By George Munene

UjuziKilimo is a Kenyan ag­ritech star­tup that col­lects and ana­lyses ag­ri­cul­tural data geared to­wards en­abling the world's small­holder farm­ers to im­prove their pro­ductiv­ity and re­duce risks through data-driven pre­ci­sion in­sights.

This data provides farm­ers gran­u­lar in­form­a­tion on per­son­al­ised weather pat­terns, mar­ket in­form­a­tion, proper ag­ro­nomic prac­tices, in­sur­ance op­tions, etc. This en­ables them to prac­tice know­ledge-driven ag­ri­cul­ture; mak­ing smarter de­cisions such as what crops to plant and exact amounts of in­puts to apply, and when to har­vest for bet­ter prof­it­ab­il­ity.

Small­holder farm­ers op­er­ate over 70 per cent of Africa's farm­land. Des­pite this, the scope of data ap­plic­a­tion by these 33 mil­lion small­holder farms re­mains largely minus­cule. This is des­pite its ob­vi­ous be­ne­fits in lift­ing farm yields and earn­ings.  

Foun­ded in 2014, some of the ser­vices the com­pany of­fers to farm­ers in­clude:

Soil test­ing  

Soil tests are con­duc­ted through the use of a hand­held sensor to quickly and eas­ily meas­ure the pH levels, mac­ronu­tri­ents (NPK), elec­trical con­duct­iv­ity, and or­ganic con­tent of your soil.

Re­lated News: Ag­ritech star­tup giv­ing mar­ket to small-scale ba­nana, pump­kin, sweet potato, ar­row­root & yam grow­ers

Re­lated News: Kilifi farmer triples cas­sava yield through min­is­ett mul­ti­plic­a­tion tech­nique

Through a monthly sub­scrip­tion, farm­ers get an un­lim­ited num­ber of soil tests, tech­nical sup­port, fer­til­izer and lime ap­plic­a­tion re­com­mend­a­tions. These are re­layed as real-time re­ports and re­com­mend­a­tions through SMS. Farm­ers can also man­age all the data on their Farms­suite ac­count.

Farm­suite 

This is a cloud re­pos­it­ory that stores all your user-spe­cific farm­ing data. Ran­ging from the basic free plan to the Sh1,615/year Super Farmer bou­quet, farm­ers get ser­vices such as un­lim­ited farmer quer­ies through SMS, farm input in­sur­ance, mar­ket data and link­ages, yield es­tim­a­tion, input fin­an­cing, re­ports and ana­lyt­ics, satel­lite-based crop pro­tec­tion re­com­mend­a­tions, di­gital ag­ro­nomy ser­vices, seed and fer­til­iser re­com­mend­a­tions, com­pre­hens­ive macro and micro soil tests and weekly weather up­dates.

Ujuzi Data 

UjuziK­limo pro­cesses mil­lions of data points daily and uses them to cre­ate a spe­cific and highly ac­cur­ate soil and ag­ro­nomic data pool. Lever­aging this ag­ro­nomic data, farm­ers can have bet­ter in­sights and tailored high-level ana­lyt­ics re­ports that re­fine their de­cision-mak­ing pro­cesses.

The com­pany has earned re­cog­ni­tion and ac­col­ades from bod­ies such as the African in­nov­a­tion fund and the royal academy of en­gin­eer­ing. 

In May last year, it re­ceived Sh18 mil­lion worth of tech­nical fund­ing from Wad­son Ven­tures cap­ital firm. 

Re­lated News: App helps farm­ers re­motely man­age & hire tract­ors

“Through the US$ 174,000 worth part­ner­ship com­mit­ment, UjuziKilimo will be able to scale its op­er­a­tions, provid­ing in­tel­li­gent ag­ro­nomy in­form­a­tion to eli­gible small­holder farm­ers af­fil­i­ated to se­lec­ted co-op­er­at­ive so­ci­et­ies, na­tional and county gov­ern­ment agen­cies. Co-op­er­at­ives in­ter­ested in re­ceiv­ing free sup­port should sign up by the UjuziKilimo web­site,” UjuziKilimo founder and CEO Brian Bosire said. 

Ujuzi Kilimo

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