As Black men and women throughout the African diaspora turn to farming as a viable career path, a Ghanaian entrepreneur and his team have created the Complete Farmer app to help more aspiring farmers achieve their dreams.
Disrupt Africa is reporting that the app, founded by Desmond Koney, first debuted in 2017. Now, it’s making the news today because they recently expanded their operations to the Ivory Coast.
The idea behind the Complete Farmer is for Ghanaians to own and operate their farms from anywhere in the world. Users of the app can also get exclusive access to registered cultivation protocols. Best of all, the app uses a combination of satellite, Internet of thing (IoT) big data, and blockchain technology to collect crop insights, which allows farmers to use that data to optimize crop growth and cultivation.
The three-sided feature of the app also allows for commodity buyers, food growers, and digi-farmers to interact on a single platform to share best practices.
How does this benefit African farmers, on a global scale?
Prior to the creation of the Complete Farmer, many commodity buyers would only invest in Africa through middlemen. This would often lead to many “cracks” in the system, with corruption running rampant and poverty prevalent amongst African farmers. But thanks to the app, the process has been democratized, and the middleman has been cut out. Now, supply chains can be built quickly and easily, and there’s extensive visibility — from cultivation to post-harvest, quality control, transportation, and logistics using blockchain traceability features.
“With the rise of B2B e-commerce, expectations of B2B buyers are changing,” Koney said to Face2Face Africa. “The rise of the Amazons, Ubers, Googles and the other big tech giants of this world are changing mindsets of commodity buyers – who now expect an easy comparison of suppliers, seamless online ordering processes and convenient deliveries. In an always-connected world where data is the new oil, commodity buyers also expect and deserve much more transparency in the production process.”
