Omar Fahmy’s family farm in Egypt’s Nile Delta looks like a picture of rural vibe: corn and rice sway in the breeze, lemons, and pomegranates weigh heavily on tree branches, and carefully planted cows and pigeons – the latter a delicacy here in Egypt – rest in their containers. Just outside its gate is an aqueduct carrying water from a branch of the Nile some 25 miles away.
But if the land itself appears prosperous, the farm’s balance sheet is not. For the past 90 years, ever since Omar’s grandfather bought it, the farm has often struggled to make ends meet, leaving the family with a negligible profit margin compared to the labor and expenses required to run it – especially with the associated heat and water shortages. Climate change requires more spending on fertilizers, water pumps, and other devices to keep crops productive.
“In my 80 years working, my dad hasn’t earned much,” he says. And the Fahmy family, who own about 1,500 acres, is much better than their neighbors, many of whom own less than 10 acres and live on about $80 a month.
Technology entrepreneurs in Egypt are turning to agriculture
Fahmy’s solution was to design a smartphone app that helps farmers get better prices for their crops by grouping them with their neighbors. And he’s not the only one with this idea: As climate change increasingly affects Egyptian farmers, a growing number of local tech startups are launching smartphone-based services to help them manage unpredictable weather and reap more profits from their dwindling crops.
Egypt hosts the second largest market for startups on the African continent after Nigeria, attracting $446 million in venture capital in 2021, according to the industry magazine. disrupt Africa. And although agriculture-related applications account for less than 2% of this funding, looming threats to climate change and food insecurity — as well as the hype surrounding the COP27 climate summit, which Egypt will host in November — are attracting more investors, Doaa said. Nassef Director A Nile University Startup Incubator.
“The agricultural technology sector has become a very promising sector to invest in,” she said. “There are a lot of problems that farmers face here that you can easily address with technology.”
Uber for warehouses and trucks
After graduating from college, Fahmy worked for several years in Cairo for a private investment firm. He came to see the problem facing farmers in the delta — a 7,700-square-mile fertile plot of land between Cairo and Alexandria and home to some 40 million people, most of whom work in agriculture or related trade — as essentially a financial planning problem. , rather than environmental degradation. In other words, adaptation to climate change is possible, but only if farmers are able to get a better yield from their crop.
Fahmy’s solution is an app called Al Shouna, which was launched in June for a select group of traders in its region and has ambitions to expand all over Egypt. Through the app, smallholder farmers can find space for their crops of grains and beans in a regional bulk storage and processing warehouse called Shona, where they are sold to distributors or exporters. Space in Shona is usually too expensive for smallholder farmers, who instead sell their crops via door-to-door dealers offering below-market prices, buy it or leave it. By pooling small crops across the barn, Fahmy could have better production rates and could pay farmers at least 6% above what they would otherwise earn.
Hussein Al-Sharnoubi takes a similar approach to trucking. His startup, Wasel, which is still under development, aims to connect farmers with truck drivers to collect crops and bring them to market. As with Shona, space on large trucks is usually too expensive for small farmers. Pooling deliveries from multiple farmers lowers costs for farmers and truck drivers.
Other Egyptian startups in the field of agricultural technology, such as Mozari 3 And the FreshSource, offer to connect farmers directly with end buyers (a factory or grocery store, for example), so farmers can avoid the guesswork and poor margins that come from dealing with middlemen. Mozare3 also provides digital financial record keeping services and connects farmers with financial institutions for loans.
Al-Sharnoubi says that mobile technology allows all of these startups to reach large enough numbers of farmers (or independent drivers, Shona owners, crop processors, and players in Egypt’s agricultural economy) to find new efficiencies in the supply chain.
“Climate change has changed all the rules,” he said. “But at this point, even the poorest farmers are connected to smartphones. If they tell me they are not good at using technology, I will just ask them if they have Facebook, and of course all of them do.”
Egypt’s farmers get a space look
Other startups are building tools to make farms more productive and resilient. 21 farms And the automaticFor example, selling web-enabled equipment that farmers can use to automate irrigation and monitor soil health. For Karim Amer, the biggest problem with high-tech devices is that they can’t be afforded by smallholders. So Aamir, an artificial intelligence engineer, is building an app called VAIS It is based on images from public and private satellites and can provide accurate smartphone readings on individual small farms.
Satellite data can reveal outbreaks of insects and diseases and negative reactions by plants to weather conditions before the grower detects them, allowing time for early intervention. This kind of information, he said, will become more important as more Egyptian farmers leave the densely populated inner delta with millions of acres of desert land that the government seeks to develop using groundwater irrigation. Mangoes, olives, and other high-value tree crops can thrive in this sandy soil, but they are also extremely vulnerable to droughts and heat waves if farmers aren’t careful.
“We are on the verge of having a huge number of acres without enough support,” he said. “With the scale of the problems we face here, there is a huge need for technologies that can help farmers adapt.”
It’s not just banks, venture capitalists and programmers who see a huge opportunity in agricultural technology: Mostafa Hasanen, CEO of Plug & Grow, which makes hydro-efficient hydroponics equipment, said: Farmers themselves are demanding solutions. He said finding clients is getting easier and easier.
“Two years ago, no one really understood what agricultural technology required and what the potential was,” he said. “Right now, we’re really seeing a change.”
Hassanen says farmers in Egypt have an unfair reputation for stubbornly sticking to outdated practices. In fact, he says, many are constantly looking for new ideas — but with the risk of failure so high, the risk can be avoided. If Egypt’s at-risk farmland is to gain a digital lifeline, it’s up to this first crop of startups to prove they can succeed.
“We need to build trust to change the culture,” Fahmy says.
This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
Originally published at San Jose News Bulletin
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