How smart technology is helping African farms to flourish - CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/18/business/smart-farming-af...

How technology is helping African

farms to flourish
By Emma Reynolds
Updated 0841 GMT (1641 HKT) October 18, 2019

Acquahmeyer in Ghana rents out drones to help farmers locate problems in their fields and reduce
pesticide use.

London (CNN Business) — A farmer's fortunes bloom and wither with the seasons. It can be
precarious work, and a bad year can leave fields barren and grain sheds empty -- slim pickings on which
to survive until the next harvest.

More than half of working Africans havejobs in agriculture, but poor infrastructure, inadequate tools and
a lack of investment have left the continent's mostly small-scale farmsstruggling to feeda growing
population. Now, a wave of technological solutions is aiming to help.

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Flying to the rescue

In Ghana, a company called Acquahmeyer rents out drones that help small-scale farmers check the
health of crops and use pesticide only where it is needed, reducing pollution and health risks.

"Ghanaian vegetables were not making it to the EU countries because of pesticide residues on the fruit
and vegetables," says chief operations oHcer Kenneth A. Nelson.

With drones, farmers can identify pests and disease to determine exactly which crops need spraying,
Nelson says. Thanks to the reduced use of chemicals (pesticide use dropped 50 percent in some
cases), it's easier for farmers to meet EU countries' regulatory limits.

Acquahmeyer's drones check leaf color and soil quality, producing reports on the crop's health.

Acquahmeyer is now working with 8,000 farmers, who pay $5 to $10 per acre, about 6 times a year, to
assess their crops and soil and apply pesticides. Each
drone costs $5,000 to $15,000 to build and can
spray 10,000 acres a year.

The company started in June 2018 with two drones and now has 10. It makes an annual profit of
$15,000 to $30,000 per drone, after operations and administration costs. With more than 15 million
hectares (37 million acres) of agricultural land in Ghana, demand for drones is only growing, says Nelson.

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Acquahmeyer's strategy of training locals to pilot

and repair the aircraft is helping fuel interest in the
company and its growth, says Nelson. "In every
farming community we have ambassadors for our
company who are pilots and we are creating
jobs," he says. "We want to make sure that
technology and agriculture becomes an exciting
job."

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Urban farming
are charging phones in Rwanda In Uganda, urban development has been blamed
for eating into agricultural land just as population
growth is boostingdemand for food.

More than 1.6 million people live in the capital, Kampala, where levels of malnutrition are rising,
according to the United Nations. To combat the problem, some city dwellers are growing their own food
and selling it.

In Kampala, Uganda, city dwellers are taught to grow produce on their rooftops.

Diana Nambatya Nsubuga, who has a Ph.D. in public health, opened Kwagala Farm with her husband in
their half-acre backyard in Kampala in 2010. She used her profits to expand and to begin providing
a\ordable training on "urban farming" -- with sessions on growing crops in spaces like tires, pipes,
wooden shelves or apartment rooftops as well as classes on raising poultry.

Nsubuga says she started out with a packet of tomato seeds worth 50 cents. "When we started making
good income, we decided to diversify beyond just tomatoes to other vegetables" like cabbages, carrots,
and spinach, she says.

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The couple bought 10 chickens and two cows.

Disposing of cow dung became a problem, so
they installed a biogas plant to convert it to
electricity for lighting and cooking. Waste from
the biogas plant, called bio slurry, was turned into
organic fertilizer to sell to other urban farmers.

Kwagala Farm now makes a profit of $60,000 a

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according to the latest data from the International Labour Organization.
year, with about 80 percent coming from fertilizer
sales. Nsubuga has invested in machines that
should allow her to increase production from one
ton to 20 to 25 tons a month.
Of the 1,800 people she's trained, half now have
their own urban farms, Nsubuga says. The farms
generate an average of $5,000 a year, she says,
a nice addition to urban farmers' salaries. The
average annual income in Uganda is $660,

Nsubuga aims to train a further 2,000 farmers by the end of 2020.

Weathering the seasons

Esther Usman, from Kaduna State, Northwest Nigeria, has been growing maize since she was 17, when
she dropped out of school to support her family after her father's death.

Two decades on, she was struggling. She often lay awake at night worrying about how to feed and
educate her children. At times, money ran so low that she was forced to sell her crop for a pittance.

"If my farm was a\ected by pests, I could only a\ord to buy a small amount of (pesticide), which was
usually not e\ective," says Usman, now 38. And since maize in storage is often lost to moisture, pests or
fungi, she said storing maize after harvesting was a problem.

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Esther Usman, a farmer in Nigeria, uses a credit network to buy seeds in the dry months and sell her
crops for the best price.

In 2017, Usman joined Babban Gona, a social enterprise that acts as a farmers' cooperative and o\ers
small-scale farmers loans, credit, training and other support. It launched in 2012 with 102 farmers, and
now works with 20,000.

Field oHcers employed by Babban Gona

photograph its farmers' fields. An app reviews the
photos, evaluating the germination rate and
seeing if the soil needs nutrients based on leaf
colors. The field oHcers step in to alert farmers of
any problems they find and advise on possible
solutions. Some farmers have increased their
yields by 50 percent.

Once the maize is harvested, Babban Gona

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stores it in sealed containers and aims to sell it in
bulk at the right time to maximize the farmers'
profits.
The quarterly payments Usman receives from
Babban Gona allowed her to invest in a cow and
a grinding machine, to buy new clothes for her
family, and to build a house.

"[It] helps me to pay for some things during the dry season when there isn't a lot of money around," she
says. "I also don't have to struggle for capital during the next farming season."

Usman says the money is helping to keep her children in school, and she hopes they may one day
become doctors, lawyers or teachers.

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