 60% of the population of sub-saharan Africa are smallholder farmers. Smallholders make up 80% of the continent’s farms and provide 70% of its food. These smallholders tend to be low income and lack access to finance, live in remote areas, and lack access to updated information on best farming practices, making it difficult for them to adopt new tech and improve their farms. As a result, smallholders’ yields are well below global averages, and farm incomes are low.

As previously mentioned, climate change is already a top-of-mind challenge for smallholder farmers. However, there are few solutions to this pressing issue available to them. Few smallholders across the continent have access to irrigation – 95% of African agriculture is rain-fed. They also tend to lack access to drought-tolerant improved seed varieties, crop insurance, and other adaptation tools. This leaves most farmers’ income and food security completely dependent on increasingly unstable weather patterns.

Crop treatments that make stress protection claims similar to ours are another potential adaptation tool for these farmers. Though these kinds of products have been available in international markets for several years now, they are rarely available to smallholders in Africa and other emerging markets. These products, mostly biostimulants, are targeting high-end premium markets, both with the problems they solve and with their go-to-market strategy. If they are available in emerging markets at all they often price out smallholders. Unfortunately, low-quality unlicensed agrichemical products have started to appear in small agrodealer stores in Africa to fill this gap.

Our product and business model have been designed to serve as a quality climate adaptation solution that can fill this market gap. Our product is designed to help crops survive climate shocks like droughts and heat waves, reducing the likelihood of the farmer losing their crop – a disaster for a farmer without significant financial cushion. It also improves yields significantly, especially when conditions are hot and dry. This helps farmers grow more food to feed their families and earn more income.

It is also designed to be easy for smallholders in our target markets to adopt. It can be sprayed on leaves or applied to soil like other inputs, so it does not require new skills or equipment. It costs only a few dollars per acre to apply – a fraction of the cost of fertilizers. Our business model is focused on partnerships with existing farmer networks and last-mile retailers. We will rely on these existing networks to make sure large numbers of farmers can access the product and that farmers are educated on the product’s benefits and proper usage.

Our Chief Science Officer, Acheampong Atta-Boateng, has researched and participated in agriculture in Africa since his time as an undergraduate in Ghana. He has 12 years of experience as a plant science researcher, and is an author of multiple papers based on research performed in Africa or in areas of inquiry relevant for agriculture on the continent. He also has entrepreneurial experience in the Ghanaian agriculture sector. He cofounded both Agrofides, an agricultural lending platform in Ghana, and Biobamboo, a non-profit working to promote cultivation of bamboo in Ghana.

Our CEO John Woolsey has launched multiple products for the African mass market as a product manager for cleantech startups like KOKO Networks and Fenix International. In these roles, he focused on human-centered design and customer research – skills he plans to apply to ensure community feedback is central in development of our products and go-to-market strategy.

We have built community input into our launch plans. This year, while we wait for regulatory approval to market our products in Kenya and Ghana, we will run commercial trials with customers of a variety of profiles. These commercial trials include work with a large coffee producer, farmer co-operative, and community farm. Besides giving us more data about product performance, these commercial trials will give us key information about these different types of customers’ pain points and their feedback on our solution. We also plan to run a larger-scale study in 2024 which will include interviews with smallholder farmers and other stakeholders in the agrifood systems of our launch markets. The goal of these studies will be to get stakeholder feedback on barriers to adoption and opportunities to improve our product. Eventually, we plan to run a longer-term study to show how our product can be used to improve communities’ food security and overall well-being.

We also feel that your program, as an organization with an approach rooted in community participation and human-centered design, can serve as an important partner for us in improving the rigor of our customer and community research and how we incorporate it into development of our products.

Our solution is not yet in the market. We are currently in the regulatory review process, and will not be able to market our solution until we are given approval in our launch markets (Kenya and Ghana). We have a few small research pilots currently operating, including one serving 5 smallholder farms in a farmer cooperative and another at a large coffee producer. Another will begin in a community farm with approximately 40 members June.

We are excited to apply to the program because we feel that the top challenges we will face in the near future are a good fit for the program’s tailored support program.

In the coming months, we will receive regulatory approval for our solution in our launch markets. This will allow us to start selling our products. Though we have carried out primary research to understand our target customers and the channels we should use to reach them, these are still hypotheses until we begin sales. As we begin selling, we will need to finalize our go-to-market strategy and prove that it is a good fit, a significant strategic challenge. the program’s experience in supporting early-stage businesses, especially those targeting disadvantaged communities, will help us through this potentially challenging process.

We are also looking for support in evaluating our social and environmental impact. For our solution to reach widespread adoption, we need to demonstrate our impact to larger customers (such as governments and NGOs), investors, and other partners. We can leverage your organization’s expertise in impact measurement to identify metrics and measurement frameworks we can use to validate that our solution improves farmer outcomes and food security.

Additionally, we are looking for support from the program to help us continue our research and development of cutting-edge crop treatments that solve market problems. To keep developing impactful products, we need to create an R&D strategy and processes that balance market needs, scientific exploration, and product development. We will also likely need to continue to partner with academia to develop relevant solutions. Your organization’s global network of entrepreneurs who have developed and brought innovative solutions to market, as well as its affiliation with MIT, make it an ideal partner to help us as we build our R&D function.

Overall, we believe that the program is the right fit for us because it provides a unique combination of financial and non-financial support that can help us overcome the barriers we face and advance our mission. We are excited about the opportunity to work with your organization and its partners to make a positive impact on smallholder farmers in Africa and the environment.

As a company, we differentiate ourselves by focusing on under-researched problems, which helped lead us to take a novel approach with Farmchef. The vast majority of R&D firms developing new biostimulants are in Europe or the US, and they tend to focus on high-value crops. Instead, we are focused on problems important to smallholders in tropical regions. In Northern agricultural zones such as the US and Europe, conditions change significantly in different parts of the season. In tropical regions, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, conditions are fairly consistent throughout the growing season, but vary significantly throughout the day. These intraday changes in temperature, sunlight, and other conditions cause ‘stress confusion’ – the plant is constantly responding to new stressors, slowing its growth. Farmchef is based on the ‘least stress elimination hypothesis’ proposed in our CSO’s published research – in these difficult growing conditions, stress is the most limiting growth factor, and reducing this stress produces outsized increases in yield. Farmchef is the first commercial product built on this idea.

There are other crop treatments available on the international market that make stress tolerance claims similar to ours, mostly biostimulants, but we take a novel technical approach to solving the problem. Existing biostimulants usually use a few different mechanisms to treat abiotic stress. Most products improve the general health of the plant in different ways (e.g., by accelerating growth of roots) rather than targeting the underlying causes of stress like Farmchef. Others use signal molecules or hormones to “switch on” the plant’s internal stress response. This approach has a couple of drawbacks, mainly that this causes plants to slow down their growth and reduce yield. Some of these solutions need to be applied just before a drought begins to be effective, which is challenging for farmers who may have limited access to quality weather data. Other biotimulants are simply extracts of seaweed, compost, or other organic matter. These products may contain some compounds that treat stress as they occur naturally in some plants, but in very low concentrations. The feedstocks for these products are also expensive. Our approach is to isolate the compounds important for stress tolerance and synthesize them, giving us an inherent price advantage.

In one year, we will have recently gained regulatory approval for our products in our launch markets. By then, our goal is to have built a small sales and ops teams to begin to grow sales. In one year, we are targeting 15 farmer network partners (such as co-ops), with a reach of ~3,000 farmers. Our goal is for these farmers to be beginning to experience the benefits of the product – protection from crop losses and higher yields, leading to improved incomes and food security – and we will survey customers to validate these impacts. We will have set up an R&D center in Ghana, and started an academic trial with an African academic partner.

In five years, our ambitious goal is to have improved food security in 15 African markets, and 2-3 markets in other regions. We plan to have developed and launched more products, including an ultra-affordable biofertilizer and other novel crop treatments solving farmer pain points. Our goal is for average yields and farm incomes to be higher and less volatile in our markets of operation as a result of our products’ adoption, and for the population to be more food secure.

We also see our job creation and ecosystem impacts in the coming years as important. In five years, our goal is to have created 500+ jobs in our operating markets. We aim to have moved some or all of our blending facilities and perhaps raw material production to our markets of operation, bringing the economic benefits of local value addition and adding to job creation.

As we build our R&D organization, our goal is not only to develop solutions to more problems largely ignored by the Global North, but also help build plant science research capacity in Africa to foster development of more solutions. In five years, our goal is to have grown our internal R&D hub in Ghana, and also developed research partnerships to fund at least five studies with universities on the continent. We have already begun this process by partnering with Kenyatta University in Kenya, and will look to build more academic partnerships in the future.

Outside of academia, our goal is to build the market environment for biological crop treatments in Africa through educational programs and industry events to raise awareness of biological crop treatments and other breakthrough technologies among agronomists, policymakers, and other stakeholders. This will help pave the way for future innovators creating novel crop treatments.

We plan to track three main aspects of our product’s impact: impact on its users, the number and socio-economic status of the farmers we reach, and environmental impact.

Primarily, we want to make sure that the product is impactful for farmers. Part of this is understanding the improvement in yield from its use – which will tell us how much more our customers can grow and earn. Starting with our customer trials, we will track farmers’ percentage improvement in yield when using our product. We also want to show that the product has the desired impact of preventing crop losses during climate shocks, so we will use case studies to track this key metric during periods of drought, and to track improvements in percentage of plants surviving in drought conditions. We will also use customer surveys, starting with our planned effectiveness study, to track impact outcomes on farmers, particularly improvement in farm income and frequency of malnutrition.

We want to ensure that our product is being adopted by low-income smallholders, who stand to lose the most in the upcoming climate crisis, as well as wealthier farmers. When we survey farmers using our product, we will track metrics like the farm sizes of our users and other socioeconomic indicators. This will allow us to measure the percentage of sales to low-income smallholders to ensure that our product is accessible to farmers of all sizes and income levels.

To understand the scale of our impact, we will also track the number of farmers we reach and the amount of product sold. This will allow us to use the metrics calculated from our trials to extrapolate our overall impact.

We will also monitor the environmental impact of Farmchef adoption. Farmchef is designed to have lower environmental impact than fertilizer, particularly on soil health and greenhouse gas emissions. To validate these impacts, we will analyze lifecycle emissions for Farmchef and compare to inorganic fertilizers. We will also use our academic effectiveness study to measure Farmchef’s impact on soil health, particularly on stored microbe biomass in the soil. As we begin sales, we will use customer surveys to assess whether farmers reduced their fertilizer use as they adopted Farmchef, which will allow us to estimate additional tons of carbon stored in the soil and greenhouse gas emissions saved as key impact metrics.

Node Bio’s primary activities will be to produce and sell Farmchef. Node Bio will focus on sales through partnerships allowing us to rapidly reach large numbers of smallholder farmers. The main output of these activities is sale and application of Farmchef to farms in our target markets, especially smallholder farms.

The short-term outcomes of Farmchef application for smallholder farmers are:

-Higher yields: more food production 

-Higher farm incomes: more production means more for the farmer to sell with the only additional cost being Farmchef.

These short term outcomes create progress towards medium-term farmer impact outcomes:

-More stable food production year to year: Farmchef adoption reduces the chance of a bad growing season or total crop loss, reducing the ‘boom-bust’ cycle caused by occasional droughts and other shocks.

-More stable incomes: As farm production becomes less volatile, farm income will follow.

In the long term, we expect farmers to see the following impact outcomes:

-Less malnutrition (SDG2): farmers have more food available for their families. Larger harvests means enough stored food to last between seasons, and higher incomes means fewer periods when lack of cash prevents purchase of food.

-Decreased poverty (SDG1): farming families see sustained increases in income. The more stable income also helps them avoid crop losses that can destroy families’ savings. In the long term, it can help make farmers more creditworthy and improve their ability to invest, building wealth.

We also expect significant environmental impact from adoption of Farmchef. In the short and medium term, we expect adoption of Farmchef to have the following effects:

-Improved soil microbe content: We have some initial evidence to indicate that Farmchef will improve microbe content in the soil. These microbes are important for uptake of nutrients by plants, and for soil carbon sequestration.

-Reduced farmer fertilizer use: In most farm environments, Farmchef will give farmers an equivalent or better yield improvement to applying inorganic fertilizer. Farmers will reduce their reliance on fertilizers to drive profitable yields as they gain confidence in Farmchef. Some farmers may eliminate fertilizer use altogether, especially if they apply Farmchef along with regenerative agriculture techniques. Node Bio can partner with organizations working to drive adoption of regenerative agriculture to drive this output.

In the long term, these effects will lead to:

-Higher soil carbon sequestration, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (SDG 13): As farmers reduce fertilizer use and apply Farmchef, more microbes are able to grow in the soil as soil pH stabilizes with reduced fertilizer use and Farmchef encourages microbe growth. This increases carbon sequestration.

-Avoidance of desertification (SDG 15): Unhealthy soil retains less water and supports less plant life. In time, this can cause erosion and eventually desertification, especially as climates become hotter and drier. -Lower greenhouse gas emissions (SDG 13): Nitrogen fertilizers produce significant CO2 emissions in production. They also gasify into NOx, a potent greenhouse gas, when applied to fields. As farmers reduce their use of fertilizers, emissions reduce.

Farmchef is built on new research on how plants handle abiotic stress. The mechanism it uses to help plants survive climate shocks is inspired by some of nature’s most efficient stress responses.

Although plants are sessile, they evolved complex survival mechanisms that allow them to thrive under suboptimal conditions without the need to migrate. One of such defenses is metabolic response to abiotic stress such as drought. The condition causes accumulation of reactive oxygen species which essentially damage the leaf tissue and impact primary productivity such as photosynthesis. Plants respond by synthesizing a suit of metabolites including antioxidants and osmolytic compounds to neutralize the effect and repair damaged tissue.

Although this is a common stressor among plants, metabolism pathways and metabolites they synthesize differ among species, resulting in disparate efficiency in abiotic stress response. Farmchef mimics the approach unique to a particular group of plants that minimize metabolic cost by delivering stress response metabolite at specific concentrations allowing a dual effect of antioxidant and osmolytic function. This allows rapid stress response and increased tolerance especially to temporal stress at low metabolic cost. Under field conditions, stressors can vary by intensity and timing and it is difficult to breed crops to deal with such unpredictable dynamics. By mimicking synergic response of selected species, Farmchef alleviates multiple stressors including abiotic and nitrogen deficit as they become threatening, through leaf conditioning. This also inhibits costly metabolic response and allows crops to focus allocation to production, improving yields significantly. The approach also makes the solution affordable to smallholder farmers in lower income economies, as the product treats multiple symptoms of stress with fewer ingredients at lower concentrations. 

As previously mentioned, Farmchef was based on a study performed by our CSO measuring the impact of abiotic stress treatment. In this study, a prototype of our current Farmchef formula (called ‘nhB’ in the study) was tested on cowpeas in Northern Ghana, a semi-arid savannah environment. It was compared to an inorganic nitrogen fertilizer treatment and a treatment designed to simply reduce abiotic stress. In this study, the nhB improved yields by 45%, compared to 13% for the fertilizer treatment group. This study was published in Frontiers in Plant Science and is available at this link: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.732279/full

After this study, Ache continued research to optimize the nhB formula for commercialization. He tested growth of radishes, a common model species for experimentation, with nhB and other various candidate formulas. These tests showed that our current Farmchef formula produced a slightly larger yield improvement than nhB (195% vs. 189%). These studies were performed internally and are not published.

Our approach to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into our work is centered around our commitment to building a team and organizational culture that reflects the communities we serve. As an international company working in Africa, we are particularly conscious of the potential for our organizational structure to reinforce neocolonial structures. We are committed to addressing this by prioritizing hiring people from the countries and communities we serve across all levels of our company. To ensure fairness and equity, we plan to target consistent salaries between any expats we hire and employees from the countries of operation. We also aim to achieve gender equity across organizational levels because we believe it is a moral imperative and diverse teams produce better results, with deeper insights into customer communities and better decision making. Overall, our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not just a moral issue, but also critical for the success of our business and the positive impact we seek to make in the world.

Though our team is still only made up of the co-founders, we recognize the importance of developing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies for hiring and culture from the beginning. We will work to develop policies that codify our DE&I values before we begin hiring, and work to intentionally create an inclusive company culture.

Node earns revenue in two ways: direct sales of Farmchef and other products and licensing.

Node will primarily earn revenue from direct sales of Farmchef in our target markets. Though our target end users in these markets are smallholders and mid-sized farms, our target customers in these markets are bulk buyers of agrichemicals – large ag producers, grower networks such as aggregators and co-ops, and government/NGO extension and subsidy programs. These farmer networks have wide reach of small and mid-sized farmers, and they are also a key source of information on best practices. Some distribute inputs to farmers already, or provide financing to purchase improved inputs. Therefore, these organizations are key for educating farmers on our product and its usage. We will also work with retail distributors. These companies work with large networks of agrodealer retail shops in towns, villages, and trading centers across our target markets. They will play a key role in last-mile distribution, making sure the product is always readily available for farmers. We will also sell to large commercial farms. These are not our target customers for impact, but will provide a stable revenue source to support the growth of our business.

We will focus on marketing and sales, using contract manufacturers and third-party logistics providers to handle production and shipping of goods, at least until we have the capital and stable demand required to set up local production in our target markets.

Node will also earn revenue from licensing agreements with large agrichemical manufacturer-distributors in the US, EU, and other high-income markets. These markets are much more expensive to enter through direct sales but have strong multinational distributors like Bayer Cropscience, Nutrien, and Syngenta. These companies often expand their product portfolios through licensing and acquisitions.

Besides sales and marketing of our products, Node Bio will focus on R&D as our other key activity. We will develop more products, building on the founding team’s capabilities in developing new products that regulate plants’ stress and metabolic systems to add more value to our product portfolio.

We analyzed the likely cost of producing and selling Farmchef, and found that we will be able to offer Farmchef at a healthy margin while maintaining a price accessible to farmers of all income levels. Once we launch commercially, we expect each market to be able to reach 'ramen profitability' within one year. In order to cover the costs of reaching this breakeven point, as well as our initial market setup and near-term R&D, we are currently raising pre-seed funding and seeking research grants.

As we prove our ability to profit in our initial launch markets, we will seek to raise growth capital to allow us to expand internationally. We also expect licensing revenues to help us get the capital required to reach this international scale.

We are currently prevented from making commercial sales by regulations in our target markets. We will not be able to begin making sales to prove our revenue model until early 2024. However, we have seen encouraging signs of customer demand in our markets. Interest in customer pilots has been strong from various types of organizations, including large agricultural producers with outgrower farmer networks, digital farmer aggregator services, and community farms. Though we only have limited product available at the moment, we have started 2 customer pilots with these kinds of customers, with another community farm pilot in Ghana starting in June.

Interviews with farmers in East Africa have shown the strong interest in solutions to drought, as well as willingness to pay. We have also seen strong farmer demand for dubious unlicensed competitor products making drought protection claims in local retail stores. Some of these products are sold at prices well above our expected retail price for Farmchef. This is unfortunate, but we feel it indicates that there is a strong opportunity for a working solution.