 All right, good morning once again. Welcome back. All right, welcome back. Visit Still Why in the Morning. My good name is Brian Sokko. You can find me at Brian Sokko 101 on all our social media platforms. Oh, that's mine. I'd like to refer to each other for the station and for the program's hashtag is Why in the Morning. That's where you can find us. And in this second part of the show, we are going to talk about some of the possible, or rather just exactly agritech solutions. What exactly does it take to be in that space? And especially at a day and age where technology is taking over the world by storm. And why is it so necessary to have this conversation right now? But before we get too far and also before I introduce my guest, just to bring a little bit to cover based on that, there's an interesting report here by Business in South Africa that says Kenya is the top destination for agritech investment in Africa, that is according to FinTech, that says one major fact that's responsible for this is the need to solve the country's food security challenges. And then they've outlined an excerpt that says between 2019 and 2022, that is last year, Kenya's leading agritech startups rose up to around 80 million, that is I don't want to mention the exact company there, but they said there are two factors responsible for this. The first which I mentioned is how important agritech is in East Africa and also to our economy as well, and the endless desire to profile solution to Kenya's food security challenges that has helped to attract investments as well. And then they're also pointing out that there's possible opportunities for the youth, especially right now, because initially how agritech is marketed in our country is not so attractive, but then how can we make it attractive so that young people or young minds or millennials and generations these can find it attractive and more appealing. And joining us live in the studio to talk about this topic is Kizito Diambohi, he is the CEO of Agribora Hill. Tell us what Agribora is bringing on the table and plus how he found himself there. Good morning to you. Good morning. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Just a brief story about how you found yourself in Agribora. First of all, my background is not in agriculture. I'm an electrical engineer by profession and it is more of a necessity that led me into agriculture and really a drive to go into entrepreneurship. So I ended up in agriculture because while I was studying I was supporting my family back home and one thing led to the other where you realize I can do more than just send money to help the family do agricultural production. I can actually look at how I can bring in the IT knowledge that I had gained during my studies to help in agriculture. And so I started my first company back in 2014, KEDO Solutions, working with smallholder farmers, soybean farmers and that grew up to 2018 where I transitioned from just working with smallholder farmers in production to looking at how technology can be used to help them improve productivity. So I closed down the first company and started the second company that's now Agribora, which I founded outside of the country because technology has already matured in other countries especially in Europe where I started. So I started my company in Germany and then came to Kenya back in 2019 to now operationalize it. But also, reading from your bio, you've worked with so many, let's say, startup agritech firms and the businesses as well. Talk about it and how it has enabled you to get prepared into this space. I think because agriculture, from the very first day, we all need agriculture to survive and there is a lot of work that I have done both at a personal level, looking at how I can work with smallholder farmers with my first company but also during that process how I can work with other organizations and other companies to bring out the best in agriculture. And actually the best on agriculture is very simple, increase productivity and improve profitability. So how do you make that work for smallholder farmers? So when you look at agriculture, you have the producer organizations, you have across the value chain, not just the smallholder farmer but the plowing service providers, the input providers, you have the off-takers, the aggregators, the agri processors. So across this value chain you realize that you have a lot of engagement opportunities which can leverage on one, everything that the farmer is making, but it requires technology to help it become more efficient and actually more scalable. Yeah. Now I had mentioned initially how agriculture is presented, even in adverts. It's not as the most beautiful advert ever you ever watch anywhere in digital. How can we make it so appealing and so easy for especially the generation Zs now or millennials so that once they see an agriculture advertisement, even a job itself, a lot of people wouldn't want to go down that direction because they think it's more handy, it's more dirty, but like you mentioned, it seems like it's one of the mostly creative spaces ever. And even as the adage goes, in our country we say agriculture is the backbone of our country. And like you said, to increase the value chain, food production and profitability are the main co-ingredients. How can we make it so appealing to the ambiance? So when I started Agribora, the main goal was to make small holder farmers more visible, more accessible, and more bankable. And so those are the three main pillars of the work that we do and I'll explain why the youth have actually very sweet spot in that because what we try to do is to balance human touch and technology. Now we all remember agriculture the days of our grandparents where it was about taking a gembe and going to the field and working so hard until you escape the sun and then you come back in the afternoon. Was it a gembe or a whore? Or a whore, you know. All this, let me say, still traditional ways of producing or for crop production. Today, if you look at why the youth should engage in agriculture, it's not because you want them to also get a whore and go to the field. The Africa Development Agenda 2063 foresees that we want to do away with the hand whore by 2025. That is what the Africa Union was hoping to do. We are now already in 2023 and we are yet to achieve that. So how do we make it work for the youth? Well, it is looking at the job opportunities that are in the agriculture sector that not necessarily require you to go and toil the hard soil. It's looking at how you can leverage on technology. Let's talk about the different stages of crop production. Just from, I need to know the quality of my soil so that I can be able to determine which crop to plant and which fertilizer to use. So what do you need to do? You need to do soil testing. Back in the day, you would carry a soil test, send it to one of the government offices. It takes a month to come back if at all it does. Today you can have a sensor gadget which can be able to measure your soil within five minutes. And so the opportunity that you have is for you to equip somebody, a youth for example, with this device which is not very expensive and they can be able to move through the county or at the world level and actually provide these services. So it's actually becoming more about service provision to the agriculture sector and not now the youth being the ones to toil the land. And at the end of the day with the mechanization that is coming in, you actually have smaller tractors and smaller planting machinery which then require you to use less of human labor and actually more of these technologies. And so if you look at the opportunities for youth, it is in the service provision. It is in how they can fit into the value chain and provide this value to farmers and then of course the end market. Right. You mentioned soil testing, which I believe that's when soil science comes in. And now you're coming in as an expert now, especially for you. But then there are so many components in there that includes like agri-tech, agri-fintech. Do you mind just sharing some of the possible opportunities in there before we get to how can we commercialize it so that anyone else who is in the interiors can even become part of it? Yeah, so agri-tech as a word is quite broad. So if you look at all the technologies and what does agri-tech basically means? It means how do you solve agricultural challenges with technology? It's that way. It's not the other way around. It's not what cool things can I do with technology and bring it into agriculture because there's also a lot of that in the market. So what are the problems in the agriculture space that would require technology to solve? Now let's talk about production because production is the first level. Decision making about what to grow. Talk about crop suitability. We are looking at climate change. We're looking at the different ecological zones in the country. So why should I grow sugarcane in western Kenya and not in eastern Kenya? So that you have a very good reason for advising a farmer what to try, right? So these decisions already at that point of just deciding what to grow, you have crop suitability where you have technologies such as data science, analytics which help you to analyze climate change and variance, soil suitability and all that. Then once you've made a decision about what you'd want to grow based on the suitability of that field you then look at what can I then grow in this particular field and then now you're talking about soil testing as I have mentioned to help you to decide which do you have enough organic matter? Do you need fertilizer? We're talking about subsidy schemes. Where do you provide the subsidy? It's not a blanket cover for all that you say as an organization or as a government we give each farmer two bags of DAP and one bag of CAN. It's not that simple, right? So technology can help us solve that problem and we have decided we have already known what the soil looks like we know which seed and fertilizer to use look at seed multiplication which seed to use we are no longer using the seeds we used in the 80s, in the 90s technology has helped us to be able to produce more drought resistant crops more early maturing crops we're talking about genetic modification which is also a big topic in the society at the moment so all this is technology and where you can look at bioscience and how that affects agriculture so we have decided what to grow I've talked about machinery that you don't need to buy yourself a big combine harvester and a big tractor to actually plow your one acre piece of land you also no longer need to depend on the cow to actually pull an oxen or something so those are some of the opportunities already just before you even put your seeds into the soil now once the seeds are in the soil and you have prayed and you probably want or you want to actually decide when to plant you're looking at the weather predictability is very different right now we no longer plant on the 15th of March and harvest at the end of June as we have been doing earlier on so weather predictions looking at when is the onset of rains it is no longer very predictable but that is now where science is coming in the metallurgists are really working hard we have more data points at the moment so weather stations we're talking about IoT devices that can be put out to be able to identify the right soil moisture conditions to enable you to actually start planting so there we're talking about weather stations drone imageries that can actually be able to help you assess what the level of soil moisture is and then are you able to plant or not and once you've been able to plant most of us think we just need to start praying to God and wait for three months and see what happens but there's just so much you can do at that point if I'm not taking too much time because once the seeds are in the soil and yes we should pray and hope for a bounty harvest we can actually start tracking crop development satellites which are out in space can detect pests and diseases two weeks earlier than the naked eye which means if you wait to check if you have a pest or a disease on your field you might be too late but if you depend on such technologies that can actually analyze the chlorophyll matter that can analyze the crop and can actually help you detect hey look out for this for this problem you can be able to then invest in this technology so you're looking at all these different ways where technology comes in talking about machine learning data science, IoT drone technologies which can all come in and of course when you look at the market side you can now look at how applications can be used to help farmers link to markets and so on you've given quite a broad explanation but before we get back to that when you look at the rate of rural to urban area migration especially in this day and age a lot of people prefer to go and work in an office because people are now studied and informed somebody would prefer to go and get a job as a TV producer as a finance accountant somewhere whatever but then who are the people remaining in these areas that can practice this agriculture we're talking about yet we're here talking about some of the possible solutions bringing in technology it's a time where we should now tell people to like it's now time to go back to where you come from go back to your village and now start practicing agriculture because at this point yes even when we talk about the cost of living I remember the president has constantly been vocal saying what do I really call mashambo or lima instead of going to the mandamana and they give fertilizer subsidies but at what point should we start having this conversation that yes it's okay to be in the urban areas at least go and start practicing agriculture the funny thing is we all live that hope that there's a better tomorrow and so anybody who lives the rural area trying to look for better perspectives in the urban areas they're just trying to see a brighter future for themselves we see these escalate until some people decide to leave their countries going migration outside of their countries of origin to other countries sometimes to other continents but at the end of the day when you look at how many graduates are languishing are in the cities yes but they do have a degree in the pocket but are doing jobs that do not actually require degree to do or not even what they studied for what they studied for you did engineering but you're actually working in a restaurant you were supposed to be a teacher and now you are doing something that is completely different because you're just not getting these opportunities so one it's to realize that there is no that greener pastures dream of saying just move to the urban areas and you will get the job because those jobs are yet to exist and we see that when we advertise for job opportunities the number of people that apply for just one single position it's ridiculous right it's really ridiculous and so how do we convince the youth because it's really a battle of convincing people to look at the opportunities that are in the rural area and I think it's not dangling the carrot of technology before them and saying hey you can be a superstar with technology go back and use it in your farm it's looking at what is the job opportunity and what is the return on investment for you so if you are to today in buying a thresher for example okay maybe you can fabricate that here locally for maybe 200,000, 300,000 shillings and what do you do with it right you don't want to sit at home and look at it you want to get jobs and that is now where digital serving this helps you to say hey there is this application where farmers can be able to request for this and it's not a mobile application that needs you know internet it can also be used via usst so that because your average farmer our average farmer on our platform and we have over 80,000 at the moment is around 55 years old that's our average farmer and so our question every day is if that is the farmer we are serving right at what point does the youth come in right and we say so that average farmer at 55 years needs a very very simple technology probably ussd based or ivr sms for them to do something that is actually very very difficult now technology if you really want to know a sophisticated technology you see the solutions that are simplest the one that they just tell you press a button and something happens that is the most complicated technology because what happens under the hood is really fascinating right so getting a farmer to just request a thresher via sms or ussd is really complicated because that youth will now get it on a mobile application and then they can service that activity and the question is how many of these farmers do you require for you to actually make a decent income out of it so I think it is exposing the opportunities and talking more from the numbers perspective how much do you stand to make in a month in a season so you've heard about this gig opportunities that we talk about in urban areas we say yeah gig opportunities in writing texts and reviewing some material but gig opportunities in agriculture is actually where you can create a lot of employment because there is a lot of work just from the day I've mentioned you need to decide what to plant and the day you're taking your crop to the final off-taker there are a number of opportunities for youth and it cannot be done by one person and you need a bit of investment but also looking at what is the return on investment so I think that's the way to go we just like the main goal like if I do this for how am I profiting getting profit that's at the end of the day you know what what am I left with at the end of the day and so the model that we have developed as Agribora is we realize that you know we have all these over 5 million smallholder farmers across Kenya and technology will never reach these farmers technology might bring the information to them or make it easier for them to access this information but there is no day our technology will go and visit them so there is always the need to have this human touch and so we have this model that we call the Agri Hub so all these last mile service providers in the villages in the rural areas that are working with farmers we are equipping them with the right technology to make their work easier so we quantify our success not just by the number of farmers we have reached but by the number of job opportunities we are creating for businesses to actually reach their farmers and that way you can actually see oh I have 5 youth who have been just picking geo-coordinates or sending you know doing springs providing spring services to farmers and they have earned this amount just this week so my question is can I give them another engagement next week and the answer is yes why because you have the right technology to actually pinpoint what a farmer is doing at what time and who may require your services right true interesting you'll also talk about later on how AgriTech can be used to solve some of this global warming climate change problems but now let's get back to the interior of course when you look closely especially in the interiors you realize there's something I know you understand about crop rotation but then there's a need to break that cycle instead of planting maize each and every year try find another alternative crop to plant but you realize that in most of those interiors they're like it's only maize or sugar can to increase our food productivity what are some other possible let's say alternatives especially in the interiors that maybe we'll not even get this conversation but just in case somebody lands here they can tap into that and help them yeah I think crop diversification is one of the critical points that need to be addressed if we are to become food secure as a country and equally as a continent now the reason why we grow maize is it's simple it's what our parents and our grandparents and great-grandparents have done so it's tradition you know it works if I can't sell it I'll eat it so it's very simple and it is easy for us to basically work with it and pray and hope that it comes out it is more challenging to actually decide to move into a high value chain crop why because one it requires higher investment there is more risk to eat why because you have the risk of pest and disease that you are not aware of you have the risk of not actually identifying the market you have the risk of post harvest handling and losses that come in with maize you know you are able to sort of we are all risk averse in a way and so a small holder farmer is the most risk averse person that will say okay worst case scenario I will eat this and my children will not go to bed hungry and if I have anything left I will then try and sell it out there but how do we expose the opportunities in higher high value chain crops in a structured ecosystem because you see every time we talk about farming we talk about maize on the one hand because it is you know it's the main crop and the main thing but apart from that we talk about tea we talk about coffee we talk about sugarcane all the woos in western Kenya with the sugar companies and then we look at the tea subsidies and coffee that is what we talk about most of the time we talk in the agriculture space we live out so many other things that are high value talk about Irish potatoes take about tomatoes talk about you know herbs and spices talk about soybean all these crops that could actually have a better fetch higher value so I think one of the things at that point in how we can be able to improve diversification is to actually support support opportunities for farmers to come and learn about these new ventures but give them opportunities to actually grow which means one you need to be able to help them access the finance and then the information to grow these crops because moving away from maize and doing something else like sunflower for example is expensive setting up a greenhouse is expensive and so while you might want farmers to go into new crops there is that fear and that first move of fear there for them so also sometimes the soil you are not sure how the soil will respond yes in case you don't have the knowledge about soil science or done soil testing and that is now where technology comes in where you just do crop you know you have this crop suitability maps Karl Rohr from the Ministry of Agriculture has developed a very extensive crop suitability map for the country where you can pick your GPS location and it basically suggests to given your conditions given the climate at this point given the soil information and did you know that from satellite data we can actually know the composition of soil at a 30 meter resolution so you do not need to go and test your soil already at that point to actually know what to grow or take it to some lab in the gallery already right now we can tell you what is the composition of soil in Tarakanithi and so we know this soil is good for this just from satellite data and so all this is technology that has been developing where you can actually talk to the county governments because now agriculture is also in a way a devolved activity you can talk to the county governments and advise the county governments to focus on specific crops that are not maize that is why you see you know you have a lot of vaccados coming from this area coffee from another area which is good right so you can be able to actually have a policy to enable you grow specific industries in your region so that you can focus on doing sorghum or sunflower in those areas that commercially okay I want us to take a very short break but when you come back you'll be expounding more on that as well as how is the government you know plugging in to ensure that this conversation continues to sink and sink further to the interior so we'll be back after a short break on the hashtag why in the mornings to go around