Why Facebook is a game changer for Kenyan farmers…and why it’s already ripe for disruption
Yesterday an article by Grace Mureithi in Kenya’s The Standard newspaper caught my eye. With the headline “Why every farmer needs a Facebook and Twitter account” it explained that Kenyan farmers must now “either make peace with selling produce at depressingly low prices or delve into the world of online marketing”. A bold claim. Is she right?
Agriculture remains the bread and butter of economies such as Kenya’s (pun intended). Unlike in the West, farms are primarily run as small family businesses rather than big commercial enterprises. The average Kenyan farm owner has less than six acres of land, 70 times less than the average farm owner in the US, and it’s estimated there are over 7 million of these small farms dotted across Kenya. Multiply millions of individual farms with thousands of individual shops, restaurants and market stalls and you have what can only be described as a logistical nightmare.
The result of this logistical nightmare? Farmers can’t find buyers, buyers can’t find farmers and a field of tomatoes turns into a rotting mush in the Kenyan sun:
So can Facebook really help with a problem like this? In the last couple of years farming Facebook groups have hit the scene in Kenya with some now over 40,000 members strong. To find out more I spent an afternoon trawling through these groups to understand what’s really going on online.
Facebook farming: The good
I counted the number of posts looking to buy or sell produce in one of the farming Facebook groups and found 430 in the space of 30 days.
The beauty of these groups is that with an audience of 40,000 members you can potentially find someone looking for exactly what you have to sell at exactly the time you’re looking to sell it.
Take this farmer on the left who found a market for his ndengu (green grams) within just 3 hours of posting online. Amazing!
Facebook farming: The bad
Unfortunately not all farmers are quite so successful. My trawl through farming Facebook groups found that onions are the most popular crop to sell online and yet a scan of onion posts over a six month period found that over 40% of them got no response at all.
Grace tells us in her article that to successfully sell online you need to keep it “interesting and visual” and add “a catchy image”. I separated all of the onion posts that followed Grace’s advice and found that, while they were a bit more successful, still almost 30% of them were met with silence.
So what’s the secret to being a successful digital farmer? I ran regressions on everything from the quoted price to the farmer location and found…nothing. The problem with selling on Facebook is that it seems to come down to blind luck. Perhaps the right buyer will be checking the right Facebook group at the right time. Or perhaps you’ll have to post and pray.
Facebook farming: The ugly
While there are many success stories to be told by online farmers, these farming groups really are the wild, wild west of online selling.
A scan of these groups shows that they can be the hunting ground of opportunists looking to make a quick buck out of desperate farmers. Some posts even tell stories of ‘buyers’ found through Facebook who collected farm produce, promised to pay and promptly vanished.
With many Facebook users hiding behind pseudonyms and fake profile pictures there is rarely any recompense for victims of these scams.
So what’s next?
The opportunity for technology to address some of these issues is big and timely. Rather than “post and pray”, a service that proactively matches up supply and demand could connect farmers to the best selling option in a matter of minutes. In fact technology has the potential to create a fully functioning “intention economy” in Kenyan agriculture, where buyers could reserve farm produce before it’s even planted.
While Facebook is the best online solution out there for Kenya’s farmers right now, it’s not the answer. That’s why at farm.ink we’re building something better. Our market connection bot proactively matches buyers and sellers in the market, designs in trust through ratings and can be accessed directly through the farmer’s preferred messaging platform. We’re testing with our first users now so watch this space!
We’re excited to be working with IDEO.org and DFID as they lend their design expertise and support along our journey. If you have questions, ideas or anything else please get in touch (info@farm.ink). We’d love to hear from you.
