Building Hardware and Software Tools for Farmers in Africa

I think the app has really made it easy to organise the farming activities. When you look at just breaking down the farming portions into different areas and being able to know where you have planted which crops, open fields, shade nets is basically what we are using. And then categorising this into blocks and obviously the utilisation of other pesticides and fertilisers and all those particular blocks and on daily basis the farm workers are able to send me a report and then I upload, uploading the daily activities and being able to monitor levels for the consumables, you know, like the fertilisers and pesticides and, and be able to know up front the level so that I can, I can restock.

For me, I think that the compliance tool is a really, really big hook! Like, for me, telling someone that, listen, I managed to print this and this report. It managed to get me over the line with this and this client. That is a major, major hook. There are a lot of people willing to pay for a physical audit, but you still have to write, like a written documentation. You have to maintain a file at your farm, you know, get random audits and all of that sort of stuff. That's the challenge with that. There's no one that's focused on digitising that entire process. And I think it's unnecessarily cumbersome. I mean, before FarmCloud™, we had a. A file with maybe like 100 pages of all the different things that you need to maintain that all the time, which is just extremely tedious. Right. Like I know, for instance, I have a customer that takes a tonne to a tonne and a half of papers a week from me. So that customer, every year around February, March, they say, hey, can you give us your traceability reports and the certification and that certification and all of that. So I obviously have to provide them that documentation and this tool is super helpful in doing that.

Yeah, I think FarmCloud, to be honest, as an app for just capturing farming activities makes it so seamless. I don't know, maybe sometimes just explaining it to another person, they may not get that appreciation. But I have been to those whom I'm close to by navigating it with them so that they get to see how it works. Because most of the guys I know, they are using Excel and you know Excel, you can edit, you can lose information and all those kind of things. But to be honest, for all these, the features that it has, I think it was well thought out just right from capturing the farm elements in terms of the different blocks and different areas and fertilisers and agro and adding buyers in there and being able to capture accounting activities and even daily activities.

We export crops grown by over 60,000 farmers and FarmCloud helps our agronomists to review farm activities and ensure all our outgrowers are compliant with our quality management system. We specifically liked the fact that the team at Synnefa worked with us to onboard all our outgrowers onto the platform then trained our operations team to use FarmCloud all within 3 months. Now, it's been easier to plan logistics and harvesting cycles. We are currently working with Synnefa to develop a yield forecasting feature using satellite imagery and our internal harvest data from the farms and this will be connected to our internal ERP via an API so that data from FarmCloud drives our business decisions.