As I have noted many times, we are entering a new age in Nigerian agriculture. Nigerian graduates are going to play major roles through various ways, from doing the actual farming to advancing the processes involved in farming. A new startup, Peatuce, has joined the club, to facilitate agro-trading and enable efficient distribution of farm produce. The company, via a newsletter, made its case:
For more than decades, numerous challenges have consistently plagued the operations of smallholder farmers on the African continent; from poor financing to stringent policies, haphazard regulation, climatic changes and obsolete technology, these challenges often create a stifled environment for the functionality of local farmers playing in the Agricultural value chain.
As such, farm productivity, efficiency, and profitability has been grossly irregular, most times, at a decline. The aftermath of this irregularity is already negative, and could grow worse if it isn’t remedied timely — especially considering that the African population, which is expected to grow spontaneously by 2050 will have more mouths to feed, when in contrast, local food production is yet to circulate the present population.
Founded in February 2018, Peatuce plans to improve the local food trade within and across Africa by increasing efficiency, service quality and enhancing profitability for farmers, suppliers and buyers.
“We believe in a future where local farmers play a large role in feeding our communities, and we are working to making that a reality. We are focusing on emerging markets with a target of over 20,000 local farmers on our platform in 2018,” says Peatuce team
The company has over 500 local farmers, who are relying on it to facilitate their farming operations, expedite distribution and supply chain, as well as help enhance productivity of farm produce.
Peatuce integrates independent services geared towards enhancing local food trade across Africa by boosting production and improving supply chain.
As I had noted, there are many ways to become a “farmer” in this age. Find yours and let us have food security in Nigeria. Here are some guides:
- Precision agriculture by making sensors: here, you make electronic sensors; may be a little hard depending on your skill level
- Agriculture insurance technology: making insurance products geared for farming
- Agro lending technology: delivering capital to farmers at scale supported by technology
- Agro financing – investing in farmers and farms through digital aggregators
- Direct Farming: owning farms and growing crops and/or raising farm animals
- Farming ecommerce: expanding farmers’ markets by providing digital platforms for trade
- Pricing aggregation: facilitating trading through provision of produce price data
- Storage: African farmers struggle with storage of produce. Building solutions in this area will be catalytic
- Logistics: there is a huge opportunity to facilitate the delivery of produce from rural areas to urban areas across Africa with our poor road networks
- Digitization of transactions: from payment to tracing origins of produce, we have a huge need to digitize farming systems in Africa
- Commodity trading: building exchanges for trading commodities
- Farm digitization: most farms must be digitized for them to be tech-ready
- Others: there are opportunities like making digital tools farmers can use. These could include farm diary, mapping solutions, etc
Some photos from Peatuce.
