Over the years, the ability and capability of using technology for production purposes has become central to sustainable development discourse. The Covid-19 Pandemic came with eye-opening experiences suggesting how businesses and the global economy will be shaped by digital ingenuity in many years to come. According to a McKinsey report, data-driven application of artificial intelligence will generate 13 Trillion US Dollars in new global economic activity by 2030, possibly determining the next world order.
In the agriculture industry, there is already an awakening to new methods that farmers could use to grow crops, rare animals and produce foods all year round without entirely depending on their labour or the natural forces. Digital-data expansion has introduced a farming techniques such as Precision Agriculture and Climate-Smart Farming.
Precision Agriculture is the use of data and digital technologies to monitor and optimize agricultural production process and increase farm management efficiency and agricultural sustainability. Climate-smart Agriculture on the other hand aims to enhance a sustainable food system through increased productivity, resilience and adaptability to climate crises and reduced Greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
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Both precision agriculture and climate-smart farming have contributed to an increase in the amount of data generated through farming and the entire agricultural value chain, and they also produced a repository of knowledge that covers various data points and insights that can help farmers to make informed decisions and outsmart nature. The application of data analytics in agriculture is projected to grow to 1.5 Billion USD at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.2 percent by 2025. It is also expected that the global agritech startup market would grow from $17.5billion in 2019 to $40billion by 2027.
Agritech Expansion in Africa’s Startup Ecosystem
In Africa many startups have developed to provide agricultural digital solutions to improve farm yield and food security of the continent. Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria are major contributing countries of digital agriculture in Africa. The three countries account for 60 percent of the active agritech startups in the continent. These startups are solving food security problems in Africa by providing farmers with digital solutions that enable them to improve their yield and have access to funds and the market.
Zenvus Technology
Zenvus is an Agritech business under Fasmicro limited that helps farmers to optimize and transform their farms and improve their yields. Zenvus’ technology comprises computational algorithm and electronic sensors that allows farmers to collect soil fertility and crop vegetative health data to deliver precision agriculture at scale. It then uses the aggregated and anonymized data to deliver financial services to farmers.
From farm management to pricing, funding and marketing as well as risk management, Zenvus provides data and insights that enables farmer to reach informed decision as regard what, how, and when to farm. The technology has in-built GPS, compass and XL making it possible to map farm boundaries which could be useful during loan and insurance applications.
Hello Tractor
Equipment leasing is way farmers are overcoming the problem of lack of finance to procure capital intensive technology. Hello Tractor is the app Auma is using to improve farming across 13 countries including Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania. This innovation is often described as Uber for tractors. The app provides digital platform for tractor owners to rent their machines to smallholder farmers in their area and allow these farmers to pool together to rent a vehicle at affordable rates. Installed in these tractors are GPS devices that can enable owners to monitor their location and activity.
Jehiel Oliver, CEO of Hello tractor noted; ‘’since launching in 2014, the company has served about half a million farmers, and 55 percent of the app’s customers were using a tractor for the first time’’. According to Oliver, Mechanization is so important to be a productive farmer. But, smallholder farmers have labour and time constraints where they have a very short window to plant and if they don’t plant on time, they lose yield. ‘’So this technology is a way to get this expensive equipment to farmers’’ he noted.
Challenges and way forward
Culture lag constitutes a major setback to Africa’s agritech ecosystem. Despite the increasing pace of digital solutions in the continent many farmers still struggle to scale and could not have significant improvements in their lives due to lack of institutions, structures and cultural frameworks that can enhance adaptation and localization of these solutions. Thus, most of these solutions still look foreign to many farmers in the continent.
According to a study by Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Co-operation (CTA), more than 33 million smallholder farmers in Africa have registered for some form digital services but less than a third use them enough to feel the full benefits.
Furthermore, lack of access to the Internet and the inability of smallholder farmers to afford procuring or even renting digital technologies have been a major source of discouragement to them.
Major investments need to be made in building ICT infrastructure and improving digital literacy in rural areas. Government should consider giving better incentives and more robust support systems through tax relief, subsidy, bond and grants to startups aiming to contribute to the food basket and the wealth of the nation.