Expansion [or ability] to accommodate other verticals can be one way of identifying companies with a high growth potential.
Farmcrowdy, a digital agritech startup that makes use of technology to connect farm sponsors with real, mostly rural farmers has launched its first subsidiary, Farmgate Africa. This move by Farmcrowdy to further launch into a vertical portrays an opportunity for the company’s expansion. This was after the company rebranded to be The Farmcrowdy Group.
The newly launched platform, Farmgate Africa is an agro-trading platform that is bridging the gap between rural farmers and the market place by providing major processors and international buyers the opportunity to purchase commodities directly from local farmers.
Farmgate.Africa enables major processors to place orders through the platform without having to go through various layers of middlemen. [Mostly, the elimination of middlemen in any sector, industry, or process helps to drastically improve such].
In addition, FarmGate Africa handles the aggregation of commodities from small holder farmers and ensures the delivery of the commodity to major processors and international buyers.
According to the Co-founder and MD FarmGate Africa, Kenneth Obiajulu who also seats on the management team of the Farmcrowdy Group, and spoke at the launch, “our business model is one that brings the farmers closer to the processors and off-takers by eliminating several layers of intermediaries. By doing this, Farmgate optimizes market access to African farmers and also improves their income by at least 30%.”
Further throwing more light on the new initiative, Onyeka Akumah, Founder and CEO Farmcrowdy Group, said that, “launching Farmgate Africa as one of the subsidiaries in the Farmcrowdy group gives us huge joy with the expectations placed on us to continue to innovate and build new solutions driven by technology to finance agriculture. We have received a lot of feedbacks from farmers and major agro buyers who need to fund market access to agro-commodities but are constantly held back because the market place is unstructured.”
To an unstructured marketplace, Onyeka says that “Farmgate Africa is our response to this need. As we launch Farmgate Africa today, we have tirelessly worked for the past 6 months with the team to build relationships with blue-chip companies in and outside Nigeria, extend our relationships with thousands of farmer networks across the country and now, we are set to launch to the market with a strong team behind the idea.”
What’s the focus?
Kenneth Obiajulu further explained that Farmgate will be focused on four key sectors in the next two years:
- Beef processing (Over 5,000MT of carcass beef) with a major partner in the South-West of Nigeria.
- Developing aggregation capacities for over 100,000MT of maize for onward delivery to a major processor in Nigeria.
- Developing aggregation capacities for over 40,000MT of soybean for onward delivery to a major processor in Nigeria.
- Developing aggregation capacities for over 3,000MT of dried-split ginger for onward export to the UAE and UK.
Obviously, Farmgate by Farmcrowdy is solving an actual need. The parent company is on the route of servicing the whole agricultural value chain, and our farmers will definitely be better for it.