Soil vs Hydroponics…
… the battle of the year
With ongoing desertification affecting Nigeria just as the rest of Africa and the world, northern parts of the country have become limited in the availability of green and nutritious pasture. Concurring community conflict as herders seek for greener pastures has influenced our team in testing and experimenting with adaptive low-tech hydroponic fodder systems to create more self-sustaining and climate resilient solutions for Nigeria’s ranchers and herdsmen.
Sprint 2 provided us with what seems like a much clearer picture on the way forward, both on future sprints as well as a potentially viable business model for the sustainability and scalability of the system in a rural setting.
This allowed us to determine clearly what Sprint 3 needed to achieve before we can move to the field and test the system within a community setting.
SPRINT 3
Experiment 1 — Private Sector Stakeholder Engagement
In an effort to create a sustainable model, we believe that the private sector will need to be part of the equation to avoid the dependence on aid funding. In order to include them in the model we needed to get a better understanding on who the private sector participants can be and what will be required of the business model to make this viable for them.
Targeted Private Sector:
- Dairy companies (In the future we would also include meat processing companies).
Imported Milk powder accounts for about 75% of raw materials used by Nigeria’s dairy industry to process dairy products. While they have invested and initiated many interventions to increase local milk production from herder communities, it has not yet reached a scale to make an economic impact and drastically reduce the importation of raw materials.
2. Commercial financial institutions (Banks)
Banks in Nigeria have been mandated by the Central Bank to provide funding to smallholder farmers through a variety of models, such as the out-grower model. They either provide financing or input to farmers and collaborate with off takers to ensure the credit is protected.
Our objective was to engage and hopefully get encouraging feedback from stakeholders of both categories and gather as much information as possible to help mold a sustainable business model.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
Experiment 1 — Private Sector Stakeholder Engagement
Dairy Company — I reached out to one of the dairy companies for which we installed a showcase system in 2019. Due to a scheduling issue we will only have a meeting with them after this sprint but the outcome will help inform our upcoming sprint.
Commercial Bank — During a call with one of Nigeria’s leading commercial Banks, Access Bank, I briefed their Agric Desk on the project, where we currently are, and thoughts around what an out-grower model could look like in collaboration with dairy companies as well as banks. They stated that our project is certainly of interest to them, however there are specific elements that are relevant to the bank to enable the provision of loans and credit lines to smallholder farmers:
- The off taker of the produce. In this case this may be the dairy companies acting as customers and buying milk from the herders.
- Financing required
- Demand of the product
- Risk assessment in terms of security of the location the herder community is based in
The bank was generally very receptive to our proposition of the outgrower model, stating that the customer/buyer being involved will provide assurance to the bank and reduce their financial risk. This means the bank can partially or fully finance the system, while the dairy companies have a contract with the herders and acting as guaranteed off-taker, creating a sustainable and independent ecosystem while allowing the herders to focus on cattle rearing and milk production.
A pre-agreed financial model can be developed that determines how the loan is paid back to the bank, as well as the period and the required interest rate. Dairy companies acting as the buyer may deduct the required percentage at the point of payment to the herder and automatically send the bank their share.
A pre-agreed model will be crucial due to reduce the lack of trust bankers have for farmers caused by a high default rate common with farmers, who at times end up receiving funds and not paying back the loans to financial institutions as agreed upon.
While some details cannot be determined at this stage such as the interest rate, the bank we spoke to was generally open to the idea and will await further data from us over the next few months, as well as further engagement to come up with a model that works.
In this case it will be fair to assume that most banks will have similar requirements, however in future sprints we will engage with more financial institutions to get a better picture.
Access Bank is eager to trial a pilot with us and a designated community once everything is in place and details have been worked out. We may be able to consider this after the FTL Project once more data and information has been captured to continue to de-risk the project and business model.
Experiment 2 — Soil vs Hydroponics
We believe that hydroponically grown fodder has advantages to conventionally grown pasteur. We wanted to be able to identify in what way i.e.
- Does it grow faster?
- Will it be more nutritious?
- Is it cheaper?
- Will it have a higher yield?
To be able to get simple answers to these questions we decided to simply grow the two “side by side”. Both growing in the same environment (Literally 4 meters apart), we would however have to create somewhat different input since their way of growing differs greatly. We nevertheless tried to keep things simple to allow us to analyze the data easily.
For example:
Seed Varities
For “simplicity” — and I use this word very loosely — we are currently utilizing maize seeds for our technical development as well as experiments, but these are not the seeds we would be using in the future. For one, we are not keen on using seeds that have a lot of relevance to food security to the population and two, from a nutritional perspective, they are not “up there” on protein content which is important to cattle nutrition.
So the question then becomes, will stakeholders be willing to accept data on a crop or seed variety that isn’t relevant to cattle development?
Could other seed varieties perhaps even yield more, or less, than maize??
Re-creating the same conditions over and over again with precision
Let’s face it, this is agriculture and no matter how “techy” what we do is, we still try to keep it low tech and adaptive, so my research facility isn’t some lab where tissue data is being analysed in some fancy display cases; we simply “grow stuff” in a greenhouse or outside the greenhouse, so, how precise can we be in creating different test groups? We bought Maize for the first test group in an open market close to my facility because we also wanted to be sure to not use hybrid seeds, but rather seeds that are available and accessible to anyone. They were in good condition but when we bought the second set from the exact same person,in the process of soaking the second set of seeds for 24 hours, they seemed to have absorbed almost five times the amount of water overnight than they did previously….I know…. shocking!!! Do we know why? No. And even as they were on the trays being irrigated they continued to swell up and put our comparison data through the window.
We planted the soil set on a 4m x 4m batch on the land without any covering, meaning the sun and rain was able to do its things, but of course this also meant that each set naturally had different weather conditions it was exposed to, so what does that do to our data…?
So at the end of the day, to SIMPLIFY things, I decided to just compare the best producing group in the soil with the worst producing group in hydroponics, since this should silence any doubters.
Below I have outlined the yield per square meter for each set as well as provided more details to the conditions created for each set.
Just to outline what this means, even in the worst conditions of a hydroponic fodder system, we were able to produce 6.8 times the amount grown in soil per square meter, on just one layer of the trays. While on four layers this is 27.3 times the quantity of fodder.
Even with all the complications on how we can dissect the data and identify its flaws, I believe this still speaks to the benefits of a hydroponic fodders system.
We now have more tools to engage with stakeholders and commence structuring a business model since we now have both the cost of the system as well as the yield.
In the near future we hope to install the system within a herder community and start to understand how doable adaptation can be as well as how cattle respond to being fed green fodder on a regular basis.
