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Judith Phiri, Sunday News Reporter
SMALL holder farmers have been encouraged to utilise technology-based platforms to market their produce directly to consumers in a bid to increase profitability.
In an interview, Farmhut founder Mr Ryan Katayi said they created an agricultural platform that ensures that farmers produce never goes to waste.
“Africa looses 30-50 percent of it’s food to post harvest food losses. Over a third of the food grown by farmers never gets to the table and goes to food waste. This can be stopped when farmers utilise our tech-enabled agro-based platform development of smart market infrastructure that allows farmers to place their produce for sale before they even finish harvesting ensuring that there are no losses that occur post-harvest due to lack of proper marketing strategies,” said Mr Katayi.
He added that their organisation became very effective in assisting farmers during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.
“Our company started in 2018 where we were doing product development and we managed to register it successfully in 2019.
Operations started this year after we finished debugging the platform and also after getting as many farmers as we could on board so as to envision the big data analysis that we wanted to do. Given that our product is an online platform most of our integrations are available online.
“It gave us an opportunity to expand into the market during the Covid-19 pandemic. So our product couldn’t have come at a right time to be on the market and assist as many farmers as possible due to the travel restrictions. Farmers were linked to customers and we also assisted with the deliveries of the produce,” he said.
Mr Katayi also noted that they were seeking to expand their product to other parts of Africa after achieving desired effects nationally.
“So our three year plan involves expanding into the Southern Region but also jumping to West Africa where there has been a lot of demand for our platform there. But we would want to stabilize operations here in Zimbabwe and get as many farmers on board before we make this international because we believe that the vision is deep-seated within Zimbabwe and the challenges that farmers here in Zimbabwe have been facing.
“So the three year plan projects that we are going to be in more than seven of the SADC countries and also in some of the countries in West Africa but it is our vision to have most if not all of the small holder farmers here in Zimbabwe transacting using the platform itself,” said Mr Katayi.
He also said that they were in the process of assisting local small holder farmers tap into the international market through exporting.
“We are currently in the process of mapping out how we are going to assist our farmers to take part in the export market. One of the programmes we have put up is where we are designing products that our farmers are bringing up. Yes, the farmers might have great products but then they may not match the international standards for those markets which they would have identified.
We want to assist them to access the markets that they would want to pursue, but the only issue left on our side is the product development of the products that the farmers are going to be exporting out of the country,” he said.
Mr Katayi said Farmhut had assisted farmers expand into value and they were working on maintaining their vision.
“We are seeing this as a huge opportunity because most farmers are getting into value addition itself so there is something that we are greatly helping them with. When all is said and done it’s just a matter of keeping up to the dream because we have faced a lot of challenges. Each and everyday our vision becomes clear and we do hope that as we go on with our projections, we will hit the targets that we had set. We hope that this platform will eventually lead to decrease of prices on the market, improve access to quality local food and also help people put food on the table,” he said.
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