FarmWorks Africa

FarmWorks solves 6 interrelated problems challenging African agriculture: (i) vast acreage of under (or poorly) developed agricultural land; (ii) limited access to financing; (iii) lack of technical and agronomic skills; (iv) limited use of technology solutions; (v) fragmented and punitive market structures; and (vi) incoherent solutions for small-holder farmers (SHF).

We are developing an integrated approach to address all 6 challenges:

• Lease land from owners desperate for solutions to develop their land
• Invest capital for professional farm development
• Deploy farm operators trained in the FarmWorks Institute apprentice program
• Develop tech enabled controls and systems for multi-location farming operation
• Build aggregation and storage infrastructure with direct market access
• Expand this capability to SHF through the FarmWorks Hub

In Kenya, we are aiming for 1,000 farms, making food affordable, employing 45,000 people and 400,000 SHF. Scaled across Africa (and globally), the impact will be massive. 

We are solving a complex problem:

• Ag land use and development: Thousands of acres of agricultural land in Kenya is underdeveloped. It is estimated 60% of available arable land is in Africa. Only 7% of agricultural land is irrigated and professionally developed

• Food productivity and farmer incomes: Yields in Kenya are one third of what is achieved in other parts of the world (our soil and weather is excellent). Farmers typically get 10% of the value of the value chain (while carrying the most risk)

• Food quality and consumer pricing: There is almost no traceability with poorly enforced growing standards for the consumer. Low productivity and fragmented market structures raises food prices – consumers spend 55% of their disposable income on basic foods

• Agricultural human potential: There are NO apprentice programs for agronomists in Kenya and across the region, leaving limited solutions for farm management

The impact of our solution, when scaled, is massive: 30,000 acres, training 4,500 operators, employing 45,000 farmworkers and working directly with 400,000 SFH. We will produce 1.2 trillion calories per year, effectively feeding 1.5 million people with quality food at lower prices year round. Our ecosystem will be a driver of transforming the agricultural sector.

FarmWorks creates the whole eco-system required to build a financially viable farming enterprise, with 2 unique components that drive scalability:   

• After extensive water, soil and legal diligence, we enter into a partnership with mid-sized farm owners, looking for a commercial management solution
• Experts develop a detailed production program and invest in farm irrigation and storage infrastructure, ensuring climate-smart farming and GAP compliance
• We deploy trained operators from the FarmWorks Institute onto the farm, supported by regional managers and world-class agronomists. The Institute is our engine of growth, developing the talent required for running our farms
• We support and monitor our farm teams with extensive use of technology, systems and standardized operating procedures, with on-going guidance from our central agronomist team. Technologies cut across mobile-based ERP systems, farm activity monitoring, satellite and AI-based yield forecasts, behavioral assessments and traceability
• Produce is sorted, stored and packaged in regional aggregation hubs, while our markets team develops off-take arrangements 
• Our infrastructure is leveraged, with the addition of collection centers and farmer field schools to support surrounding small-holder farmers, providing them with inputs, extension and aggregating their produce

Integrated, these elements create the full ecosystem required for a profitable and scalable farming enterprise.

FarmWorks has the opportunity to achieve transformative impact:

Landowners: benefit from increased passive income, with zero additional headache and investment required. We anticipate developing 1,000 farms over 5 years

Employees: at scale, we will directly employ 45,000 farm workers, mostly youth and typically over half women. These will be in regions where jobs are often hard to come by and we will pay above market. Our technical teams benefit from a one-of-a-kind Institute, providing management opportunities that do not currently exist in a meaningful way in Kenya

Small-holder farmers: extending our infrastructure and eco-system to surrounding communities means we can potentially triple incomes of over 400,000 farmers, profitably providing services that are desperately needed

Consumers and the market: our produce will fill supply gaps, reduce price volatility, enable agro-processing, all with GAP compliant traceability and quality standards

The environment: our practices ensure the long-term soil and environmental health through sustainable practices. Our processes will arrest the washing away of top soils, plaguing the country’s farm lands and limit the introduction of nematodes and other diseases

The sector: The Institute provides much needed expertise for FarmWorks and the market as a while, supporting the transformation of the sector

Our solution relates to a number of the Challenge dimensions:

• Developing clusters of mid-sized farms for horticultural products promotes the availability and affordability of low-impact, diverse and nutritious foods, while maintaining soil health
• Creating passive income from owners of mid-sized lands will create an alternative to land-change patterns towards urban infrastructure
• Our investments in post-harvest and market access infrastructure will improve supply chain constraints and reduce food wastage
• The extension of our infrastructure and services (inputs, finance, extension, aggregation) to small-holder farmers is transformative to their farming activities, risk mitigation and incomes

Our solution has a number of innovative components:

1. We have set off to resolve an ecosystem challenge. Many players in the market are resolved to tackling one or two components of the agricultural system (e.g. finance and inputs for small-holder farmers; aggregation and market access). We realized that to have sustained and scalable impact, we need to integrate all the components of the full farming ecosystem
2. The FarmWorks Institute is the only apprenticeship farm training program in the region. This explains the tragic gap in technical and agronomic capabilities for farm management. The Institutes extreme focus on mindsets and beliefs is a second area of innovation, as technical capabilities alone do not create the human capital required to drive the sector
3. Our technology and process driven controls and systems across every element of farming operations will be unique. The components exist, but have not been integrated for a distributed farming enterprise as we envisage it. Take for example our conversations on telematics and image recognition that allow us to monitor equipment usage while identifying real-time challenges of a distracted or tired tractor operator
4. Our approach to supporting small-holder farmers is unique. We are farmers operating within their communities, extending our infrastructure to them, as opposed to an NGO-led or single-solution provider tackling elements of the support required

Our tech requirements are to develop a system that allows us to create controls and provide real-time transparency over the operations of a distributed farming enterprise. This system needs to provide functionality across a number of interrelated areas:

1. A farm planning and performance monitoring platform to manage preparation, planting, growing and harvesting of produce. Embedded within this is the planning and monitoring of the usage of crop protection to ensure their timely and safe application
2. Monitoring and analysis (for further insight on optimizing yields and revenues) of growth of produce across the network of farms, incorporating satellite data, weather forecasting and soil moisture content analysis
3. Produce management for off-takers from across out network of farms for the required basket of products
4. End-to-end traceability capability, not just from our own farms to the markets, but also extended to the small-holder farmers that produce for us on contract
5. Real-time monitoring of usage, operations and maintenance of equipment and machinery across all farms and clusters
6. Digitally delivered instructions and on-going training and coaching of farm technical staff from our agronomists and the FarmWorks Institute

We are integrating existing technology and making it fit-for-purpose for a distributed farming enterprise. As such, we are explicitly working with technology that is either widely used, or being developed for the market. We are currently at the point of assessing the different technologies to work with and pilot. Some examples include:

Agricultural ERP systems: we are exploring mature solutions (SAP and Muddy Boots). We are also exploring partnerships with 2 players with solutions for distributed farming enterprises, CropIn (www.cropin.com) and Intersoft Eagles (https://intersofteagles.com/). Both incorporate satellite imagery and weather data for yield projections.

Traceability and produce management: many existing and new solutions exist, using RFID and increasingly blockchain technology (e.g. www.farmsoft.com). Key will be for us to integrate these with our ERP and allow us to plug them into our off-taker systems

Real-time monitoring: basic telematics (currently being incorporated by OEM’s e.g. John Deere) and behavioral image recognition technology are readily available (e.g. www.sqn.world)

Management of small-holder farmers: many solutions for these markets exist (www.hellotractor.com, www.safaricom.co.ke/business/digifarm), though exist as standalone solutions that we will need to integrate into an ecosystem provider for farmers

Knowledge dissemination and communication: we will seek to adapt existing solutions (e.g. www.ujuzikilimo.com) with gamification and other models of two-way learning, using e-learning solutions

We have not yet implemented these technologies, but are exploring our options and partnerships actively. The Prize will go towards helping us prioritize and onboard our priority technology partners. 

Our objective is to support the sustainable and equitable transformation of agriculture in Africa. With Kenya being our starting point, our goal is to build a scalable farming enterprise, operating across 1,000 farms, feeding 1.5 million people per year, directly employing 40,000 people and supporting 400,000 small-holder farmers.

Achieving this requires 5 linked activities:

1. Identify, develop and manage underutilized farmland. Over 5 years establish a network of 1,000 farms in clusters across the country growing a basket of produce for domestic and export markets. These farms, with appropriate planting, irrigation, harvesting and storage technology lifts yields and reduces costs, allowing us to feed 1.5 million people per year and lower the cost of food
2. Identify, train and support 4,500 farm operators across irrigation, crop protection, machinery operations, post-harvest management and general management in the FarmWorks Institute. With a deep focus on technical skills and the right mindsets, these operators create the human capital required to operate our 1,000 farms and manage our 40,000 employees
3. Leverage a robust tech-enabled system of supporting and managing a distributed farming enterprise. Technology is key to ensuring our ability to bring professional farm management across our network of farms in a cost-effective, scalable way. Technology will need to cut across every aspect of our farming operations.
4. Build small-holder farmer hubs across our clusters, working with 400,000 farmers, providing them with inputs, finance, training and market access, raising their incomes while increasing our basket of produce. These hubs leverage the full infrastructure of FarmWorks in the region, including our aggregation and storage capabilities, agronomy expertise and access to inputs and equipment
5. Establish go-to-market capabilities, able to connect our produce directly to markets, limiting wastage and increasing value to the growers. Markets provide the sustainability for growth and support to small-holder farmers. Current market structures can skew value towards the traders. Building our own go-to-market allows us to reduce wastage and retain a bigger portion of the value, while creating efficiencies across the whole value chain

We started our operations in May, 2020. We currently have 6 managers and 30 employees working on our first farm. We have also brought on board 10 apprentices as the first cohort of the FarmWorks Institute. We are developing the first small-holder Production Unit, serving 300 farmers, while will each employ 3-4 people, in total supporting the livelihoods of ~1,000 people in the community.

At the end of year 1 (mid-20201), we will have 400 direct employees across 8-10 farms, work with 900 farmers across 3 Production Units (employing ~3,000 people on their farms), have 50 apprentices in the Institute. Our produce will feed 15,000 people. 

At the end of year 5, we anticipate having close to 20,000 employees across 500 farms, work with 200,000 small holder farmers and their employees and train 300-400 apprentices a year in the Institute. Our produce will feed 1.5 million people per year.

By year 4, we anticipate our expansion into other markets outside of Kenya, given that the problem we are solving is common across Africa and our solution is fully transferrable. The numbers above do not take this geographic growth into consideration

Goals over the next year

Establish the early building blocks of our solution: (i) 8-10 farms in 3 clusters across the country, producing a basket of product for local and international markets; (ii) aggregation and storage facilities built across our 3 clusters (iii) the FarmWorks Institute established and training 50 apprentices to support our growth; (iv) initial control and support systems established and being refined, layered on with digital and analytics solutions, where relevant; (v) 3 production units working with 900 small-holder farmers, supported by a network of collection points and farmer field schools; (vi) market relationships to ensure movement of our produce; and (vii) executive team roles filled (we have 4 filled), and an advisory board established.

Goals over the next 5 years

Establish an at-scale ecosystem player solving a major food-systems challenge across Kenya, with early activity in one or two other countries on the continent: (i) 500 farms across 10-15 clusters, supported by regional aggregation hubs; (ii) an established Institute with proprietary approaches to technical and behavioral training of farm operators, training 300 apprentices a year; (iii) an established and proprietary approach, with the technology, digital tools and processes that supports the professional running of a distributed farming enterprise; (iv) a few hundred Production Units, working with 200,000 small-holder farmers; (v) a recognized and respected consumer food brand with strong linkages to markets; (vi) partnerships with food processors to establish value-added foods for domestic and expert markets; (vii) growth to 2 other African markets. 

Our main challenges and barriers are of execution. Based on our work so far, we feel there are no structural barriers to our solution. However the execution challenges are substantial and require significant attention, creativity, investment and focus to address. Our focus areas are:

1. Delivering the expected yields in year 1 from our current farms. This will be critical to demonstrating the investable economics of this solution
2. Finalizing our Seed round and subsequentially Series A funding. Critical that we select the right partners for the long term
3. Building out our management team and the right partnerships. We have a strong starting team, and will need to remain focused on this over the next 2 years
4. Our systems and tech capabilities to manage a distributed farming enterprise. The tech exists, but finding the right partners and making it bespoke for our needs will be essential
5. Establishing a go-to-market capability. Off-takers want to see product before they are willing to commit to volumes, while investors would like to see committed off-take contracts
6. Building an Institute that is able to not only transfer the right technical skills, but is able to deeply develop the right mindsets and beliefs required. We see examples in different arenas, but this will be unique to our sector in this region
7. Driving our international expansion (from year 4) and adapting our model, while deploying our core IP, to meet the unique needs of different countries

1. Yields: Our Head of Production is a leading agronomist with 25 years’ experience in horticultural production. We are supported by expert agronomists. 
2. Funding: We are working with a financial advisor and are speaking with a range of potential investors, working with them to ensure the right structuring
3. Team: Our approach is to hire experienced executives into our management team. We currently have our starting team (Production, Institute, Operations, Markets). The remainder will be onboarded over the next 12 months as we grow our footprint, revenue base and funding. The time allows us to identify the right people
4. System and Technology: Our ops head is working with agronomists and ag tech players to build our systems. We will start with the basics and build on it as we expend the scale of our operations
5. Markets: Our head of markets has a background in food distribution and is leveraging existing relationships to secure markets for our early harvests. We have conducted detailed market studies to understand market dynamics for product sales directly to the market. We have invested in aggregation facilities that are GAP compliant, allowing us to go straight to market without the need of brokers
6. Institute: Our Head of Institute has built Kenya’s only other ag training facility. We have hired our first apprentices and will gradually build our curriculum
7. Expansion: We will grow internationally once we have established our Kenyan operation and will look at this down the line

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We currently have 4 full time executives and 1 part time executive leading our team: 

Peter Muthee. Head of Production and Institute 

Wanjiku Kiereini. Head of Markets 

Mark Lewis. Head of Projects 

Farouk Ramji. Head of Operations (part-time, full-time in August) 

Timothy Murage. Head of Small-Holder Farmer hub

As an early-stage business, FarmWorks has attracted a experienced executive team. We decided to establish ourselves as a joint leadership team

Head of Production and Institute: Peter Muthee has 25 years of experience in horticultural production. Working across Kenya, but also internationally, developing and managing farms. Before joining FarmWorks, he served as CEO of Greenblade a grower and exporter of herbs and vegetables for the domestic and international markets, where he turned the company around. He was also the founder of Latia, the only other agricultural vocational training institute in Kenya. Early in his career, he managed the largest outgrower program across Africa

Head of Markets: Wanjiku Kiereini worked in agricultural development with small-holder farmers before running an FMCG distribution business for 15 years. Her relationships, knowledge of food markets and distribution is ideal to lead our markets

Head of Projects: Mark Lewis has worked on farms across the world. Most recently he served as the agricultural expert for the IFC across Africa, overlooking over 400 due diligences. He brings depth of global experience to our team

Head of Operations: Farouk Ramji has 10 years of experience as COO and head of transformation for major telecommunications operators in emerging markets. He is very well suited to building our tech enabled systems and controls

Head of Small-Holder Farmer hub: Timothy Murage has 5 years of experience managing small-holder farmers specificially in crop protection, and agri business management. He brings a wealth of on ground, and local expertise to the SMF hub.

• Global agricultural machinery OEM: collaborating on adapting telematics and analytics to support our use of their machinery; also on developing tools to manage leasing of equipment to the surrounding small-holder farmers
• Global suppliers of inputs (seeds, fertilizer, chemicals) technologies: working together on adapting training materials and the model of delivery to small-holder farmers
• Local IT developer of ERP for farming: partnering to establish an end-to-end ERP system for horticulture, including use with small-holder farmers
• Local training institutes: working with different educational institutions that would provide the talent required for the FarmWorks Institute apprenticeship program
• Global agricultural research universities: early conversations with a number of global research universities, both for our agronomy knowledge and also for the Institute

We have 3 sets of customers:

Consumers, retailers, food and beverage entities: FarmWorks develops farms and grows quality produce, to GAP standards with clear traceability. We sell this produce to consumers and retailers for a profit. Current operating margins in Kenya are high as a result of inefficiencies in the food systems

Small-holder farmers: Through our small-holders Hub, we supply and sell inputs and lease machinery to the small-holder communities that surround us. We also contract food production, which we aggregate and sell to the market

Other farm owners and students: The FarmWorks Institute trains farm operators both for FarmWorks and for other farming operations at a fee. It operates as a profitable social enterprise (not paying dividends, but investing in its own development and growth)

FarmWorks intends to leverage grant funding from Solve to overcome the execution barrier identified in our solution. More specifically the funding would be used to customize an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool to fit the business requirements and context for the FarmWorks business model. The ERP tool will enable farmers producing a variety of crops to effectively record every transaction from purchase of seeds to post harvest sales thus accounting for every cost along the value chain. The system will enable the calculation of production costs per crop, per block of planting to effectively calculate gross margin. In addition to this being a financial tool, the ERP would also allow us to track inputs such as planting programs to manage and accurately define yeilds and output measures. The system with customization would be able to  automate controls, such as linking a bluetooth weighing scale at the time of post harvest handling to automatically calculate with no human intervention what the weight of our crops are. This tool is a key requirement  for FarmWorks to build controls as it looks to scale 30,000 acres across 1,000 farms within 5 years. We recognize that the grant amount would not cover the full funding requirement for development however FarmWorks is also interested in additional prize funding to support the full technology build-out to manage a distributed farming enterprise. Additionally, Farmworks would benefit from both the Solve and MIT community networks along with opportunities for mentorship as the company looks to accelerate 

FarmWorks would benefit from Solution Technology support as this is one of the key barriers to execution we face today. Developing farms is not new, but the FarmWorks model of leveraging technology solutions to support scale, manage and control growth is fundamental to our business strategy.

FarmWorks will always require human capacity and talent on each farm. With an advanced technical solution, a senior agronomist for example, located in our central office will be able to support, advise, and train farmers across the 1,000 farms we operate. The use of technology will provide the senior agronomist with detailed information on crop protection, productivity of machine elements, and risk mitigation based on future weather patterns this information will be transmitted through the use of technologies such as satellite imagery and IoT sensors.

FarmWorks intends to bring technologies together within the agricultural context to improve efficiencies in food production and food security.

Our interest in the Solve challenge lies in building the tech-enabled systems and controls that will enable us to establish a distributed farming enterprise, initially across Kenya and later across the African continent. We do not have names of specific partners, but groups we know we would benefit from include:

• Ag tech players with solutions that would be of us to our solution (across agronomy, management, analytics, education, monitoring, traceability)
• Research institutions in agricultural development
• Individuals (whether faculty or Solve Members) who have expertise to share (e.g. in building analytics platforms

From each of these groups we would be looking for access to expertise, technology and capabilities that will support out development. 

FarmWorks will use the AI for Humanity Prize in the following three areas:

• Data Science
  • FarmWorks will look to build a database across crops, varieties and geographies to fine tune crop growing blue prints that would help improve yields & quality of vegetable crops and therefore returns to small-holder farmers
  • Building on partnerships with global players such as Yara, Syngenta, and Corteva to leverage on their existing data for decision making.  
  • Usage of satellite imagery to monitor crops 24/7 to ensure more proactive observations of the problems they could be facing, and thereby taking actions to increasing yields and quality.

• Artificial Intelligence
  • Partner with global and local weather data and satellite imagery sources to enable prediction of likely pest and disease problems that may arise in vegetable crops
  • Utilize telematics as early warning systems for such things as temperature fluctuation in cold chain and potential problems with machinery
  • Monitor soil temperature & moisture together with water quality to enable more efficient use of water in growing vegetable crops 

• Machine Learning
  • Utilize GPS in managing tractors and their operations to improve efficiencies savings input costs and improving returns
  • Investigate the use of robots in various stages of vegetable production such as seedlings in a nursery, with a view to enhancing productivity and reducing cost of production. 

Kenya imported ~USD 800 million of potatoes in 2017 and 50% of red onions consumed. Demand for quality produce domestically is growing rapidly with Kenya’s urbanization. The impact of data science, AI and machine learning in agriculture would unlock the productive value of underdeveloped farms across Kenya (and Africa) and would result in consistent quality of locally grown produce at an affordable price.

We have set out to address a major set of challenges that are common across most of Africa, all linked to basic agricultural production and access to markets:

• African yields are often one third of what they are in other parts of the world, plagued by poor quality and access to inputs, lack of capital for investing in technology and limited agronomic expertise.
• Concurrently, most African farmers (which constitute the largest share of Africa’s working population) live a life of subsistence at or below the poverty line, subject to the impact of changing and unpredictable weather patterns and punitive market structures, with limited government support.
• Consumers often spend over half of their income on basic food (55% in Kenya), leaving the rest for housing and schooling and very little for further discretionary spending or savings.
• Poor farming practices have a major environmental impact: top soil erosion is a major challenge, as is the introduction of diseases and pests in our farmlands – both jeopardizing future agricultural potential

Our solution which unlocks the productive value of mid-sized farms at scale, while supporting surrounding small-holder farmer communities, enables us to tackle, head-on, all four of these challenges, impacting millions of people. The health, social and economic crisis that COVID-19 has brought has served to heighten the necessity of our approach.

FarmWorks, the FarmWorks Institute and the FarmWorks small-holder Hub combined develop the required talent, mobilize resources, apply deep farming expertise and establish access to markets, thereby having multiple levels of impact. At scale (1,000 farms), the impact will be transformative to the sector in Kenya:

• 1,000 farms, covering 30,000 acres of improved soil health, more sustainable use of water and ecologically friendly farming practices. It also provides an alternative to converting agricultural land into residential and commercial uses
• 4,500 trained operators from the FarmWorks Institute, creating a pipeline of the talent required to change farming practices across the country
• 40,000 direct employees across our farms, mostly youth and over half women. These come from the communities in which we work, in desperate need of well-paying jobs that support and develop their professional growth
• 400,000 small-holder farmers, whom we work with directly through the FarmWorks Small-Holders Hub. We project that we will be able to triple their incomes overtime
• Our produce could feed the equivalent of 1.5m people for a year (assuming 2500 calories per person per day), with high quality food and a lower price as we are able to bypass the many layers of brokers and middlemen

Beyond these direct impacts, the reliable increase of produce at competitive prices enables investment in agro-processing, creating further GDP contribution and jobs.

Our solution is also transferrable across the continent – potentially amplifying our impact across the continent.

The Prize will be used in developing our capabilities across 3 areas:

1. Scaling up the Institute, to enable us to develop the talent required to unlock farms in our pipeline
2. Developing our tech-driven controls and systems, which allows us to monitor activity and performance and manage a distributed farming enterprise that can scale
3. Scale up the FarmWorks Small-Holders Hub, impacting the thousands of farmers that work within our farming clusters