Rooting for Rainforests

I am a fourth-generation Guyanese farmer.  Despite having generational smallholder farming heritage, my path to agriculture had not been obvious.  After completing my MBA at Harvard and building a career in investment banking, instead of joining Guyana’s brain-drain statistics, I returned home in 2012 to start an enterprise that helps smallholder farmers like my parents combat the limited local market.  Today, Plympton Farms is the largest grower, aggregator, and processor of chili peppers in the Caribbean. We provide economic opportunities that empower smallholder farmers and indigenous communities to continue their role as stewards of the rainforest.

During 2012-2015, I had the opportunity to lead the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund, a US$250M low-carbon development portfolio financed through an agreement with Norway for avoided deforestation.  Reporting directly to the President of Guyana, I facilitated earnings of US$180 million, expanded property rights for 80 indigenous communities and launched Guyana’s largest micro/SME lending facility.

Deforestation is the second largest contributor to climate change. Indigenous communities living in and near the forest provide the best line of defense against deforestation.

Guyana’s forest communities are dwindling.  With limited options for sustainable livelihood, these communities’ migration in search for economic opportunities means the loss of their stewardship of the forest.

Our project creates economic opportunities in remote forest communities in agriculture.   By pioneering both technological and business model innovations, we ensure smallholder farmers and forest communities have the knowledge, markets, and opportunities to earn a dignified living.

Plympton Farms is founded with the mission to elevate economic opportunities for communities of people who have historically been left behind while economic development moved apace away from the forests.   When livelihoods are secure, forest communities are afforded the option to continue to defend the forests, and thus contribute in fighting climate change – a fight that elevates all humanity. 

Global loss of tropical forests contributes to 8-10% of annual human emissions of carbon dioxide, making deforestation the second largest contributor to climate change.

Forest communities play a strong role against deforestation - deforestation in indigenous territories is found to be 80% less.   However, these communities are challenged by the lack of economic opportunities in forests.  Many are forced to migrate.

This is the case in Guyana, a small Amazonian country in South America with nearly 85% of its land covered by forests.  Approximately 80,000 indigenous people live in or near these forests and have been the forests’ protectors for generations.  Unfortunately, Guyana’s indigenous forest communities have limited options for sustainable livelihood and are struggling to stay.  Their migration in search of economic opportunities means the loss of their stewardship of the forest, contributing to increased deforestation and the dire global climate change effects.

The structural characteristics of large tropical forests, including sparse population, limited economic activities, poor infrastructure, and long transportation distances, are both favorable for forest protection and limiting in terms of livelihood opportunities.  Creating a model of sustainable economic opportunities in forest communities under these conditions would provide a blueprint for community-based forest conservation.

Recognizing that sustainable livelihood enables forest conservation, I started Plympton Farms to create an end-to-end agribusiness value chain in indigenous communities on the Demerara River in Guyana.  Today, Plympton is the largest grower, aggregator and processor of chili peppers in the Caribbean, with an export volume already 3x the size of the entire domestic market. 

The three pillars of Plympton’s operations target the three biggest challenges that Guyanese forest communities face:

Business model innovation to overcome limited economic opportunities: to create a dependable market for agriculture goods, we developed non-perishable commodities that can be grown and processed in forest communities in Guyana, and sell directly to industrialized-world food companies

Agriculture innovation to offset infrastructure cost: in order to offer products at a globally competitive price point against companies with better public infrastructure, we focus on agriculture innovations to attain competitive production cost. 

Smallholder farmer network to help farmers overcome limited local markets: we provide smallholder farmers technical assistance, inputs, credit and most importantly, a one-way market guarantee. We provide a guaranteed market to these farmers without obligating them to sell exclusively to us – enabling farmers to maximize their income when domestic market prices are favorable.  

We serve the following communities:

Forest communities: We are located near several indigenous communities.  While we provide employment opportunities that are otherwise unavailable, the communities have given us license to operate and supported us with their forest knowledge, local operation insights, and neighborly care.  It’s an invaluable symbiotic relationship. 

Smallholder farmers: Plympton has a network of partner farms across Guyana.   We tailor our technical assistance to each farmer, offer a guaranteed price, and pay at farm gate to reduce farmers’ working capital burden. 

Aspiring youth farmers: Agriculture is an area of pride and mind-share for Guyanese.  Many young people contemplate a career in agriculture, but change course when jobs in agriculture appear to be unattractive with antiquated practices.  I am passionate about demonstrating that agriculture is full of innovation potential and a worthy calling.  I have hosted numerous university field trips and will begin teaching a course at University of Guyana this fall called “Modern Hydroponic Farming”.  I hope to inspire young people to join me in adapting cutting-edge agriculture technology to their unique environment. 

Finally, by empowering forest communities in Guyana, and by providing a blueprint for community-based forest conservation, we contribute to the global fight against climate change.

Forest communities in Guyana play a key role in the fight against climate change, but without economic opportunities, they are struggling to stay. Our project creates an economic alternative that is within reach for these communities, so the choices of remaining rooted in one’s community and making a viable and dignified livelihood are not mutually exclusive.

The project began with my desire to elevate Guyanese smallholder farmers and was brought to life when I met my partner and now wife at Harvard Business School.  The two of us spent significant time during our MBA studies writing our initial business plan.  We even made agriculture research an essential component of any travel, learning about agribusiness models in countries such as Vietnam and Chile to identify Guyana’s gap.

After graduation, we advanced the business plan while holding full-time jobs – we even honeymooned in Guyana as a working holiday.  Building a commercial farm and a market off-taker for smallholder farmers is conceptually simple but requires courage.  In 2012, the real journey began as I returned to Guyana.  Leaving a lucrative career as a Vice President in mergers and acquisitions investment banking to build a farm in Guyana was not a choice that many people genuinely supported.  It was hard to find a role model or mentor who had taken a similar path against the current of brain drain.  The potential for failure was high.  Nevertheless, in order to elevate smallholder farmers like my parents once were, there was no other way than to be physically present.  

Climate vulnerabilities and agriculture market instability marked two major events which shaped the course of my early life.  

One of my first vivid memories was clutching onto my mother’s neck as flooding encroached on our stilt home near the ocean coast in Guyana.  Water stayed knee-deep all night before receding with the tide. My parents had no choice but to abandon their first home and their careers as primary school teachers and move our family inland into a different region. 

After the move, my parents became cash crop farmers and struggled through a number of seasons of unreliable input sources, high transportation costs, small local market and volatile price fluctuations. Eventually they had to accept the realities of the limited economic opportunities in Guyana.  We became the last set of my father’s eight siblings to immigrate to the U.S.

During my studies, I saw that development problems in low-income countries did not garner the attention they require. It was up to me to either take action, or choose to be a bystander, part of the brain-drain statistics, watching my home country and smallholder farmers like my parents become further marginalized in the global economy.   

Creating economic opportunities in forest communities in Guyana at scale is a challenge that requires a blend of local knowledge and cutting-edge business skills.

Having grown up in Guyana, speaking native Creolese and living in Guyana twelve months a year enables me to engage with forest communities and smallholder farmers face-to-face every day, understanding these stakeholders’ needs, tap into local knowledge and work effectively in a unique local operating environment.

My pre-entrepreneurial career in management consulting and mergers and acquisitions investment banking enables me to lead an enterprise with efficient operating practices and fiscal discipline.  Further, I am able to sell to large food corporations and articulate compellingly the impact of their purchases on the forest and on our communities.  

Surprisingly, I have been able to overcome my lack of professional training in agriculture and develop subject matter expertise as an agriculture innovator.   I discovered that tropical agriculture is heavily under researched and developed the skill-set of data-driven experimentation.  This approach of relentless experimentation has led to a low-cost growing system that produces global industry leading yields. This has made Plympton Farms and its small farmer network financially viable.

Finally, my personal conviction leads to an uncompromising commitment to the success of this project.  Having been the child of smallholder farmers who were economically marginalized during political turmoil and mass exodus, I have dedicated myself to elevating economic opportunities for those left behind in Guyana, starting with forest communities and smallholder farmers.

When I started Plympton Farms eight years ago, I saw challenges in creating a new export industry, but I never thought agriculture production could pose such a powerful threat to Plympton’s survival.

While I didn’t have formal agriculture training, I had foreign experts employed by aide projects on the ground as partners.  A few months into the first crop cycle, it was evident that the highly paid experts did not have the right expertise to help Plympton become a globally cost-competitive farm.   If I followed their approach, Plympton Farms would have never achieved commercial yield to fulfill its social mission; it would be a commercial failure.  I decided that it was up to me to acquire that expertise personally.

Thus begun my journey to find a way to grow food on Guyana’s white sand.  The challenge keeps evolving, presenting itself in unfavorable weather, unknown pests and diseases, and local logistical breakdown.   I tackled the issues by taking a scientific approach through relentless experimentation and making growing decisions based on data.  It was only in the last year and half that we began to exceed commercial yield targets, and I gained a patent for our agriculture method in the process.   

When the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Guyana in late March, my team and I faced the tough question of to what extent, if at all, Plympton Farms should continue operations.    Guyana reportedly had two ventilators in the entire country.  If COVID-19 became wide-spread, the consequences would be dire.  While suspending operations would eliminate all disease risk under our name, I also know that almost no one in our communities had a safety net outside of their immediate families.  We have been successful in creating opportunities in good times, could we be our communities’ safety net in the challenging times? 

With the goals of minimizing disease risk, reducing food security pressure and continuing employment, I rallied the team to implement the following policies:

• -Ask employees to make a social-distancing pledge to each other
• -Provide transportation to eliminate the need for public transportation
• -Purchase food staples in bulk to provide to employees at cost
• -Retain every employee and purchase any excess product from partner farms on top of guaranteed volume

I am proud to report that there has been zero case in the 100+ families in our communities to date, against the backdrop of growing disease cases country-wide. 

The project is innovative in both the mission-embedded business model and in agriculture technology. 

While the concept of supporting economic opportunities for indigenous and forest communities to safeguard against deforestation has been articulated before, we are a pioneer in successfully putting this concept to practice.   By developing non-perishable commodities that can be grown and processed in forest communities in Guyana and selling directly to industrialized-world food companies, we are able to bring tangible and sustainable economic opportunities into forest communities in Guyana.

Plympton's disruptive agriculture innovations were borne out of necessity to ensure a commercially viable business, cost competitive offerings, and ability to operate in forest communities with poor soil.  After years of relentless testing and exhaustive research, we have developed a practical and scalable solution to making agriculture production viable in sandy regions.  The currently available solutions such as greenhouse hydroponic systems and vertical farming are costly in both setup and operations.  In comparison, our patented growing method makes use of the readily available existing infertile sand, low-cost grow bags (US$0.30 each), and can be deployed as smallholder farmer modules as well as at commercial scale.  With this growing method, we are able to achieve globally competitive yield - the first to do so on Guyana's white sand.  By adapting cutting edge hydroponic technology for the local realities of Guyana, we have the potential to expand and enable adoption by farmers in other developing, forest countries.

The economic opportunities Plympton Farms creates directly improves the livelihood of 100 families in forest communities in Guyana.  In addition, another 100 farmers and university agriculture students benefit from the training and field education experience.  

By year end 2021, we hope to double the number of livelihoods impacted and disseminate our agriculture best practices to 10,000 farmers and aspiring farmers in Guyana through social media.  

In five years, we look to impact approximately a quarter of indigenous forest households in Guyana.  

In the next 12-18 months, we hope to double our impact in terms of economic opportunities created for forest communities and smallholder farmers, against the backdrop of economic contraction due to the COVID pandemic.  

In the next five years, we hope to expand our farming operation to a major commodity crop, most likely cacao or rice, and grow our impact to a quarter of forest households in Guyana.   We expect the wide adoption of our agriculture innovation to revolutionize how agriculture is done in Guyana.

In 2020, the biggest challenges for us in expanding impact is the COVID 19 pandemic.  In March, two out of Plympton Farms’ five customers have postponed orders until Q3 of this year.  This represents a 30% drop in revenue in the first half of the year. 

Increasing the number of customers is a medium term goal to reduce volatility in demand.  Up to this year, we have had more demand than we are able to supply.  However, given the postponement of orders, growing our customer base will protect us from unexpected drops in demand.

In the long term, we believe we can expand impact by entering the market of a new crop, such as cacao.  We anticipate that meeting capital requirements, finding markets, and obtaining agriculture expertise will be the three biggest barriers in developing the market for a new crop in Guyana.  

Commitment to smallholder farmers is the starting point as we forged a strategy to overcome the slowdown in purchase orders.  We are fortunate to produce a self-stable product with a shelf life of two years, so we decided to invest in the working capital necessary to hold more inventory during this pandemic, so our partner farms are not impacted by the slowdown.  

To overcome the key barriers in scaling our impact through a new crop, we hope to build strategic partnerships with entities such as Mars or Nestle, where one of our founding partners worked for 3 years as an investment manager, global agriculture research institutions and development financial institutions such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC).  By then we would have had over a decade of experience pioneering agriculture innovations in Guyana, and will be well positioned to exponentially scale through new partnerships. 

We currently partner with the University of Guyana.  I have hosted numerous university field trips and will begin teaching a course this fall at University of Guyana called “Modern Hydroponic Farming”.   The University gives me a platform to inspire more young people to join me in modernizing agriculture in Guyana. 

I participated in Aspen New Voices Fellowship in 2019, where I improved my policy advocacy and op-ed writing skills.  As a New Voices alumnus, I continue to work with a writing coach/mentor to hone my skill and capitalize on opportunities to be an advocate for my communities. 

Plympton Farms is the largest grower, aggregator, processor and exporter of Caribbean chili peppers.  We generate revenue by supplier processed pepper and other tropical ingredients such as tropical fruit pulp to B2B customers.  As a social enterprise, our mission is embedded in our operations.  As our revenues grow, our impact in creating economic opportunities to secure forest communities' staying power grows proportionately. 

I believe we can expand this business to major commodity crops such as rice and cacao to accelerate our impact. 

Plympton Farms has focused on achieving commercial yield since the beginning in order to reach financial sustainability.  It has achieved financial sustainability, with revenues exceeding operating expenses.  

Plympton Farms is entirely self-funded by me and my wife.  It generates revenue by selling processed pepper and other tropical ingredients to large packaged food companies in the export market.  As a social enterprise, Plympton Farms has received in total $240,000 USD in financial support since 2013 from three funding sources.

In 2013, Plympton Farms was a winner in the Caribbean Compete business plan competition, supported by UKAID and Canadian International Development Agency. The prize was a grant of $100,000 USD, which contributed to the initial farm build out.  

In 2018, Plympton Farms was selected as a Global Innovator as part of the Dubai Expo 2020 Innovation Programme.  As part of the Programme, Plympton Farms received a grant of $100,000 USD.  This grant was used to conduct a commercial scale pilot trial of Plympton Farms’ low cost hydroponic growing method on infertile sand. 

In 2019, Plympton Farms was an awardee in European Union’s Caribbean Direct Assistance Grant Scheme for a grant of approximately $40,000 USD, which contributed to the building of a warehouse to increase inventory storage capacity in order to expand Plympton’s smallholder farmer network. 

Plympton Farms is not currently raising funds.  

Our revenue can sufficiently cover expenses at our current scale. 

Funding, network, and media exposure are three significant ways The Elevate Prize would contribute to accelerating Plympton Farms’ impact.

I have been told by more than one commercial bank in Guyana that despite having no debt on the balance sheet, Plympton Farms is not a good candidate for a commercial loan or credit line because agricultural innovations are “unconventional” and “risky”.   As such, while my wife and I self-funded the company to date, to scale up our impact either by growing our partner farm network exponentially or expand customer base requires significant working capital.  The Elevate Prize would enable us to capitalize on growth opportunities without financial constraint.

Being a social entrepreneur can be a lonely undertaking at times, so having a network of peers, mentors and partners who are equally passionate about implementing bold ideas to make a difference is greatly appealing to me.  

Lastly, Plympton Farms can benefit greatly from The Elevate Prize’s focus on amplifying prize winners’ work and exponentially expand their media following.  I believe Plympton Farms offers both uplifting human stories and novel agriculture technological innovations that can capture global audiences’ imagination.    Such media exposure would not only help accelerate our direct impact locally but also inspire adoption globally.

Board Advisors: we hope to recruit 2-3 mission-aligned advisors in the next 2 years. 

Regulatory matter: we would seek assistance in regaining USDA APHIS import permission for fresh pepper grown in Guyana, reversing a ban that was implemented in 2015. Achieving this would create a high value export market for pepper farmers in Guyana. 

Media: we plan to build a social media platform as a way to engage with farmers in Guyana and other forest countries to disseminate information on our agriculture innovations. 

Funding: in the long term, we want to expand our impact into a major commodity crop such as cacao, and hope to raise funding from entities such as the International Finance Corporation. 

We would like to partner with Rain Forest Alliance, a leading company in environmental certification for sustainable agriculture. The company currently provides certification for coffee and cocoa. However, to our knowledge, does not currently certify tropical ingredients. We would like to work with Rain Forest Alliance to develop a certification for tropical ingredients that are grown and processed in the forest.

The certification would build awareness of how sustainable agriculture can bring opportunity to forest communities and ultimately preserve forests. We hope to increase the awareness of large food companies on how their purchases and supply chains can have a positive impact on both forest communities and the climate.