Farm marketing goes hi-tech
Early morning light finds Mr Njuguna, a trader in Githurai Market, on the move. He is laden with produce but he carries it all with a light heart. It is no longer a wait-and-see business; every new message on his phone makes his heart sing — someone wants his produce, and now.
In Emuhaya, Mr Ngonze tends to his tree seedlings with renewed energy — he doesn’t want to be unable to meet an order when it begins to ring on his phone. The Mau Forest will be restored sooner rather than later, he ponders, if that’s where all the seedlings he has sold so far are headed to.
And thousands of miles across the seas, Mr Stephen Gitonga, a resident of the US, will soon be the proud new owner of an eight-acre parcel of land in Moroeo, six kilometres from the main road heading into Nyahururu town. He bought the land from Mr Richard Ndirangu, a second-hand clothes trader in Nairobi’s Gikomba Market.
After unsuccessfully looking for a buyer for his land for more than six months, before finding his US buyer within two weeks, Mr Ndirangu is looking forward to a whole new life.
He and his US buyer are in the last phase of closing the deal. When it is complete, he is starting a new line of business by venturing into the imported clothes market.
Interestingly, the two have never met. Neither has the buyer from Bangkok, Thailand, met his Kenyan macadamia nuts suppliers, or the South African buyer his Kenyan avocados supplier. But all these traders are successfully doing business together, thanks to the mobile phone and the internet.
All they had to do was send an SMS to a four-digit number or get online to receive instant results to their requests and broker their deals.
Credit it to technology that has been causing hitherto impossible things to happen and changed the way we think and do things almost completely.
Take the mobile phone, for instance; it has completely revolutionised the way money is transferred, reducing long queues of people standing to pay bills to a simple tap of the finger on the keypad to enter a code among other numbers.
These new forms of technology have also, unlike in the past eons, not been limited to urban centres but are becoming a fixture in rural areas too — there are 17 million subscribers listed in the four mobile phone service providers in Kenya.
But what is starting to excite many in rural set-ups, especially the farmers, is that they are beginning to get the attention they deserve lately not only from the Government, but also from entrepreneurs and organisations that are striving to include them in technological advances with products and services relevant to them.
They who have often been left behind when it came to technological advances, and who have continued with old farming methods and poor marketing strategies while urban businessmen marched ahead to maximise the use of opportunities such as business news delivered to their phones as it broke, along with foreign exchange rates, and software that allowed them to receive and instantly respond to associates via e-mail. At last, they are enjoying having their needs taken into account.
Among the problems most farmers have had has been marketing of their produce and accessing the most suitable and affordable inputs available. But today, technology is changing all that.
Now, there are websites that give wholesale and retail prices of produce, as well as weather forecasts in various locations around the country via mobile phone texts.
Farm inputs such as seeds and fertilisers, and hiring of equipment such as tractors can also be accessed from a number of local websites via mobile phone.
The Kenya Agricultural Commodities Exchange (KACE) is among private firms that facilitate linkages between sellers and buyers of agricultural commodities. It does this by combining traditional face-to-face interactions with modern communication technologies by using blackboards, SMS, phone-in radio programmes and the internet.
At market information points, farmers can find out the prices of commodities in different markets, and make contact with potential buyers. They can also advertise their own offers and make bids for farm inputs such as fertilisers and seeds.
With a mobile phone, a producer can book SMS alerts on daily prices of a given commodity and can find out who is looking for products like his, and clinch the deal before he leaves his farm.
Kephis, a regulatory agency for quality assurance on agricultural inputs and produce in Kenya, is another such organisation. In order that farmers are assured of planting the right quality and variety of maize on their farms, it has provided an SMS service where farmers are informed of the recommended variety of maize in their division
Heart of the matter
Another website that gets to the heart of the matter by offering farmers an immediate market for their produce and going into beyond-the-border markets they otherwise would not have access to is sokosasa.com.
This is the ‘place’ where the US land buyer met the local land owner, and it is also the site that brought together the macadamia nuts buyer from Bangkok and the South African trader in need of avocados from Kenya.
Sellers and buyers listed on the site include farmers dealing in a variety of products, including potatoes, tomatoes, tree seedling, seeds, fertilisers, tractors and other farm machinery, input providers as well as support services such as electricians and technicians offering installation and maintenance services for farms and farm equipment and machinery.
Sokosasa.com is the brainchild of Mr Charles Njue, an agricultural economist by profession. The site, which has been in the development phase since March this year, was launched this month and has caught on with farmers and those looking to buy and sell agricultural products and services.
Apart from telephone queries, there are over 200 hits a day on the website and more than 100 daily text message queries about the service, he says.
Mr Njue was inspired to start the service to improve the lot of farmers who diligently till their land but are disheartened by their returns, so much so that some literally uproot crops from their land to try others.
“Farmers struggle to get inputs and products like seeds and fertilisers and they plant hoping for good returns but that is not always the case,” he says.
“Their problems,” he adds, “begin during the post-harvest stage when the market is flooded with the same products and sell at a low price, forcing some to stick to farming only one or two crops when they could plant others and make good money by selling it not only in their locality but to other markets that would buy it at a good price, including abroad.”
With this idea, Mr Njue, applying his training and work experience in economics and agricultural marketing, and working together with an IT specialist and marketer, got to setting up the service that would enable farmers access new markets for their products.
The result was the Sokosasa website, which together with a few others, has opened a whole new world to farmers.
Not first but on the edge
While online trading is not a new penomenon around the world or even in Kenya, the website is able to give instant results when a buyer or seller needs to get or sell agricultural products, keeping in mind their limited shelf life, including milk.
“Sokosasa is concentrating on improving the lot of farmers, which would be lifting up the majority of Kenyans, as ours is mainly an agricultural-based economy,” he says.
The firm also offers services of technicians, also available on the site, who supply round-the-clock support in case of broken down farm machinery and equipment.
When it comes to capital-intensive products and those that earn revenue for the Government such as tea, coffee, sugar and pyrethrum, it offers a second window.
“A second window means that it is the State-established marketing agencies and associations that handle the bulk of the regulated products while we come in as sources of information and offer a small, secondary window for farmers to sell their products,” Mr Njue says.
The company also works with farmers’ associations and organisations through hosting them on their website as a source of information about various products like wheat, potatoes and poultry.
Apart from the major crops, Sokosasa deals with other crops like tomatoes, potatoes, kale, spinach, carrots, cabbages and even milk.
“Nairobi residents must love (French) fries,” Mr Njue quips, noting that potatoes are among the most sought after products in Nairobi.
Indeed, this online market is being used by businesses that include fast food joints and institutions like schools and hospitals to find out the best prices at which they can buy food for their customers, students and patients.
Logging in
Buyers and sellers can log onto the system on their mobile phones or via the internet. A one-time registration fee of Sh10 is charged.
Sellers send a message in the format of Reg#Name#Location to 4225 and are registered immediately. They then send another message in the format of Sell#product#price#quantity to the same code and receive a response confirming successful posting of their product. They then wait to receive messages from buyers who want the product.
A seller of a certain product can also view buyers immediately by sending the letter B and they will get buyers looking for the product first in their own location and then in neighbouring areas. To see more buyers, sellers send the letter M to the same code and can keep requesting for as many listed buyers as he wishes. Each message is charged at Sh10.
Buyers need not register but send a message in the format Buy#Name#Product#Location to the 4225 coded to get listings of sellers. They can send the letter M for more sellers at a charge of Sh10 for each message request.
Sending you your greens
Having started off with opening up new markets for farmers, Mr Njue envisions developing the service to include personalised services.
“In the not too distant future, I hope to incorporate a service where we receive personal orders for various products, pack them up and deliver them to homes.
“We will have the advantage of knowing where to get products for the lowest price and hope to pass that on to the consumer, who I believe will appreciate cheaper foods due to the high cost of living. We will also be saving them time they would have spent shopping for these products.”
Bulking up
An emerging need is to bulk up orders, especially for overseas buyers. “Bulking up means getting a product from different farmers and adding it all up to fill one big bulk order that one seller may not have enough of,” he says.
Data provision
Provision of data to various organisations on details such as areas where a certain crop thrives, where the best variety can be found, farming methods and practices and other information that may be useful to input traders, researchers and perhaps Government bodies, is another need the entrepreneur believes the website can ably fulfil.
He hopes to be able to do this along with subscription, where a buyer subscribes to be contacted when a product he has been looking for that was is listed at a later date.
Disclaimer
“Seeing as traders that are doing business with each other do not know each other, discretion is advised,” he cautions. “We cannot verify every product, equipment or parcel of land that crosses our lines,” he explains. “We can only facilitate the coming together of a seller with a product to sell and a buyer who needs what he is selling. We urge both sides to be careful before parting with their money. “
On the whole though, there have been no complaints of dubious transactions or items sold, he is happy to report.
