Climate-Smart Agriculture for Farmers

Agriculture is a significant contributor to employment and livelihood creation and continues to be the mainstay of the African economy. In the face of increasing population and rapidly growing food demand, it is critical to sustainably intensify agriculture to achieve food security for Africa.

Mechanization is one way to accomplish increased productivity and profitability for African smallholder farmers while reducing environmental impacts. 

Hello Tractor is working alongside its partners to increase the number of tractors in the market through its novel PAYG product while implementing innovative mechanization that will promote conservation agriculture as one key climate-smart agriculture (CSA) approach that conserves soil carbon (reduced oxidation of C often resulting from tillage associated disturbances), improves soil health and curtails soil erosion.

By implementing this project, Hello Tractor will be creating a clear pathway to increase transparency and encourage private financing to support sustainable agriculture across Africa.

As our global community approaches 9 billion citizens, more food will be needed to feed the population. While the African continent could feed the world, agricultural growth and development is constrained by the low productivity of smallholder farmers. Without sustainable solutions to increase farmers’ productivity, food insecurity will continue to endanger current and future generations globally.

African farmers are known to face some of the lowest rates of mechanization. It is estimated that Africa only has eight (8) tractors per 100km2 of arable land while the global average is 200. When tractors are not available, farmers cannot fully cultivate their plots and end up losing crop yields even before they can be harvested. 

In addition, across Africa, although conservation agriculture has been actively promoted, smallholder farmers face difficulties in making the necessary investments in mechanization to optimize its benefits. Frustrations and abandonment of conservation agriculture often follow when implemented without mechanized ripping and subsoiling because of widespread hardpans associated with decades of land trampling and shallow ploughing. Such production has negative impacts on crop productivity and profitability, which is a disincentive for future implementation by smallholder resource-poor farmers.

Hello Tractor is accelerating smallholder farmers' access to professional mechanization services, thus improving farmer yields and income while generating meaningful business opportunities for rural entrepreneurs. This is enabled by our industry-leading technology, developed over 5 years of experience working with tractor contractors across Africa and Asia. Our technology works by connecting smallholder farmers in need of mechanization services to tractor owners operating within their vicinity.

Through our novel PAYG approach, and our introduction of the CSA approach to mechanization, we are building on existing work by significantly increasing the number of tractors farmers across Africa have access to, which will; ensure that agriculture is practised more sustainably, drive down the cost of mechanization services, and create jobs for youth not only serving as farmer demand aggregators (booking agents) but also as tractor contractors.

Hello Tractor supports smallholder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa by connecting them to tractor owners through our farm equipment management and sharing application that seeks to sustainably support mechanization by making tractors with the right attachment more readily available and reducing the transaction costs between tractor owner and farmer. 

In order for smallholders (who are generally not technology savvy) to benefit from our offering, we have engaged middlemen known as booking agents to bridge the digital divide that they currently face. These booking agents are young men and women within rural communities who aggregate smallholder farmer demand for tractor services within their community. They measure the farmer’s farmland to ensure that he is only paying for his exact plot size, and send in his booking through our Booking App so he can be paired with a tractor that will serve his land with the right equipment and in a timely manner.

The Hello Tractor platform enables farmers to request affordable tractor services to plant 40 times faster and 2.5 times cheaper than conventional manual methods. The benefits of tractor services for farmers include: planting on time, 63% average savings and upwards of 3 times increase in yield.

Hello Tractor helps to increase the productivity and profitability of smallholder farmers while reducing environmental impact for a globally secure food system by providing conservation agriculture mechanization in the form of climate-smart tractor implements to farmers, hereby promoting regenerative agricultural practices. Hello Tractor, through our network of Booking Agents, also provides mentorship to the farmers by teaching them about climate-friendly practices. Our conservation agriculture approach is 30 per cent less labour intensive and contributes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through lower energy inputs and improved nutrient use efficiency.

Hello Tractor is currently the largest and fastest-growing tractor contracting network in the emerging markets. To date, we have scaled our offering into 15 markets across Africa & Asia and grown our contractor customer base to over 3,000 tractor owners who have provided services to over 500,000 smallholder farmers.

We are laser-focused on revolutionizing tractor services and will continue to lead the market in innovation. We have established a scaled network of users brought together by our robust technology platform that powers hundreds of thousands of tractor service engagements every farming season. We leverage our technology platform, the scale and density of our user network, and insights from these users to continuously improve our marketplace, tractor operating profits, and farmer yields.

Hello Tractor’s platform creates transparency and efficiency in the hired services market by connecting tractor owners with CSA implements to farmers at each stage of the process. This makes service delivery more secure, efficient, sustainable and profitable for all stakeholders involved. As our farmers have expressed, access to mechanization services increases yields, income, and improves overall livelihood. To maintain our innovative edge, our business leverages:

Best in class technology: We maintain a laser-focus on addressing the constraints facing tractor dealers, contractors, and tractor owners looking to serve smallholder farmers (i.e., managing costs and aggregating demand to grow revenue). Like Salesforce, our technologies enhance existing businesses by providing insights and efficiencies needed for scalability.

Market building for all stakeholders: In addition to organizing supply, we drive revenue opportunities by developing agent networks that engage with farmers, cooperatives, and out grower schemes to build demand. We also work with downstream processors and buyers (i.e., food and beverage companies) to create markets for additional yields cultivated as a result of mechanization.

Innovation in a local context: There is an increasing willingness across our customer base to explore new, innovative models (such as the CSA approach) to address mechanization challenges. We capitalize on this momentum by thinking outside the box and leveraging our technology to assist our customers and increase our impact. 

This innovation is anticipated to significantly disrupt the African agricultural sector by enabling an increase in agricultural productivity across the country and allowing maximum yields to be reached.

Hello Tractor-connected tractors have serviced more than 500,000 farmers since the beginning of 2017.  This technology has made it possible for tractor owners to increase the size of their tractor fleet, resulting in more smallholder farmers across Africa being served instead of keeping their tractor close to home base for fear of fraud and lack of trust.  By providing products and services to support the supply and demand side of the market, we are introducing efficiency into the mechanization ecosystem.

Our immediate goal for the next year is to have provided services to an additional 250,000 farmers through the anticipated tractors on our platform.

In 5 years time, we expect to have serviced more than 10 million farmers by scaling our PAYG product across various emerging markets.

We are developing a causal model to show the links between our project activities and our expected output, outcome and impact indicators. We focus on those causal links that are the most critical to achieving our project success. We identify and prioritize the key indicators to monitor and evaluate the impacts for farmers, booking agents and tractor owners from our scaling up activities. The metrics are captured through our platform, surveys/questionnaires and our mixed-method approach for assessing our project. The following key performance indicators are to judge the success of the our project:

Output Indicators:

• # Tractor Owners

• # Tractors active on the platform 

• New features released per year  

Farmers

• Quality of service (Goal: Avg of 4 out of 5)

 Outcome indicators:

• Improved profits and reduced costs for farmers

• Increased labor productivity for farmers

• Increased farmland cultivation for farmers

• Trained booking agents provide high quality services (ensures continuity of services and repeat customers)

• Trained booking agents generate increased revenues

Impact indicators:

• Increased employment and entrepreneurship

• Increased youth and women employment as booking agents 

• % yield increase

• $ income increase

Hello Tractor currently employs 22 full-time staff with technical expertise across agriculture, hardware engineering and telemetry, software engineering, data science, sales, and customer relationship management.

The Hello Tractor team is spread across the United States, Nigeria and Kenya. Our founder, Jehiel Oliver, 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. 

Hello Tractor prioritizes talent of the highest caliber from the markets served. 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. Building a strong, dedicated ground team has allowed us to better understand the local market, optimize our technology and maintain our competitive advantage.

We have an ESOP in place that guides our team building approach ensuring that diversity and inclusivity are accounted for. Our management team currently has a total of 5 people, two of whom are women.

Solve can provide us with some capital needed to fund our activities to support our PAYG work and ensure that we are able to bring more tractors into the market with the right implements to support our CSA approach and promote agricultural sustainability across Africa.

In addition, being able to leverage Solve’s community of experts is key for us. Being able to learn more about regenerative agriculture and see ways we can improve on our model will help us do better even as we work to expand our footprint across the continent.

To date, our M&E approach has been largely manual, requiring heavy time allocations by our already stretched lean team. Developing a more integrated approach to data collection, analysis and decision making will assist the organization to collect and analyze more actionable data more quickly. This resource will work with our data analyst and will build an approach and processes that are integrated with the current data processes. 

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.