Recently updated on May 17th, 2019 at 02:59 pm
Serial entrepreneur and digital expert, Onyeka Akumah has launched Farmcrowdy, which is Nigeria’s first digital agriculture platform that offers Nigerians a new way to participate in agriculture using their online technology.
Nigerians around the world can partner with Farmcrowdy to own a minimum farm space by committing an agreed sum to starting and completing a farming cycle.
In doing so, the farm partner is able to sponsor a farmer in one farming cycle thereby empowering the farmer, expanding their farm operations, participating in the drive to end food scarcity and making use of 50 million hectares of arable farm land in Nigeria that is currently under-utilized according to the World Bank.
The Farmcrowdy.com platform allows Farms Partners to sponsor any farm of their choice including Maize Farms, Poultry (Broiler) Farms, Cassava Farms and Tomato Farms. The Farm Partners then gets bi-weekly updates about their farm progress including pictures and videos from the farmers. Also, Farm Partners can visit their farms if they wish to at any point in time to learn about the farmer they’ve partnered with and the farm products they are working on.
According to Onyeka Akumah – CEO and founder:
“The company has acquired over 1,000 hectares of farmland in the South-Western part of Nigeria especially in Oyo and Ogun states as we launch this initiative. With one farmer working on one hectare per season, this means that we have provided a platform to engage a minimum of 1,000 farmers with Farmcrowdy. Our goal is to secure 10,000 hectares around the eastern parts of Nigeria and the LAKAJI Corridor in other to make use of Dams and Irrigation facilities in these areas.”
He further explained that the launch of Farmcrowdy’s website and platform was brought forth out of a need to engage Nigerians especially youths in agriculture, empower small-scale farmers and increase food production to keep up with the growing Nigerian population.
Asked about Farmcrowdy’s knowledge in agriculture, Onyeka Akumah said that apart from being in to farming in the past one year, he has partnered with co-founder and COO, Africanfarmer Mogaji who is bringing on board over 19 years of livestock and crop production experience into the company.
Mr. Africanfarmer Mogaji is well known in the agriculture space. Africanfarmer Mogaji before FarmCrowdy, was the CEO of X-Ray Farms Consulting – a new generation agricultural expert, coach and consultant with over 19 years of experience both in the livestock and crop production industry within and outside Nigeria.