One of the keystone insights we have garnered working with farmers and buyers in the horticultural sector is that there is a buyer for every grade of produce. In this article I would like to outline why grading matters and how you as a grower can use it to maximise your revenue by selling more of what you grow.
A tool to help farmers and buyers reliably measure color and size of fresh produce.
In our efforts to get a deep understanding of the fresh produce value chain, and how we can optimise it with our innovation, we engage with buyers just as much as we engage with farmers. And as much as farmers share the experiences and challenges they face with markets, we have also gained many important insights about what buyers are looking for and what matters to them.
Mixed Vegetable Farming as a Strategy for Smallholder Farmers*.
As many of you know, in addition to being a Co-Founder of Kuronga, the journey of building this platform inspired my wife and I to get into farming ourselves. In our second year of farming, we have adopted a mixed farming strategy, focusing on a mix of higher value vegetables after having solely grown spinach (how we in South Africa refer to Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard) in our first year.
Something that requires a bit of explanation to most people we speak to is why the matchmaking. Some of you may have noticed from our website that we claim to be a company focused on quality in agriculture, specifically the quality of high value, highly perishable fresh horticultural produce. We also claim that we are using AI to build automated grading solutions that farmers and market sellers can use to help standardise quality and grading standards in their operations.
Yet if you sign up and start using our app you will see our platform currently looks more like a matchmaking platform. A platform where farmers and buyers list the crops they are selling and seeking to procure respectively to attract each other.
Controlling and managing quality is vital in fresh produce supply chains. Quality significantly impacts shelf life, price and the ultimate nutritional benefit to the end consumer. Buyers are generally acutely aware of the importance of quality yet many farmers remain ignorant or are only partially aware to its importance. This is not a failing of the buyer or the farmer but rather the lack of an appropriate communication portal to convey the nuance and specifics of grading fresh produce.
We founded Kuronga because we realised that there is a market for every grade of produce. However, to access these markets farmers needed to improve their on-farm grading to cater for different market grading standards. That is what Kuronga does. It helps farmers begin to understand the importance of on-farm grading, how to execute it effectively and subsequently target different grades to the appropriate market. Buyers also get real world benefit as they can specifically communicate grading requirements on a dedicated platform that clearly shows their suppliers what they need and expect from them.
One of the first questions we get asked by investors is why Africa?
Several really, but the first is that is where we are from. We both grew up and went to school together just outside a little town called Marondera, in Zimbabwe. We get Africa, we understand it and see the huge potential for growth in a young startup willing to tackle one of the many unique challenges that the agricultural sector face in Africa.
Kuronga is a Shona verb meaning to organise.
At Kuronga we are focused on enhancing the quality of fresh produce on farm and at market through pragmatic AI powered grading systems.
Also check out our how to pages on how to get started.