It’s easy to assume that Fefifo is just another urban-farming-going-digital company on the surface. But dig deeper and you will understand why their approach to farming is different –if not revolutionary.

The Malaysia-based agritech startup brings in the concept of coworking space into farming. They called it co-farming, where aspiring smallholder farmers can come and rent a space to grow ready-to-buy crops and find buyers to buy the crops.

The idea of the company came when the two co-founders, Kelveen Soh and Chris Fond, were inspired by a mutual childhood friend who is a smallholder farmer. The friend started a two-acre farm three-and-a-half years ago, but still encounters many problems in ensuring the farm lives up to its standard in operation and profit.

“We realised that by focussing on solving our friend’s problem, we actually solve the smallholder farmers’ problems in general,” says Fong. So, the company was officially established a year ago in Malaysia.

The troubles with farming

After a thorough study of the problems encountered by their friend, the founders concluded that the key problems faced by smallholder farmers are along the lines of spending tons of money on farming infrastructures and securing networks of regular buyers.

Fong adds that smallholder farmers often still find it hard to grow consistently as they lack access to reliable and consistent sources of knowledge. Moreover, the number of information that they can get their hands on are also limited, such as where and how to market their harvest.

There are also issues with the management and administration side of farming itself. Things such as financials and inventory ultimately become a hiccup in smallholder farm operations.

“We aim to take over all of these problems that smallholder farmers face, so they can focus on one thing that matters: growing their farms,” says Fong.

Not to be mistaken with urban farming

During the conversation with e27, Soh and Fong highlight the fact that they are not an urban farming company.

“We provide real farming spaces that are all ready to use,” says Soh.

“What we do is digitising the process of the farm operation, making sure the smallholder farmers get immediate access not only to the farming infrastructure but also to guaranteed markets and use a standardised digital growing protocol on Fefifo’s platform,” Fong adds.

In short, Fefifo takes away all the business formality side of farming, to give agropreneurs -the term they use to describe aspiring farmers- everything they need to start in the co-farming space. Joining Fefifo’s community, daily hassles such as expensive greenhouse and fertigation systems are all taken care of.

“We use the term co-farming because it’s much like joining a coworking space. Interested agropreneurs must first register and our team will have a look at the application. Once accepted to join the co-farming community, the agropreneur will pay up three month-deposit rent for a farm space and start immediately with growing crops, all curated by Fefifo,” says Fong.

What Fefifo provides in return is pre-harvest financial support, which is a loan that can jumpstart the agropreneur in running the farm. The agropreneur will then receive a one-week training to familiarise themselves with digital protocol to run the farm.

As proper commercial farm sources, Fefifo’s proprietary platform Digital Distributed
Farms Network (DDFN) allows for a digitalised and standardised crop financial models and crop growing, with SOPs of the entire seed-to-sale process. The digital workflow platform is all AI-empowered to help farmers control, manage, and grow more with less.

Also Read: These are the 5 game-changers in Indonesia’s agritech sector

“We focus on helping agropreneurs in monitoring the farm and making sure that it’s profitable with a guaranteed market. We welcome people who want to start right away, with or without a background in farming, without access to hiring CFO or COO for the farm, but want to learn anyway and make a steady income out of it,” Soh points out.

Soh notes that the agropreneur joining co-farming with Fefifo will be business owners themselves, with US$12,000 – 16,000 per year income.

The company targets fresh graduates and smallholder farmers as well as contract farming buyers. The last group is benefited by Fefifo’s regularly available supplies of crops.

According to Soh, there are many potential parties that can be contract buyers in the future, such as chilli sauce producers and grocers in Malaysia.

Going back to its roots in Malaysia, Fefifo also works with the local community in rural areas, villages, and nearby townships.

Confidence during crisis

When asked whether or not the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed down their progress, the answer is a yes for the startup.

“We’re forced to push back on the timeline, although there’s not much change in operation,” says Soh.

“If anything, COVID-19 made us relook at how to better design our systems, and how well we would stand up to in an event of a future pandemic. As long as we put a stronger scenario in a farm space and prepare from what we learned, we are optimistic that we can weather future pandemic,” he continues.

Fefifo says that having to take a second look at what they have been doing enforces the confidence in what they are doing.

“There’s a spike of visitors into our site during the pandemic, and it helps boost the confidence in this sector. Seeing the government trying really hard to keep supply chains open really propels people to open their eyes in the opportunity lies in this business model,” Fong points out.

What comes next

In August, Fefifo plans to start operating its pilot farm in Negeri Sembilan. So far, they have three agropreneurs ready to start in the first batch of five acres land, which consists of one farmer for two acres of chilli farm, and two other farmers each tending to one acre of greenhouse rockmelon crop.

Also Read: These 5 Vietnam-based agritech startups are tackling the country’s fragmented farming sector

Fong points out that while there are many new innovations meant to help smallholders farmers, such AI, vertical farming, and drones, they are still “very small and hard to work with.”

“All these wonderful things [such as] micro biotech, robots … It’s all promising for the future of farming. We play a critical role in bridging these technologies to smallholder farmers, to filter and pick out the techs, to structure the policies, and accommodate the curation that smallholder farmers can use,” he details.

Fefifo is optimistic that their 10-year plan will work out.

“Within two years, we want to get to 50 acres of land within the Malaysia market, then Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Our plan features an expansion of 25 acres each year, as we’re optimistic that it can be scaled quickly and suitable to replicate for Southeast Asia,” the co-founders said.

In the past, Fefifo has raised S$950,000 (US$682,000) from angel and corporate investors and has recently started its equity crowdfunding campaign via Ata Plus.

The development that’s already in the pipeline will get the platform starting on big data while doing research with universities in Malaysia, as well as augmented reality and machine learning to close the financial gaps between farmers. It will help them get loans with AI-based credit models, forecast problems, and assess credit risk.

The platform will also provide access to profit and loss data recorded.

“There’s no more going to the bank, where these smallholder farmers financial histories are usually required. In their case, not many smallholder farmers can provide that, and hopefully in the future, with our platform they can provide the digital record of it,” says Soh.

–

Image Credit: Fefifo

The post How Fefifo aims to make farming cool again for the younger generation appeared first on e27.