Farmcrowdy Review: All You Need To Know Before Investing
About FarmCrowdy
Farmcrowdy is the first First Digital Agriculture Platform in Nigeria that empowers the rural farmers by offering them improved seeds, farm inputs, good training on modern farming techniques, and also equips them with a market for the sale of their farm produce. This gives the farmers the ability to farm more acres and by extension leads to increased food production and security in Africa. Their purpose is to increase food production and security in Africa by empowering farmers.
Farmcrowdy works by developing a platform in which individuals can securely sponsor the farms of other people online. Their sponsorship offers then go to a rural farmer who makes use of this fund to start and complete a farm cycle. At the end of the farm cycle, the sponsors get back their initial sponsorship and percentage return on their sponsorship. The returns a farm sponsor gets fully depends on the type of farm that was sponsored.
Farmcrowdy works by bridging the gap that is between farmers who have little or no capital to cultivate their farmland with farm sponsors who are passionate about influencing the Nigerian agricultural space and making a profit out of it. In one short year, Farmcrowdy has already worked with more than 1,000 sponsors to more than 3000+ farmers, and they have a huge goal to empower 50,000 rural farmers by the year 2022. This goal can only be achieved if other individuals start investing in the vision of increasing food production in Nigeria, and that is evident when farms are being sponsored.
Established in late 2016, FarmCrowdy prides itself as the first Digital Agricultural platform in Nigeria and is looking to become the foremost digital agricultural platform in the whole of Africa. FarmCrowdy is a startup that facilitates food production, food security together with its sustainability by empowering farmers. This, it does by equipping the farmers with equipment and tools that are needed on the farm (such as improved seed varieties, training on using modern farm techniques and other mechanized tools) as well as off the farm (such as marketing of harvested produce)
How does FarmCrowdy get this done?
Working with farmers
FarmCrowdy boasts of having a clear-cut but effective farmers selection process that is followed by a project pre-incubation period of around 2-3 months. The company’s farmer’s integration process is as follows:
Crop and Land Selection: this involves the identification of the crops to be cultivated. The result of this stage would depend on certain factors such as farming season, availability of land, etc.
Identifying Farmers: To pick the farmers to work with, FarmCrowdy works with the association of farmers’ in the locations and/or community leaders instead of approaching farmers individually. FarmCrowdy says it does this to “keep things well organized.”
Provision of Inputs: FarmCrowdy then goes further to supply farm inputs to the selected farmers. Also, the firm offers training and tools in addition to assigning technical field specialists to each farm for both assistance and supervision.
Offtake of harvests: This is where FarmCrowdy helps the farmers to sell their harvest after the cultivation or breeding period has been completed. FarmCrowdy does this to make sure that the products are sold for what they are worth and not a single penny less. Therefore making sure that maximum profit is made.
Working with sponsors
Looking to make some money (as profits) from Agriculture on FarmCrowdy, you would have to sponsor certain farms or farmers on the firm’s ‘Farm Marketplace’ which the company refers to as ‘FarmShop‘. Called the Sponsor’s Integration Process, the following are the stages that are involved in sponsoring a farm(er) on FarmCrowdy:
Registration/Signing up: Before you can get anything done as a sponsor, you are required to be a registered member. you can sign up either through the website or through the mobile application which is currently available for both iOS and Android smartphones.
Farm Selection: This involves you going through the Farmshop and picking the farm that you would love to sponsor. When you click on a farm that you want to sponsor, the sponsorship/contract period, expected return on investment (calculated in %), harvest period, available units to be sponsored, and pretty much all details you need to know about the farm are made available.
Sponsorship: After you have successfully made payments to sponsor a farm, FarmCrowdy uses your funds to make certain provisions like farm input, technical support, training, farm, and farm produce insurance, marketing assistance, logistics, etc.
Tracking: Either through the application or the website, you can keep track of activities on the farm that you have sponsored as FarmCrowdy would provide pictorial materials in the form of images, texts, and videos to your dashboard. Interestingly, you can also put in a request to visit the sponsored farm.
Harvest and Payment: Upon the completion of a successful farming cycle, FarmCrowdy would pay the sponsors their initial sponsorship (to an electronic wallet that is on the dashboard) in addition to the return on investment. Sponsors can either choose to transfer their profits to their bank accounts after a successful farming cycle or to further reinvest the proceeding in sponsoring another farm.
Is It Legit?
Farmcrowdy is a legitimate startup that raises funds from people. These are individuals who want to contribute to the agricultural sector without farming directly. The company is under Leadway Assurance just like its fellow agritech company, Thrive Agric, which covers only initial sponsorship investments in cases of unforeseen circumstances.
In 2016, when they were founded, they were backed by Venture Capitalists, Techstars Ventures, Cox Enterprises, and Social Capital. They are also in partnership with Syngenta and ASTC (Agricultural Services Training Centre). They are leading companies in the field of agriculture.
Through the platform, both farmers and sponsors get a good return for their investments.
On the farmer’s part, his hard work rewards him by selling his farm proceeds. The proceeds will be at a profitable price while the sponsors get their returns on the investment as at when due.
