Tweetstorm: WeFarm’s 1 million farmers
1) this week @Wefarm, the world’s largest farmer-to-farmer digital network, had a party to celebrate reaching 1 million farmers — we’re very happy investors at Local Globe alongside ADV and @trueventures. I wanted to explain why we’re so excited…
2) the majority of the 570 million farms in the world are small (<2 hectares). Smallholders supply 80% of overall food produced in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America
3) looking at stats, the state of the world’s food systems is bleak: 800 million don’t have enough food to eat & 125m under 5s are stunted. On the other hand, 2 billion adults are overweight or obese. Poor diet is now the leading risk of the global burden of disease (@JessFanzo)
4) so why are these small farms so important — why not focus on large industralised agriculture? Because a onesize-fits-all approach does not work for global food production. Smallholder farms play an important role in maintaining the genetic diversity of our food supply
5) these farmers face many challenges, inc climate change & disease. @Wefarm allows farmers to ask each other questions. Knowledge shared can help farmers increase yields, get insight into pricing & effects of climate change, plus source the best seeds, fertilisers, & financing
6) when we first invested in WeFarm, we looked to Stackoverflow as an example of a thriving domain-specific network. Today, @Wefarm shares more content than Stack Overflow and has more content contributors than Wikipedia
7) this is a photo from @wefarm’s 10,000 farmer party. They now add 10,000 farmers every couple of days…
8) 1 million farmers is a great milestone — congrats to @Kennyewan & the @wefarm team based in London, Uganda, Tanzania & Kenya
