Agritech community
Technology that pays off at the farm gate.
Most farms are smallholdings, phones are basic, and a season’s income turns on rain, prices and a buyer turning up. Tools that work here reach farmers by SMS, USSD and extension officers, not dashboards.
Open to every member. Join now and help shape what it builds next.
What we work on
Four problems define this community’s work right now. Every sprint, review and essay here comes back to one of them.
Yield and price forecasting
Models that tell a farmer or an aggregator what to plant, when to sell and what it is likely to fetch.
Remote sensing
Satellite and drone pipelines that flag crop stress early enough to act on.
Market access
Linking smallholders to buyers, inputs and credit, and cutting what is lost between the field and the market.
Last-mile delivery of advice
Getting the right advice to farmers in their language, on the phone they already own.
Questions we are working through
No one has settled these yet. They come up in every sprint, and members argue them out in essays and reviews.
- How do you make a yield forecast useful to a farmer who will never open an app?
- Who should own the data a farmer generates, and how do they benefit from it?
- How do you price advice so it pays for itself within one season?
Our impact
- Systems in Agritech we have built and shipped
- 2
Shipped in Agritech
- MazaoAgri Intelligence · Tanzania · 2023
Crop-yield forecasting and market-price advisory, delivered as a white-label platform and API.
14k farmers served6 crops modelled - ShambaRemote Sensing · Zambia · 2023
Satellite and drone imagery pipelines that flag crop stress early, delivered to agronomists in-field.
11% yield uplift40k ha monitored
From the field
No essays here yet. Members write about what actually happens on the ground, and every essay is edited before it is published. Apply to write
Your first build
New members pick one of these for their first month. Each is small enough to finish and real enough to show an employer or an investor.
An SMS price alert
Send farmers the day's prices for their crop at nearby markets, in their language, by SMS.
- SMS gateway
- Data pipelines
- Localisation
A crop-stress map
Turn free satellite imagery into a weekly map that shows an agronomist which fields to visit first.
- Remote sensing
- Python
- GIS
An aggregator's ledger
Track what each farmer delivered, its grade and what they are owed, and pay them by mobile money.
- Web app
- Payments
- Offline
Words you will hear
New here? These come up in your first week. Plain meanings, no jargon.
- Smallholder
- A farmer working a small plot, often under two hectares, mostly with family labour.
- Aggregator
- A buyer who collects produce from many small farmers and sells it on in bulk.
- Extension officer
- A field advisor who visits farmers to share better practices.
- NDVI
- A measure, taken from satellite images, of how green and healthy vegetation is.
Who you will meet
- ML and geospatial engineers
- Agronomists and extension officers
- Founders in input supply, aggregation and agri-finance
- Researchers in food systems
How the community runs
- Every week
Build sprint
Bring a real problem from your work in the sector. Leave with progress, reviewed by people who have shipped the same thing.
- Every week
Office hours
Drop in with a model that will not converge, a regulator question or a hiring decision. Practitioners answer.
- Every month
Demo day
Members show working systems to the community, mentors and invited investors. Demos, not decks.
The team behind it
Lead the Agritech community
We are looking for experienced practitioners to lead this community: host one session a month, review members’ work and shape what it builds next.
Tell us about your workJoin the Agritech community
One payment of $15 makes you a member for life: every community, its sprints, reviews and events. No subscription.