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The interest in investing in agriculture has been growing in recent years, but many people have no clue about how to get involved. Caleb Ojewale, met with Uka Eje, CEO/Co-Founder of Thrive Agric, a crowd funding platform for agric investment, and he discusses how the platform has been operating. With returns of up to 23 percent within 6 months, it was important to find out just how the system works.
The first thing I want to know is; why are your farms always sold out? I ask because for the last five months of stalking your website, none of the farms have been available so I’m curious if it is real at all?
The reason is not for the hype of it. It is because one of the ways to test that something is viable is for people to want it. The investment platform has been an attractive one that people want to make money from. People register by themselves, and this creates a list of accounts so when a farm opens up, we do an email blast to all these people. They are those who get notified first whenever farms are open for investment.
The reason farms get closed up is because people love it, people are ready to plug in cash immediately. We have several people registering every day, and who keep asking questions to know more. We also work with clusters such as cooperatives. We tell them about we do, and what we can do. Through this we open up this investment opportunity in farming for people. We also let them realise that it is also a way of impacting smallholder farmers.
How have your farms been making impacting?
The core of it is the fact that, people who invest in this farm can see how their investment is impacting the smallholder farmers. Recently, we went for farm inventory and update, and in the course of this we met a 24 year old man who farmed on one hectare. He was very hard working and because of the money he got from the farm, he was able to pay for his schooling. That is one of the things that is primary for us; to see how the money from you (an investor) can have a direct physical effect.
The excitement for us is not just farms closing, but how it translates into the life of a farmer. I have this hypothesis that; the wealth of the country is in the rural communities, not here (in the city). I used to be in Markurdi, Benue state, and believed that if truly Benue state is the food basket of the nation, then it should feed itself, have its own processing companies, and self-sufficient enough if it has the rich soil. Now, that belief is broad for the entire nation, not just Benue. I believe that Nigeria has capacity to feed Africa, but first, should be self sufficient in food production.
Before Thrive Agric, our farmers did not cultivate up to one hectare, mostly few plots. What we are doing is to help them scale production. The intervention we do from the money we get from people who fund these farms is by providing extension services, training them on best practices, insure their farms against risks, and they also get push notifications on their phones on standard farm practice. This covers insecticide application, fertiliser, rain patterns etc. The information helps farmers in many ways because if for instance a farmer’s schedule showed they were to spray today, and then get notification from us that it will rain tomorrow, it prevents them from wasting such an effort.
How are farmers selected?
After visiting a community, we get community land and decide the size we want to cultivate. Thrive Agric is a form of community empowerment; the communities have existing aggregation of farmers. They have clusters which are among the most organised one can find. So, we take advantage of this society of farmers and these are the people who we bring out to farm. Some of the communities also have heads for the farmers, and through them we select members to be aggregated.
How do you take care of off-taking?
What we do is to get a forward contract and this is possible because we work with a lot of processing companies in the country. This informs us of buying price, and what time of the year it will be needed. This is also what informs the pricing and everything else we put on the website.
Before Thrive Agric, I and my co-founder, Ayo Arikawe, were into buying of commodities. I was in Benue state while Ayo was in Lagos, so we go round farms in different locations to aggregate commodities. In essence, we had already created a market relationship with our off-takers before Thrive Agric. But, we noticed there is a problem, and it is; processing companies need more than local farmers are producing.
There was a time we got an LPO for 3,000 tonnes of Soya Beans, Maize, and Sorghum. It was tough fulfilling the order as we had to scout through different states, and we didn’t find enough to meet that need. So, I came to the realisation that if we can’t meet internal need, how then do we meet export need. Ironically, most of the crops we dealt in were those with high export value, and we were not even meeting our local need. So, initially I thought this should be addressed by aggregating farmers. I did this using my savings as well as my co-founder.
We are also particular about farmers getting the right value for their produce, because anything short of expectations may discourage them from farming for another cycle. At Thrive Agric, we make rural dwellers realise that profit from agriculture is possible, and they need not migrate needlessly to urban centres.
