Solutions

Our solution, Freshmarte, is a mobile platform that sustain-ably & inclusively integrate smallholders into the agricultural value chain via a mobile app and SMS service that helps them find & secure raw material production (farming) contracts from food and beverage manufacturers and at the same time also helping food & beverage manufacturers sustain-ably source raw material from groups and individual smallholders.

The farming contracts that we provide to farmers are digitised & built on distributed ledger to ensure its transparency & provenance. We are also creating a platform where smallholders can use this digitized contract to access finance for their farming operations from social, impact and even commercial lending institution.

• Contract Farming Solutions:Using our app, a food and beverage company can issue a contract to source its raw material produce from smallholders. Our app helps the company finds smallholders that produces the raw materials and with the motivation to fulfill the contracts. The contracts are of different types, but we do encourage food companies to help in the financing and supplies of farm inputs for the farming contracts with a benefit of a transparent pre-negotiated produce sales to the contractor. Integrated is also aContract Monitoring and Reportingfor food and beverage companies. We are recruiting a team of field officers for smooth monitoring of farmers within their cohorts of contracts. These reports can be viewed for each stage of farming operation and are displayed in a graphical model displayed on their mobile dashboard: Our mobile web app will allow food manufacturers and agro-processing companies to:
  • find smallholders within their value chain that are within or outside of their preferred location.
  • Present graphical analysis on the production capacities of these smallholders based on data that we have collected, and satellite imagery and other open data from government agencies and nonprofits.
  • Initiate digital smart contracts to smallholders. These contracts are built on Blockchain to ensure it is tamper proof and transparent.
  • dispense through our platform information on planting to smallholders with their outgrower scheme
  • easily facilitate farm input and pre-farming finance (as the case may be) for the smallholders under them through our network of agro-allied services company and agri-finance institutions.
  • provide stage-by-stage monitoring and management of smallholders farm through our platform.
  • At harvest; provide notification, settlement and clearing through algorithm based price determination understood by both food companies and smallholders, provenance and traceability services for each produce accessible through our APIS to all parties and logistics services for delivery of raw material to their processing plant.
• Farm Produce Listing:Using our app, farmers who don’t want to enter into contracts can list their produce and find ready buyers in a spot-market kind of trading. Real-time local/ international prices are displayed for commodities that the farmers would want to sell, so that they would not be short-changed but at the same time advise them on negotiable pricing so they can attract buyers.
• Data-driven decision support service:Freshmarte`s FarmBot is an SMS farm virtual assistant that leverages machine learning to analyse carefully collected agronomic data, satellite and data from farm sensors to provide smallholders with real-time information for quality decisions in their core 5 areas of farm operations of :
  • planting & optimum watering
  • input application
  • crop monitoring
  • plant disease detection and mitigation
  • market

For example, a user can askquestion such as "When should I start planting this year", Farmbot queries the Weather API and related datasets in our database then returns an answer like " for Maize ... Start planting between 5
15 of March".

Providing market access and finance helps for the inclusive integration of smallholder farmers into the global food supply chain and this in turn will;

• improve the income of farmers and fight rural poverty
• combat issues like post-harvest losses, feeding the several million people that suffer chronic undernourishment (230 million people in Africa alone) and
• ensure our global food security.