Startup FARMA Solutions are introducing a way for farmers to track their agricultural inputs and output activity in real-time. They hope the system can lead to more accountability and increase the efficiency of agricultural processes.
Who are FARMA Solutions
The startup is a “technology company focused on developing agricultural technology solutions that harness resources to develop competitive, scalable and efficient agriculture value chains.”
They have created the Farmer Resource Management System (FRMS) a tool which is built to address various issues affecting farmers and in a bid to improve overall quality of produce and efficiency.
In their own words:
The FRMS solution enables governments, donors and their stakeholders to rapidly deploy a mPOS delivering Inventory Management, KYC, Performance monitoring and revenue collection solution utilising field officers or similar personnel within local communities.
Why did they create FRMS
They believe that the government, NGOs and private sector contract farmers have no real-time visibility if their inputs and outputs. This, in turn, means they cannot make timely adjustments if something goes wrong during the farming process.
Secondly, due to the current lack of a central database for farmers, it has been easy for farmers to be victims of fraud and losses within the agriculture value chain. These losses have created a strain on resource allocation thus adversely affecting ROI (return on investment) for all stakeholders involved.
The inefficient manner in which inventory is distributed and managed makes it hard for farmers to measure their results on a micro-level. This also leads to uneven allocation of resources and input distribution which further reduces efficiency in the farming process.
Desired effect…
According to FARMA Solutions, FRMS enables all involved parties to have a real-time view of input inventory, allocation and output performance enabling timely policy change and adjustment.
FARMA Solutions believe their system will increase agricultural productivity, improve the planning capacity of farmers and create a central database which will help stakeholders to allocate resources efficiently.
FRMS field officers use mPOS(mobile Point Of Sale) machines and this is to enable more timely, secure registration and KYC(Know Your Customer) data collection of all farmers registered under a designated program.
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