From Challenge to Opportunity: Martin's journey with Amini's Geospatial data
Meet Martin, a smallholder farmer in Nyeri in Kenya. As a smallholder, Martin farms for two reasons. First is to provide food for his family, and second is to sell the surplus to help him cater for his other needs.
Recently, Martin realized that his Maize yield had been decreasing after each season. In 2023, he noted that there was a part of his farm that did not perform as well as expected. He solely relied on his experience to try and mitigate the situation. Even if he has a solution to some of the issues affecting his farm, like pests and diseases, he cannot afford to buy the necessary products to apply to his farm at that time of the year. Martin also lamented that the weather patterns have been changing a lot in the recently, and that creates a lot of uncertainty in his farming journey.
As Amini, we want to provide solutions to the problems farmers like Martin are facing. First, we have created a Crop Monitoring platform. This platform monitors the farms from the time that they are planted and with the use of Time Series Analysis using satellite imagery, we can understand what is happening to farmers farms and send them customized recommendations through affordable and widely used channels like Text Messages.
In this case we paid a personal visit to Mr Martin in Nyeri to show him what our analysis can do. We showed Martin how his farm has been performing since the start of the season and the parts of his farm that were not doing well and he was really appalled. We were also able to show him his planting date and predict his ideal harvest date. We noted the challenge at one end of his farm and proposed solutions including the shading of the area that could help alleviate the challenge he was facing with lower yields in that section of the farm.
With our deep tech and geospatial analysis, we have created a platform where farmers like Martin and many others can tap to and make informed decisions when it comes to farming, which will in the end help them increase yields and consequently their incomes.
As a next step, we hope to use our data and models such as our Yield Indices to unlock financing to farmers like Martin for the crucial inputs he needs to sustainably increase production, while simultaneously encouraging Good Agricultural Practices.
