Our investment in WeFarm
Take a look at your breakfast table and the chances are, much of what you’re eating and drinking was grown thousands of miles away. For my morning coffee, the journey from seed to cup is over 4,000 miles. It’s a slow journey too — it takes 4 years for a newly planted coffee tree to bear fruit. And it’s a risky journey — there is just one harvest a year. If something goes wrong in the planting, growing, picking, or processing cycle, it’s another year before I can brew my next cup of coffee.
The people responsible for ensuring that we all have our morning dose of caffeine are the 500 million small-scale farmers who supply 70% of our food globally. These producers are tiny in scale compared with the other players in the food supply chain — the input suppliers (seeds, fertiliser, machinery), the big food retailers and distributors, and governments. Bringing these farmers together and creating a compelling network is hard. Farmers are often isolated, many miles walk from the nearest village. 90% of the 500m smallholder farmers around the world don’t have access to the Internet.
Today We Farm has announced that they have 100,000 farmers using their peer-to-peer Q&A platform. Just as Quora and Stackoverflow built domain-specific networks, WeFarm is taking the same approach with small-scale farming. The company has been building their network of farmers for the last year, but I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about LocalGlobe’s investment in the company. Founder Kenny Ewan and his team describe WeFarm as “The internet for people without the internet.” When George a farmer in Meru, Kenya wants to know why his chickens are eating their own eggs, he uses his feature phone to SMS WeFarm. His question is translated and routed to other relevant farmers locally, nationally, and internationally. George then gets a handful of answers from other farmers who tell him the solution to his chickens’ cannibalism is to feed them more protein and calcium.
One thing we immediately liked about WeFarm is that it works seamlessly across both feature and smartphones. We believe there remains a significant opportunity to design products for users of feature phones. In much of the world, phones are still predominantly feature rather than smart. Just look at Tanzania and Uganda where smartphone ownership remains in the single digits (Pew, 2015). Another thing we love about WeFarm is the way they attract those feature phone users, farmers like George and 99,999 others. In 1950, the BBC broadcast a new radio drama series: The Archers. It’s aim was to educate farmers and increase food production, in a post-war Britain still subject to food rationing. 66 years on and The Archers is the longest-running radio series in the world. In a similar vein, WeFarm uses radio to educate and build their farmer community. During one hour-long radio show, more than 3,000 farmers signed up.
Over the last few months of working with WeFarm, there have been a number of real highlights: winning $200,000 at The Venture competition, sending over 14 million messages, and this week hitting 100,000 farmers on the platform. These milestones are not just great news for the WeFarm team based in London and Nairobi, but also an important marker of the impact the company is having.
We are excited to be working with the WeFarm team — building a global company from London.
