Hello Tractor

Jehiel Oliver is the founder and CEO of Hello Tractor, an agricultural technology company that connects tractor owners with smallholder farmers in need of tractor services. At Hello Tractor, Jehiel is responsible for overall management and strategy. He has been honored with numerous awards for his work in social entrepreneurship including being recognized by Foreign Policy Magazine as a Top 100 Global Thinker for 2016. He was appointed under the Obama Administration to serve two years as a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa, where he most recently chaired the technology sub-committee. Prior to Hello Tractor, Jehiel worked in consulting and investment banking. He lives with his wife and daughters in Nairobi, Kenya

Challenges in the African agriculture ecosystem around productivity and lost income are underpinned by a lack of access to mechanization. Small farmers in the region, who are overwhelmingly women, plant late, under-cultivate, and lose income due to antiquated production practices.

To address the SDG goals and food security challenges across Africa, Hello Tractor seeks to accelerate smallholder farmers access to professional mechanization services. We will do this by supporting contractors with flexible financing to buy equipment, under a pay as you go (PAYG) model, to service farmers in their network. This approach is enabled by our industry leading technology, developed over 5 years working with tractor contractors across Africa and Asia.

Through this work, we will be improving the lives of smallholder farmers across emerging markets, creating jobs for youth and women and supporting efforts towards global food security.

As our global community approaches nine billion citizens, it is projected that for the world to feed itself, crop yields would need to either double to meet the food demands of our growing population or an additional 280M Ha of new land would need to come under production. The sub-continent of Africa has 600M Ha of uncultivated farmland, 60% of the global total, which represents the largest inventory of uncultivated farmland in the world. Unfortunately, this land remains fallow because of demographic shifts in rural labor markets and low investment in labor-saving technologies. 

While the African continent could feed the world, agricultural growth and development is constrained by the low productivity of smallholder farmers.  Technological advancements are improving agriculture globally, but smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) continue to face limited access to labor, tools, investment, and resources. Without sustainable solutions to increase smallholder farmers’ productivity, food insecurity will continue to endanger current and future generations globally. 

Smallholder farmers are in need of mechanized services to increase agricultural productivity and land cultivation – but tractor owners face barriers to providing service for hire profitably and efficiently. Taken together, these factors make collaborative consumption vital to serving rural smallholder farmers. 

Through our novel PAYG approach, we will be building on existing work by significantly increasing the number of tractors farmers across emerging markets have access to, which will drive down the cost of mechanization services and create jobs for youth and women not only serving as farmer demand aggregators (booking agents) but also as tractor contractors.

Hello Tractor's beneficiaries include:

Women Credit Cooperatives: Investors (mostly women as well as youth) investing 20% equity contribution to replace the need for a downpayment on financed tractors. These individuals are always looking for new investment opportunities especially those that will help build communities. Providing them with such investment opportunities will not only empower them, but will also help achieve some of the SDG goals.

Farmers: The innovation will make access to mechanization services easier and faster for small farmers who often struggle to gain access to tractors, allowing them plant 40 times faster at ⅓ the cost of conventional manual labor

Booking Agents: Young, tech savvy individuals who are jobless will be empowered with jobs to serve as demand aggregators for farmers within their communities and earn an income by so-doing.

Operators: Access to tractors to earn income while serving farming communities

OEMs & Dealers: Scalable approach to selling equipment into smallholder markets. 

Banks: Receive valuable insights to provide low risk loans to finance agricultural equipment in a controlled marketplace

Our solution is directly tied into elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind (smallholder farmers, youth and women in our case). Most farmers across emerging markets, who are overwhelmingly women, plant late, under-cultivate their land, and lose income due to antiquated production practices.

Our technology ensures that tractor supply meets farmer demand in a transparent and profitable exchange between contractors and low-income growers. By also creating jobs for youth and women serving as booking agents & contractors, we are able to educate farmers on best farm practices for increased yields and profits.

The idea for Hello Tractor grew out of decades of research on the benefits of agricultural mechanization. When tractors are introduced in smallholder markets, they drive efficiency, reduce labor constraints, and result in cost savings for farmers. 

Tractors are expensive and access to financing for most smallholder farmers is virtually nonexistent – but if farmers have access to a tractor, that’s as good as owning one. Our original business model was built on this premise of collaborative consumption; we would sell affordable (< 5000 USD), ultra-low horsepower (<20 hp), two-wheel tractors, equipped with monitoring devices, to enterprising farmers or cooperatives. We would then create a Lyft-like model for Smart Tractor owners to identify and service additional smallholder demand. 

We chose Nigeria as our first market due to its size, pro-private sector policies, and cultural emphasis on innovation. During our first two years of operation, we learned critical lessons that ultimately informed the decision to pivot our business model to what it is today. We are now strictly a technology company that is creating solutions for tractors in the sub-100hp range.

At Hello Tractor, we are passionate about transforming the agricultural ecosystem, creating efficiencies that generate inclusive growth, reduce poverty, and help build stronger, more stable economies. Hello Tractor seeks to create holistic solutions for the market and high-quality customer experiences, while differentiating on simplicity, design, and our focus on adaptability. 

We are currently the only IoT platform built to address the needs of tractor service providers. We integrate into our customers’ existing business models, supporting and enhancing their operations with our technology. We prioritize working with customers that aim to create valuable service offerings for smallholders and approach the market with a long-term mindset. This is because our ultimate mission is to improve the lives of farmers through our agricultural services platform.

The Hello Tractor team is spread across the United States, Nigeria and Kenya.  Hello Tractor currently employs 22 employees comprising agriculture, hardware and software engineering, data science, and sales.  Our team believes in our mission and strives to empower communities to create shared benefits and transform the agricultural ecosystem, creating efficiencies that generate inclusive growth, reduce poverty, and help build stronger, more stable economies.

Our CEO, Jehiel Oliver, leads the team, strategy, and partnerships. He was an advisor to two sitting U.S. presidents on business in Africa and has worked in global finance and agriculture for over a decade. He has worked as a financial sector consultant, providing advisory services for transactions totaling over a half billion dollars, in over ten countries, including conflict zones.  Jehiel began his career in the US investment banking and private equity and studied economics at Florida A&M University and Cornell University.

The biggest challenges we have faced was trying to create a tractor assembling/manufacturing company down in Nigeria where the economy is very volatile. We started Hello Tractor off selling 2 wheel tractors coupled with our telematics technology and it seemed like a great idea at the time, until the realities and drawbacks started to set in. The machine in itself is great and very useful for smallholders, but unfortunately when you import it into the region, the cost of the machine goes up by about 40%. When cost goes up, the utilization rate also needs to go up in order to reach that economic break-even point and that is where our technology comes in. The issue however was that to ensure reaching the break-even point, it implied heavy usage of the tractor leading to wear and tear and series upon series of breakdown and we saddled with the responsibility of taking care of every issue the customer faces.

In response to this, we pivoted our business model in 2017 to focus on just creating technology for sub-100HP tractors in the market to broaden our reach to farmers and increase the impact of our work.

Jehiel’s efforts leadership efforts in pushing agriculture forward in Africa have been recognized and honored on so many different occasions. He also got special recognition from President Barack Obama at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit held in Kenya in 2015 and was later appointed to President Obama’s Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa in 2016.

He also was selected as a 2016 Mulago fellow; winning first place at the University of Chicago Booth Social New Venture Challenge; first place at
World Bank’s Diaspora Demo Day, first place at Points of Light CivicX; first
place at SkyRocket’s Brand Prize Competition; and was selected as a 2015
Echoing Green Global Fellow.

Hello Tractor is currently the only company designing technology specifically for the compact tractor segment, as larger players in the tractor space rely on expensive sensors and high priced software for high-horsepower tractors. We are taking this industry leading technology and the data that it produces to introduce financing to segments of the market traditionally lacking access. The combination of our technology, the data it generates, and our deep marketplace of farmers in need of tractor services, allows us to finance tractors with no down-payment and no collateral outside the tractor value.

Our innovation is anticipated to significantly disrupt the agricultural sector across emerging markets by enabling an increase in agricultural productivity across these markets and allowing maximum yields to be reached for a more food-secure world. We are accomplishing this by leveraging on market forces and crowding in new capital that traditionally has been on the sidelines of agricultural investing in Africa. The result of these investments will be a reinforcing ecosystem of farmers willing and able to pay for tractor services and tractor owners delivering these services, with financial investment coming from both local and international sources.

Our technology has already made it possible for tractor owners to increase the size of their tractor fleet, resulting in more smallholder farmers across the country being served. Additionally, tractor owners allow their machines to roam the country in search of demand instead of keeping their tractor close to home base for fear of fraud and lack of trust with their operators. By providing products and services to support the supply and demand-side of the market, we are introducing efficiency into the mechanization ecosystem and reducing the cost of service delivery. 

Insights from the Field: Independent Customer Survey Implemented by Lean Data: 

• Farmers value that Hello Tractor is easy to use, and that the quality of tilling work is high. Most customers rated quality of tilling work at Hello Tractor 5 / 5.

• Nearly 95 % of customers said their quality of life has improved to some extent as a result of access to Hello Tractor tractor services, and cite productivity and income increases as the reasons behind their answer. Separately, 94% of customers report an increase in productivity, saying they experienced better harvests and the ability to plant on more land. 

• Only 13% of customers had prior access to tractors before working with Hello Tractor and that 95% of all farmers used Hello Tractor services to facilitate their top income source. This appears to indicate that there is a unique value-add of Hello Tractor to customers: they value mechanization services, but previously had low, or no, access to them.

Since our business model pivot in 2017, Hello Tractor has been able to capture 80% of all commercial tractors sold into Nigeria and scale into 15 additional markets. We have over 3,000 tractors and 1220 booking agents on our platform; our impact has reached over 500,000 smallholder farmers to date through these tractor services.

Our immediate goal for the next year is to have provided services to 1,000,000 farmers through an anticipated 2,000 tractors we would have onboarded on our platform.

Due to our success in supporting the tractor contractor ecosystem, Hello Tractor has been able to form strategic partnerships with John Deere, after an extensive due diligence process. After their deep review of Hello Tractor and the success generated by tractor owners across our platform, John Deere’s executive team made the decision to utilize Hello Tractor’s technology to increase the number of tractors across Africa by committing over $200M dollars of investment capital, through John Deere Financial, to support commercial tractor service providers using Hello Tractor’s technology. We have also been able to unlock partnerships with other tractor manufacturers such as Kubota in Thailand and look to further build on this momentum as we scale.

Over the next five years, we intend to position ourselves as the leading telematics solution provider for sub-100HP tractors globally. To do this, we have set the following business and impact goals:

• Build Market Leading Technologies and Products: We started off by launching the first version of our technology (Hello Tractor Version 1.0) which was a big learning opportunity for us and provided a clear picture of what fixes were needed to address customer needs. We recently launched a new version of our technology which not only addresses the majority of our customers’ core needs but also addresses larger market concerns which has helped increase our relevance and value among stakeholders in the value chain.

• Expand to 15+ New Markets: We have been quite successful in our operations within Nigeria and are excited to take our solution across to other sub-Saharan Africa and Asian markets. We intend to penetrate into, and properly establish ourselves within the following other markets over the next 5 years:  Bangladesh, Tanzania, Nepal, India, China, and Indonesia. 

• Achieve impact target of 10 million farmers reached:

Despite the negative impact of COVID19, we expect that by the end of 2020, we will have achieved more than 4,000 tractors on our platform across our three core markets and the select expansionary markets that we are targeting. By the end of 2024, we expect to fully have more than 100,000 active tractors on the platform with more than 10 million farmers served.

For the next year, we have identified the following as potential barriers that we may face even as we continue to scale up:

• Operating: Operating costs could exceed budgeted allocations; Leadership team may not be equipped to deliver success

• Technology: Competing product development on time and within budget is key to our credibility; Less than optimal technology may be developed; competitors could leapfrog us in key market; mobile carriers could pull out of key markets

• Capability: Scaling capabilities quickly are key to growth and we may be slow

Over the next 5 years, barriers we are likely to encounter include:

• Economic: External economic forces drive private and public sector agricultural investment and financial firm participation

• Legislative and Policy: Regulations could change and pose a negative impact to our current and future operations

• Funding: We need funding to be available at a level and timing required for success

• Supply side: Actual market demand for our product may not yield projected sales volumes

• Reputational: Highly visible potential missteps could negatively impact our ability to grow

For the next one year,

• Operating: Enhancing internal controls, developing active forecasts for monthly and quarterly key investment needs, and hiring a financial/accounting staff are key levers to better understand our OPEX and cost realities. 

• Technology: We are using software project management tools like Slack & Mechanical Turk to ensure we deliver superior training to internal staff and generate the feedback needed to turn field insights into technology development quickly. 

• Capability: We are filling out our team increasingly with personnel with analogous experience. Receiving funding is key to being able to attract the type of talent that can enhance our internal practices and prepare us for future growth

For the next five years,

• Economic: Hello Tractor targets customers and partners with firm, organized, and professional management teams. We look to spend a considerable amount of our resources working with relatively established, stable organizations like Deere (OEM), TATA (dealer), and the World Bank (financing). By being smart about the relationships we have in place and working with some of the more capitalized players in the industry, we minimize risk.

• Funding: Hello Tractor anticipates building a growth model that can attract venture capital to the company. Over the next 5 years, we will go to the markets at least twice, seeking to raise $12 million in funding. 

• Supply side: Africa is a growth market and we are committed to its development. But we would also be making strategic bets to sell solutions in large volume markets like those in South Asia.

Hello Tractor has cultivated strategic, cross-sector partnerships that aid our ability to scale. Hello Tractor is already partnered with Aeris, the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, CalAmp, John Deere and IBM. 

• Development Finance Institutions - We’ve seen firsthand that bilateral and multilateral engagement provides critical funding and serves as an important screening function for government related projects. Over the past two years, Hello Tractor has been in discussion with the World Bank regarding its FADAMA project and was just recently brought onboard as a partner. 

• Agriculture industry stakeholders -  Input providers represent an attractive market   opportunity for us to engage farmers, create new revenue opportunities, and bolster our agents’ product offerings. In turn, by our platform can provide these companies with critical data on input usage at the farmer level.

• Foundations and NGOs - Hello Tractor has worked extensively with philanthropic partners to engage/train booking agents and to link our tractor owners to coordinated farmer groups/cooperatives. We have a number of NGO partners across each market that we are operating whom we would consider prospective partners.

Hello Tractor seeks to create holistic solutions for the market and high-quality customer experiences, while differentiating on simplicity, design, and our focus on adaptability. Our solution cuts across the following customer segments:

Smallholder Farmers: The target smallholder farmer customers are farmers who, on average, have less than 5 hectares of farmland. These farmers plant late, under-cultivate their land, and lose out on much-needed income. While these farmers are unable to purchase their own tractor, they do have the means to pay for mechanization services. By accessing our services, they are able to plant 40x faster at 1/3rd the cost

Booking Agents: Our commission-based booking agents, primarily young people from rural farming communities, perform critical market-aggregation, ensuring idle tractors can connect to farmers desperately in need of service, all while earning a sustainable livelihood they otherwise may not be able to access. We target active, commission-based booking agents to be trained and closely supported by Hello Tractor under this program. As bookings are entered into the system, our technology aggregates them into groups profitable for tractor owners to service. 

Mechanization Service Providers: Our service providers are contractors that purchase our IoT devices which are fitted to their tractors to enable them monitor their assets and  receive smallholder farmer service requests. Hello Tractor targets contractors who have achieved scale or are building with scale in mind. While these contractors may differ in size, experience, geographic area of focus, brand affinity, and services offered, all are highly cost conscious.

Hello Tractor has emerged as a true agricultural mechanization platform. Our scaling partners include top companies such as John Deere, IBM, Calamp, and Aeris. For Africa, Deere has positioned Hello Tractor as their exclusive telematics partner. This means direct access to their dealer networks on the continent as well as strategic partnership opportunities on large projects like the 10,000 unit deal in Nigeria and the 500 tractor a year deal in Ethiopia.  

In addition to John Deere, Hello Tractor has launched partnerships with Aeris Communications and Calamp, both global leaders in connectivity and telematics. This opens up very exciting sales channels at the tractor dealer and existing tractor owner levels. 

As we mature as a business, Hello Tractor will diversify its revenue sources beyond the monitoring device and software revenue to include the following:

• Analytics: For customers with significant tractor holdings, Hello Tractor will provide a business analytics team to work alongside the customer's management team and provide solutions. 

• Transaction Fee: Our booking services provide real value for managing the interactions between the farmer and the tractor service provider. Hello Tractor takes a 2% fee for every tractor service managed on the platform.

• Dealer Advertising: Dealers seek a closer connection to their customer base. Hello Tractor offers dealers an opportunity to provide a simple advertisement on it's platform

By the end of 2023, we anticipate generating more than $10 million USD from these new revenue sources which will account for just under 25% of our revenue

Hello Tractor has seen significant revenue growth over the last three years of being in the market, starting out at $489,000 (earned revenue excluding grants) for the 2017 fiscal year, and going up to $730,000 in 2019. 

We have also received grants from the following organizations to support our work:

Name: CTA Year: 2019
Type of funding: Grant   Amount: $280,662.5

Name: Winrock Year: 2018
Type of funding: Grant.       Amount: $70,239

Name: FTF-P4I Year: 2016
Type of funding: Grant      Amount: $989,470

Name: USAID DIV Year: 2016
Type of funding: Grant.   Amount: $150,000

Name: CIMMYT Year: 2014
Type of funding: Grant.        Amount: $19,920

Given the capital intensive nature of an initial implementation of our PAYG model for tractor ownership, and given the fact that we are a small company with very limited resources, Hello Tractor is currently in the middle of a $2M fund raise to support the work. We are actively engaging investors to bring the funds in and look to begin work in Kenya & Nigeria this planting season. 

We look to take the proof points from the initial implementation of our PAYG work to scale into more markets and get more tractor manufacturers onboard. This way, there will be more tractors available to service farmers for increased productivity and global food security.

We will go on to raise $50 million to scale the PAYG model pilot for the financing of 1,250 tractors to be deployed in Kenya and Nigeria for 2022 season.

The Elevate Prize brings us an opportunity to not only connect with a dynamic network of Global Heroes and partners, but to also potentially receive funding to fuel some of our activities to engage more youth & women as tractor contractors & booking agents across emerging markets . These activities include capacity building training for on-boarded youth and women, provision of branded materials such as t-shirts, hats, ID cards, fliers etc, to them to support their work promoting mechanized farming to smallholder farmers, mechanization service demos for smallholder farmers to help them see firsthand how tractors are a better option than manual labor in that they save time & money while increasing productivity on the farm as well as identifying and financing potential tractor contractors amongst the youths.

In addition, we intend to leverage Elevate Prize's professional management and development services to better guide our work even as we continue to grow and scale into new markets, as well as leverage the tailored media and marketing campaign to reach new markets and serve as an inspiration to other social entrepreneurs across the globe.

As we grow, we believe it is important to also continually improve on our funding and revenue model to ensure that we are maximizing our opportunities and are able to do more in the process. Hence, we are happy to receive advice on ways we can improve in this area. 

We are also particular about building a strong team with the needed ground experience to push the company mission and objectives forward. As we look to recruit every now and then as need be, support with talent identification would be a great add for us.

Lastly, ensuring that we properly capture the impact of the work we are doing is important to us. We are happy to partner with organizations who are experts in doing this to be sure we aren't leaving anything out. We can then bring more exposure to our work through relevant media & marketing opportunities.

We have identified the following kind of organizations as critical to our growth and success as a company:

• Development Finance Institutions

• Agriculture Industry stakeholders

• Food and Beverage Companies

• Foundations and NGOs

We believe that using a collaborative approach, which takes into account the resources and expertise of established partners, will enable our company to grow efficiently and effectively, driving sustainable impact for all of our stakeholders.