MIT Solve

Solution Overview & Team Lead Details

Solution name.

FarmTech Analytics

Provide a one-line summary of your solution.

FarmTech software is an agriculture business intelligence platform for agriculture fund managers, investors, agric commodity traders, and distributors. It provides precise data on farmers, their farmlands, and their activities.

What specific problem are you trying to solve?

Lack of precise data on farmers and their farmlands - has led to over 90% failure of capital crowdfunding projects for agriculture in Nigeria and most Nigerians in the diaspora invest back in Nigeria’s agriculture through these crowdfunding projects that have continued to fail them.
Lack of property database and property rights in Nigeria’s rural agriculture sector - farmers in Nigeria regularly face the challenges of securing capital because their land assets are not properly documented and because of the lack of property rights systems in Nigeria. FarmTech has developed as part of the software and in partnership with Nigeria’s Institute of Surveyors to digitize official cadastral surgery documents of farmers and make them available to our users.
Helping farmers access capital funds and investments for agriculture continuously based on the performance and ratings of the farmers listed on FarmTech software on previous investments procured through the software - there is a 91% gap in agriculture financing in Nigeria despite the 3,161% increase in foreign investment inflow into Nigeria's agriculture. While the farmers will be able to access more funds because they are now asset-backed it is also important to track their performance on the investments and help other users identify and select farmers based on their performance ratings.

Elevator pitch

What is your solution?

FarmTech has centralized access to data of over 15,000 farmers and their farmlands including the soil biomass data of their farmland, soil nutrients data of their farmlands, water holding capacity of their farmlands at various depths, etc. these datasets are easily interacted with on the software development environment (IDE) where you can highlight and select farmers by variables e.g. soil nutrients, soil biomass data, etc and users can also run various analysis with these data and the IDE also allows users with basic data science experience run their model on the datasets to find the result they need to make their decisions.

The software also works with over 1000 mappers spread across Nigeria that use a simple mobile app to constantly build our datasets and also validate the datasets we have captured remotely. These data collectors also known as mappers are available to FarmTech users to help them access more data that suits their needs.

FarmTech software also provides access to the property database of the farmers we are building in partnership with the Nigeria Institute of Surveyors and this is the first of its kind in Nigeria’s agriculture space. This cadastral database perfectly improvises for the property rights system of farmlands that will prove that farmers are credible enough to access loans and other financial instruments.

FarmTech software in the long term is designed to also rate farmers' performances with investments they get in order to build more checks and also help investors optimize their investments by selecting farmers based on their performances with investments.

Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?

FarmTech software provides precise data on farmers and their farmlands to the users, and the software’s users include; Agriculture fund managers (capital crowdfunding companies investing in people in agriculture).

Bankers seeking to provide credit support to selected farmers can use FarmTech software to validate the farmer’s claims and they are also able to leverage farmtech’s partnership with the Nigeria Institute of Surveyors to validate land their land claim considering it is the only asset they have. The FarmTech software currently lists over 15,000 farmers across Nigeria and it helps users get insight into farmland distribution and also identify which farmer needs what. This indicates that farmers in the most remote areas of Nigeria will be able to access funds as much as the farmers with visibility and influence because the new metrics will be performance and productivity.

The government’s agriculture agencies are planning to use FarmTech to build proper records of farmers in various Local governments. This will lead to precision in the distribution of government scarce resources to farmers, based on farmers' production capacity and track record with performances with previous investments.

Individuals in the diaspora (UK and US) seeking to invest in agriculture back in Nigeria need deep insight into farmers and their farmlands before making decisions. These set of individuals have over the years been victims of failed agriculture crowdfunding projects and most of them have not been able to recover their lost funds. But with FarmTech the Nigerians in the diaspora interested in investing in agriculture back in Nigeria will have better insight and also understand and be able to visualize the distribution of the farmers they wish to work with without working with third parties.

How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?

FarmTech team has two (2) co-founders and 3 members the team. Previously we developed a GIS (Geographic Information System) software called CMAPIT (cmapit.io) that has grown traction globally and has also won 3 international awards. We developed CMAPIT in response to the need for affordable GIS solutions to visualize and plan for social developments in Nigeria and to also help undergraduates that could not afford the available GIS software work with CMAPIT to onboard the skill much more easily and also become professionals in the GIS space. We have presented the software in various places around the world and the software's impact has helped members of the team gain fellowships like the Mandela Washington Fellowship, and AfriNIC amongst others.

We are a team of GIS experts and also GIS software engineers and we have helped train organizations on the importance of location intelligence in their service delivery. Our team apart from the FarmTech Analytics we are working on we are also building methods to scale down remote sensing to fit the use case for smallholder farmers in Nigeria. We are working so hard to ensure that remote sensing adoption in Nigeria's agriculture is highly affordable and that it will also form part of the smallholder farmers' strategy in the long term.

Our team has also volunteered with training students on GIS skillsets and how they can apply them to their field.

What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?

We have interacted with more than 15,000 farmers across Nigeria and also listed the farmers and their farmlands on the FarmTech software. This includes the sizes of their farmlands, and the history of their farmlands, and also we have built information on the soil nutrients of their farmlands including the water holding capacity, etc.

We also have a network of more than 1000 field agents collecting data for us across Nigeria and they use our mobile app to gather these datasets that provide so much insight into farmers and their needs of farmers.

Technically we can easily profile each of the 15,000 farmers and their potential capacity to deliver on investments.

Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Improving financial and economic opportunities for all (Economic Prosperity)

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in at least one community, which is poised for further growth

In what city, town, or region is your solution team located?

Ibadan, Nigeria

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Abiri Oluwatosin Niyi

More About Your Solution

If your solution has a website or an app, provide the link here:

https://farmtech.ng/

What makes your solution innovative?

FarmTech is an agriculture business intelligence software making it simpler for agriculture fund managers, and bankers investing in farmers and their farmlands in high-risk and unfamiliar areas in Nigeria. FarmTech software also provides high-quality agriculture data for sustainable agriculture insurance programs in Nigeria.

Problems that led to the creation of FarmTech software include poor documentation of farmers in Nigeria and the lack of property rights for farmers. This has led to a 91% financing gap in Nigeria's agriculture despite the increase in foreign investments by 3,161%.

The recent flood disaster in Nigeria indicates the magnitude of the crisis farmers will face in Nigeria and their investors and this includes farmland encroachments and disputes and the need for nutritional revival of most farmlands.

Lack of precise data on farmers and their farmlands has led to over 90% failure in agricultural investments in Nigeria while the lack of a property database (cadastral database) restricts capital and investment access to less than 10% of farmers in Nigeria and this led to the massive financing gap because the lack of credibility amongst farmers hinders capital distribution and redistribution to farmers in Nigeria.

FarmTech provides precise data on farmers and their farmlands to strengthen investors' confidence in agriculture and it also integrates with a cadastral database designed by the FarmTech team to improve property rights that prove farmers are credible.

What are your impact goals for the next year, and how will you achieve them?

FarmTech has centralized access to over 15,000 farmers and their farmlands in Nigeria so the software currently helps to understand the distribution of farmlands and their productive capacity. This indicates that over 15,000 farmers now have better access to potential investors because they are listed on FarmTech and the farmland reports of every one of the 15,000 farmers are automatically generated to aid investors' decisions and to also help the farmers access capital from financial institutions offering products to farmers.

FarmTech is also digitizing the cadastral survey documents of every one of the 15,000 farmers and what this means is that farmers will now be proven to be more credible to access more financial support that is available to farmers but was out of reach because of the lack of property rights that took away investors confidence.

FarmTech is currently working with a few state governments, directly and indirectly, to ensure cadastral database projects for farmers will be supported by the state governments, and also help the state government with better precision in the distribution of support to farmers within their jurisdiction.

Describe the core technology that powers your solution.

FarmTech has centralized access to over 15,000 farmers and their farmlands across Nigeria including the farmlands' soil biomass, soil nutrient data of the farmlands, water holding capacity, and other key datasets that can be easily interacted with via the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) built into the software.

The FarmTech software also works with over 1000 data collectors across Nigeria that use a simple mobile app developed by the FarmTech team to constantly parse data into the software and also instantly accessible by the software users in real-time. The users of the software can also leverage the broad network of the 1000 farmers to further build data on their interests.

The software also integrates with the cadastral database developed by the FarmTech team in partnership with the Nigeria Institute of Surveyors (NIS) to establish the proof of land ownership or tenancy of farmers in order to help these farmers access more financial support by being able to prove that they are creditworthy and asset-backed.

Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:

Big Data
Crowd Sourced Service / Social Networks
GIS and Geospatial Technology
Software and Mobile Applications

In which countries do you currently operate?

Nigeria

How many people does your solution currently serve, and how many do you plan to serve in the next year? If you haven’t yet launched your solution, tell us how many people you plan to serve in the next year.

1000+ downloads of the mobile app available in the Google play store with over 320 active users while FarmTech has recorded over 3000 downloads of the windows and mac versions. Our projection is to have more than 10,000 downloads of the mobile app by the third quarter of next year and over 20,000 users of mac and windows.

We are currently in an incubation perfecting our technology to serve more people and also expand the value proposition e.g. distributing funds to farmers through the mobile application while we also help investors track and keep farmers' records in almost real-time in order to build investors' confidence in the farmers they work with and to also help the farmers access more investors and capital with their records and this will include farmers ratings on delivery.

What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year?

We are currently perfecting the legal barrier of providing this service as a startup while we have to secure more partnership interests with the government in order to prepare for the conflicts that may arise from the transparency that the cadastral database will bring to farmland ownership in every state. With the work we have done so far we have identified several farmland encroachments and these are major legal issues that need to be resolved.

Your Team

Business Model