About us
Ten years of farming came first. The software came out of it.
Smart Agri Africa is a Southern African agribusiness headquartered in Midrand, Gauteng. We are farmers from Africa, technologists and financiers from America, and software engineers from Europe, and we have been doing this together for a decade — through cattle, input supply, emerging-farmer programmes and more than 20,000 hectares across fifteen-odd crops.
Our story
The lessons were expensive, which is why they stuck
Over the past ten years we have invested in and managed farming operations across the region — cattle breeding and trading, input supply chains for chemicals, fertiliser and seed, and deep involvement in emerging-farmer programmes alongside local banks, agricultural bodies and regulators.
Not all of it went well. The journey had its bumps, and the lessons learned became the best teachers we had. What they taught us, repeatedly, was that the failures were rarely agronomic. They were failures of planning, of supply, of timing and of monitoring — the right ingredients not reaching the right place at the right time.
That is the specific problem FarmSwitch was built to solve, and it is why the platform is organised around execution rather than around reporting.
Vision
Feed Africa and the world, sustainably
And make the farming profitable while doing it. Africa has the soil. What it has lacked is the operating system: the planning discipline, the supply reliability, the mechanisation access and the market linkage that turn potential hectares into delivered tonnes. Our stated ambition is a million hectares under management, and every capability we have built is aimed at making that scalable rather than heroic.
Mission
Farming-as-a-Service, across the supply chain
Better planning, better execution, better monitoring, better yields, better sustainability — using systems and AI where they genuinely help, and people where they are what is actually needed. Profitable, inclusive farming systems that create economic growth, youth employment and regional food security are the point of the exercise, not a footnote to it.
Leadership
Farmers, financiers and engineers in the same business
Cumulatively the team brings more than thirty years across the agricultural value chain, thirty years of corporate finance and agri-investment, and twenty-five years of applications and systems development.
Tommie Martinson
Operations and agri-commercial. Runs the farming side of the business and leads the commercial relationships that sit behind the programmes.
Ian Houvet
Technology and systems. Responsible for the FarmSwitch platform, its data spine and the integrations that connect it to the rest of the value chain.
Agronomists, mentor farmers and onboarding leads
The people who actually turn up when the platform raises a flag — matched to the crop and the district, and the reason our software stays in use past the first season.
What we do as a business
Vertically integrated, deliberately
Smart Agri Africa manages commercial-scale farming projects, runs mechanisation and packhouse hubs, aggregates emerging and commercial farmers under a structured production model, and acts as the implementation arm that turns funder and off-taker capital into an actual crop.
That integration is what makes the platform credible. We are not asking anyone to adopt a system we do not depend on ourselves — our own funder relationships, our own off-take book and our own farms run on it.
- Scale. Proven management of large-scale irrigated and dryland projects across South Africa and Namibia.
- Technology. FarmSwitch delivering visibility, continuous evaluation and accountability across the ecosystem.
- Data. Season-on-season datasets that make each subsequent decision better informed than the last.
- Mechanisation and inputs. Hubs that make timely land preparation, planting, application and harvesting something we can guarantee rather than hope for.
- Market access. Long-standing relationships with South African retailers and processors that secure long-term demand.
- Farmer development. An aggregator model holding commercial and emerging farmers to the same operational standard.
Where we work
Mpumalanga, the Free State, the Western and Northern Cape, and Namibia — dryland and irrigated, summer and winter rainfall.
- Maize
- Groundnuts
- Potatoes
- Onions
- Citrus
- Canola
- Beetroot
- Cabbage
- Carrots
Come and see a farm
The fastest way to work out whether we are the right people is to stand on one of the operations with us. We would rather do that than send a deck.