EMPOWERING SMALLHOLDER FARMERS

About Solution

Farmcrowdy is Nigeria's first digital agriculture platform that connects small scale farmers across Nigeria with access to finance sourced from individuals and corporates, equips the small scale farmers with know-how of sustainable & highly efficient farming practices and ultimately points their produce at harvest to markets offering superior returns to what these farmers get compared to trading within their locality.

Farmcrowdy uses an integrated agriculture approach to ensure a sustainable food production process and has identified that the best place to tackle hunger is from the small scale farmers themselves who make up 80% of the food providers in Nigeria but are unable to adequately feed themselves due to suboptimal yields from the lack of modern farming techniques and improved seed varieties. According to our estimates, if we are able to work with 1,000,000 farmers (we are currently at 7000 farmers) by Year 2021, then not only would these farmers have enough resources to continue to cultivate their farmland but food security would have been improved by Availability, and Access. Our work is important to the 38 million smallholder rural farmers in Nigeria who currently have an average of 7.5 acres of farmland but utilise only 30% but depend on healthy harvests in order to be able to affordably purchase food based on their food preferences and dietary choices.

Farmcrowdy operates a model that gives people a secure platform to participate in agriculture by sponsoring rural farmers. Rural farmers are generally not bankable so without sponsorship, these farmers will not have access to finance for improved seed varieties, modern farming techniques and training to turn a healthy harvest.

Our goal is to have at least one farmer in every family in Nigeria and this is made possible because anyone, regardless of work experience, educational background or can conveniently sponsor any farm unit of choice from the comfort of their mobile devices.

Launched in November 2016, our solution has scaled from just one poultry farmer in one state to over 7,000 direct and indirect livestock and crop farmers across 10 states in Nigeria.

The benefits of our solution include:

  • the impact on the lives of rural farmers, who in our first year of operation were able to improve their income by at least 80%. Farmers get 40% profit from their produce after harvest.
  • increasing food production in order to reduce hunger and guarantee food sustainability.
  • providing a ready market for farmers to sell their produce in order to avoid and reduce prevalent food waste.

Farmcrowdy as a business is a culmination of diverse team with experience across different sectors.

As an Agric-Tech company, Farmcrowdy avails Nigerians an opportunity to participate in Agriculture without necessarily getting into the farm. A farm sponsor will need to only select an available farm of their choice from our platform, and then we match a farmer and activate them with farm inputs to complete the farm until harvest. At harvest, we have already brokered deals with off-takers or processors to mop up our farm produce and then we pay the farm sponsor 40% of the profit (plus their initial sponsorship), the farmers gets 40% of the profit and finally, Farmcrowdy keeps 20% for our work.

We are focused on empowering smallholder farmers, who are the most vulnerable to agricultural risk due to their high dependence on agriculture for their livelihoods, chronic food insecurity, isolation from markets and proper storage and processing infrastructure and lack of access to banking facilities and financing. We enable these farmers to increase their food production, expand their farm operations and increase their total revenue from their farming activities by ensuring that financing for their farm cycles comes to them by way of matching their farms to farm sponsors through the Farmcrowdy platform while also supporting them with technical know-how and access to market infrastructure through the duration of their engagement with us.

We are not only happy that the farmers that have worked with us see an 80% increase in profit but we are very upfront on the share ratio which is 40% for farmers, 40% for farm sponsors and 20% for Farmcrowdy

We also have technical field specialist that specially train farmers on how to get maximum yield from harvest. This encourages our farmers to further seek education. For example, one of our rural farmers was so encouraged that she applied and just recently gained admission to the university.

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