Services
We are investing in developing a robust farmer and produce database
Data into Asset
We understand how important but scarce reliable and harmonized agricultural data could be. To this end, we are investing in developing a robust farmer and produce database from the deep remote smallholder farms to medium large-scale farms.
Also, in line with GODAN goal of making agricultural data open data for public consumption, we will make lots of our data freemium for public benefits and make some available only on premium. All of these would be done with very high regards for data use ethics and regulation by concerned authorities.
We are confident that lots of products and services that would fix lots of frictions across value chains in the agricultural sector would emerge from our database.
If you or your company have interest in what we do or involved in similar project, we are opened for collaborations, please do reach out via our email (fooddataorg@gmail.com). We believe in collaborating to solve problems, not competition.
Farmer’s Education
Did you know that more than 70% of farmers in Nigeria have no basic education or understanding about climate change despite the glaring impacts?
According to FAO’ s small family farm country factsheet 2018, only 6% of smallholder farmers (who are about 88.4% of the 36.5% labour force agriculture employ in a population of about 200 million people) are recipients of extension service. The neglect for agricultural extension service and huge information deficit constantly put farmers in positions to grapple with lots of uncertainties which prevent them from scaling while increasing our exposure to food insecurity.
The government seems to invest much money on everything but knowledge – which is a principal thing. For instance, the Anchor’s Borrower Programme of the CBN witnessed lot of challenges basically farmer’s inability to pay back. While some farmers may not be honest, a good number of them were impacted by the consequences of climate change, which they do not have sufficient education on. The 2020 planting season was not spared of this ongoing impact. For example, the south west which receive more rainfall in the raining season experienced daunting drought which ruined lots of investment, whereas, the north which is notable for receiving less annual rainfall got extremely flooded with accompanying disasters on cultivated lands. Sadly, agro-climate weather predictions are not efficient enough and not far reaching.
Here, we made a survey of planting calendar for certain crops across the country and watching these disruptions to advise farmers on what to expect subsequently.
Every form of feedback on this would be appreciated.
As a firm, we are committed to taking every key information- (climate, market, research, diseases, finance etc,) that can help farmers suffer less risks to them, making them produce more profitably – through our digitalized private extension service.
Planning / Supply Chain Improvement
For a good number of years, cycles of gluts and scarcity has continued to disrupt market, demand, and supply – because of lack of production data to make projections and reliable forecast, leading to price instability challenge.
Our goal is to use previous production and consumer’s demand data (off-takers, processing industries etc.) to advise farmers on what to grow more or less and avoid the risk of growing what sold best last season due to scarcity but would sell less in the next planting season due to gluts. This is not only important for price stability, but also for food security. There are lots of food loss and wastes during gluts and hunger, ill health, and insecurity during scarcity. This approach can help provide equal information across all value chains and improve supply chain from the farm to the table.
Budgeting and Policy
No successful nation in the world develop policy without reliable data and that is what breed success. It is a reversed case Nigeria and many African countries. Our policies are more emotional and reactive than responsive, meanwhile, emotions and development are negatively correlated.
We are positioned to use insights from our database to advise policy makers to make impacting, sustainable, and evidence-based policies. This would also allow the budgeting ministry to allocate resources to solutions oriented capital expenditure and have measurable metrics to measure performance. You can check our work on budget tracking and how we are creating awareness for people to follow the money, get informed and involved. This has the potential to improve accountability and transparency. Read about it here