This piece was originally written by Onyeka Akumah, CEO of FarmCrowdy

In September 1996 when I was just 12 years old, I discovered my love for Agriculture when my mother made me raise 500 day-old chicks for sale and the proceeds were to be used to get a gift from Santa Claus. Sadly, most of the chicks died and the rest went into my mum’s pot of soup. This experience gave me my first real foray into Agriculture.

Years later, after I graduated with a first class degree in Applied Information Technology from the Sikkim Manipal University of Health, Medical and Technological Sciences in India, I returned to Nigeria and started my professional career as an E-marketing Coordinator at Deloitte. I veered into e-commerce and online travel as well while my first love, Agriculture was put on hold.

At the ACCI International Tech Conference in October 2015, I was privileged to speak at an Abuja ICT conference where I met a Tian Xu national who was introduced to me by my friend, Prof. Adesugba who would later become an advisor in Farmcrowdy. This Chinese man during our conversation gave insight on how technology was changing China including the sheep farming market and the methods and techniques the Chinese used.


I did my research for several months and found out that farmers in Nigeria had 3 major problems: access to the market, input, and technical know-how. I also discovered that several people were interested in Agriculture but there was not enough time for them to get into it. Initially, I was looking at a pure crowdfunding model but then decided on a partnership model where everyone is given an opportunity to participate in Agriculture, and rural farmers across all the states in Nigeria have an equal chance to work with Farmcrowdy.

HOW I MET MY CO-FOUNDERS

Everyone’s favorite startup story is of founders eating noodles and selling their home furniture to raise enough money to start their business but I was able to change the narrative with my story.

My dream was to build a fantastic team through my desire to get people that were as crazy as I was, people who wouldn’t mind delayed gratification, who would complement my skills and people who identified with my key elements like farm operations, financial management, technology, and product development early on.

Some factors were put into consideration when I began to search for the perfect co-founders. The first factor was to find individuals who shared the same values with my vision, the second factor was to individuals who were ‘crazy’ enough to join me on delayed gratification and willing to contribute their own capital to build the business. The third factor was to find individuals who had time to devote to this project, as I would be devout to it.

First on my list was IFEANYI. Ifeanyi who is now the VP, Data Intelligence and one of the co-founders of Farmcrowdy was a brand consultant for ETISALAT Nigeria in 2010 when we met. A car breakdown, blog post and a project interview later, Ifeanyi reached out to me, we worked on a couple of projects for some years and then the Farmcrowdy vision was incorporated. Ifeanyi joined me in January 2016 to start building the idea.

Next on my list was  AKINDELE, my trusted accountant for several years. Akindele had always wanted to play in the Agric space for a while so sharing the Farmcrowdy with him was easy. I reached out to Akindele in February 2016 to join me and when we needed to justify our thoughts with numbers. Akindele, who is now the Chief Financial Officer and also a co-founder of Farmcrowdy joined our team in just one conversation about finding the right financial consultant.

Let’s talk about CHRISTOPHER, my longtime friend of over 15 years, our friendship started when Christopher taught me Java programming at the Aptech

Computer Institute. Together we built websites to make enough cash to get by until we eventually got a website project that made us a lot of money back in 2005. I knew that as an Agric-Tech company, there would be a need for serious technical know-how and there was no other person that I could count on asides my longtime friend and partner to build clean code to power our site. As expected, Christopher came on board as our Chief Technology Officer and co-founder in February 2016.

In May 2016, AFRICAN FARMER MOGAJI joined the team first as a consultant then became the Chief Operating Officer in July 2016. His experience in the Agric space triggered my decision to invite him to join myself and the other co-founders in the early phase of the business.

However, after launching Farmcrowdy officially on the 14th of November, 2016, Africanfarmer was left with the decision of coming onboard full time to help the new startup kick-off in full swing. Unfortunately, he decided to resign from the company in its 4th month (February 2017) to focus on working with one of the government ministries.

TEMITOPE was the last Co-Founder on my list. Temitope joined August 2016, with her hands-on farming experience and in-depth knowledge, she had been to gather a handful of rural farmers under her wings. Tope built her career as a personal-shopper, shopping in the local market for working-class women who had tight schedules. As a result of her past experiences, it was easy for us to get our first 500 farmers to sign up. She was a perfect completion for my team as the Chief Operations Officer and co-founder.

When Farmcrowdy started, my own funding from working a 9-5 job and my co-founder’s resources were used to start this business. Now, we have raised seed funding to establish a business with structure and we have grown rapidly from 1 to a team of over 50 empowering over 11,000 farmers to potentially feed millions of people every day.

TOUGHEST MOMENTS

“After many sleepless nights, more than half of the birds were lost to heat…”

Entrepreneurship will test you and no doubt the co-founders at Farmcrowdy were tested when more than half of the first poultry farm units were lost in transit due to heat. Dealing with insurance while making sure that relationships with off-takers were not severed stretched the founding team members, and they continue to refer to this learning experience years later.

When Farmcrowdy was still less than a year old, we had Poultry farms and three different crop farm units available for sponsorship: Cassava, Maize and Tomato, each with its unique ROI. Tomato farm units which are no longer available in the Farmshop had an ROI of 20% at that time. We had a number of unfortunate events where cultivating, harvesting and preparing the tomatoes in time for the off-takers was no longer possible. We were in a fix. Temitope warned us while also grinning that the whole project must not blow up because Nigerians can only trust a brand once especially when their money is involved.

I knew from my two previous businesses that failed that I needed to team up with the right people to give Farmcrowdy a high chance of success and growth. This knowledge made my selection of co-founders very strategic but even when an individual plans everything to the letter, things are never completely in your control. So I took to my books, called each sponsor one after the other and explained to them why we couldn’t continue with the tomato farms and why they should switch their sponsorship to poultry while guaranteeing that their ROI remains the same. This angle worked. After calling 70 sponsors, they all switched to the poultry farm sponsorship and we still have many of them as sponsors.

When I moved to Agriculture, there was also a lot of skepticism from people because I had earlier demonstrated my expertise in marketing and technology so Agriculture made no sense to a lot of people. This thinking made it really difficult to raise money in those early days and I had to use every last bit of my savings to fund the project.

In 2016, if anyone was contributing money to farm hectares of farmland, they did it secretly. It was like a coded sort of investment that no one was supposed to know about. When we came out, we had to do a lot of disrupting and attending countless meetings to put the right structure in place. We made quite a number of mistakes, we had a problem with our first farmer and we lost birds because of the location of the farm and logistics. These situations made me question my ideas and have a rethink about the whole project.

These crises made us really sad because we couldn’t go back to work with many hard-working farmers. We had just worked with some farmers to cultivate and harvest 500 acres of Maize farms and the crises prevented us from going back. This is a classic example of how a crisis can affect people’s livelihood. This, however, made us tighten up conversations around insurance cover and risks assessment because we would hate to lose sponsors’ money.

A CO-FOUNDER LEFT: HOW IT SHOOK THE BUSINESS AND HOW WE MOVED ON

As earlier stated, AFRICAN FARMER who joined Farmcrowdy as a C0-Founder left in Febrauary 2017 to pursue other achievements. Temitope Omotolani, was reassigned as the VP of Operations in March 2017. As expected, she led Farmcrowdy to execute its first successful crop farm and has managed the internal operations of the business from there on. African farmer has remained a stakeholder in Farmcrowdy and we appreciate his amazing contributions in the first 4 months of the business.

BECOMING FARMCROWDY GROUP

Farmcrowdy has since moved on to become Nigeria’s foremost leading agri-tech company, empowering over 12,000 farmers across 13 states in Nigeria; reared close to 2,000,000 birds, cultivated 16,000+ acres of farmland with over 35,000 farm units sold.

On the 21st of March 2019, we became the Farmcrowdy Group, with a mandate of building agri-tech solutions that enable the achievement of food security in Africa. The Farmcrowdy group currently is comprised of subsidiaries including Farmcrowdy and Farmgate Africa.

Farmcrowdy Group operates from its Lekki, Lagos office as its Headquarters and has a second office at the Civic Innovation Centre, Abuja.



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