Farming-as-a-Service
Most agri-technology is sold on the assumption that the hard part is knowing. It isn't. The hard part is doing — with the labour you have, the machine that broke, the delivery that is late and the window that closes on Thursday. Farming-as-a-Service is our answer: the platform, plus the people to help you use it, plus the capability to take on the work ourselves where that is what is needed.
Why this exists
We know because we bought the tools too. Over a decade of running our own farms we have paid for satellite subscriptions, scouting apps, farm-management systems and GIS packages. Some of them were good. Almost none of them were still in daily use by the second season.
Not because the software was wrong, but because there was nobody whose job it was to make it part of how the farm actually ran. A platform handed over at a training session and left there becomes a login nobody uses and a dataset nobody trusts.
So we do not hand it over and leave. We stay in the season with you.
A licence, a two-hour training session, a support email address, and a dashboard that goes stale by week six because the data stops going in.
A regional onboarding lead through the first season. Agronomists on the farm when a signal fires. Mentor farmers who have grown the same crop in the same district. And our own mechanisation and application services when the market cannot deliver in the window.
How far we go is your call
Some operations want the software and nothing else. Some want an agronomist in the season. Some want us to run the block. All three are legitimate, and you can move between them season to season.
You run the farm. FarmSwitch runs underneath it — planning, tasks, costs, scouting, satellite verification and reporting. We onboard you, digitise your fields, build your baseline and train your team, then support you.
Everything above, plus our agronomists and mechanisation specialists inside your planning and inside your season. Crop programmes built with you, and someone on the ground when the platform raises a flag.
We take operational responsibility for the parts you want us to take. Input procurement, mechanisation, precision application, harvest coordination and market linkage — executed by us, tracked on the platform, reported to whoever is funding it.
A season with us
This is the sequence we run, whether it is one farm or seventeen enterprises inside a development programme.
GPS mapping and digital field boundaries. Historical yields, crop programmes and soil layers turned into productivity zones. Equipment, storage and irrigation infrastructure mapped. What comes out is a picture of what this land has actually done, not what it is hoped it can do — and a performance profile that, for a grower with no audited financials, starts to do the job an income statement would.
Nutritional and protection programmes, cultivar selection and field layout aligned to the productivity zones, and a mechanisation strategy that says which machine is doing what and when. Costed per hectare, per field, with a yield forecast attached.
Every input synchronised to the programme and ordered against verified suppliers, with delivery scheduled to the field. Contractors and mechanisation booked off the same programme. The seven-day delay that quietly destroys a yield is an availability problem, and it is solved in advance or not at all.
Tasks assigned and closed out with geo-tagged photo evidence. Costs tracked against budget as they land. Satellite monitoring every five to seven days, with alerts when a field deviates. Structured farm visits, and an agronomist dispatched when something needs a person rather than a notification.
Yield forecasting and harvest scheduling, quality assurance against buyer specification, packhouse and cold-chain coordination, and off-take against contracts secured before planting. Traceability runs back to the block, which is what retail and export both increasingly require.
A full-season operational and financial record per field. For the farmer, that is the evidence that gets a better facility next year. For the funder, it is a verified performance history. For a programme, it is audit-ready impact reporting that did not have to be reassembled by hand.
Who turns up
Smart Agri Africa is led by people who farm. Our management brings more than thirty years across the agricultural value chain, thirty years of corporate finance and agri-investment, and twenty-five years of systems development — and the farming and the software have been done by the same team, in the same business, for a decade.
That is why the platform has the fields the way a farmer thinks about them rather than the way a database would prefer, and why the people who arrive to help have usually grown the crop in question.
Experienced commercial growers matched to the farm and the crop, who inspect, advise and are listened to because of who they are.
Programme design, in-season diagnosis, corrective plans and the follow-through to make sure the plan was actually executed.
Precision planters, applicators and harvesters, plus drone-based spraying and fertilisation deployed off the crop programme.
A named person for your region through the first season — the difference between a platform that is adopted and one that is merely installed.
What it produces
The honest version
If what you want is a licence and a login, there are cheaper options and some of them are good. What we sell is a season that goes better than it otherwise would have, and that involves people, vehicles, agronomy and time.
The case for it is simple: on the numbers we see, the cost of the support is smaller than the cost of one badly timed input application on a single decent block. If that is not true for your operation, we will tell you.
One farm or a whole programme. We will tell you which level makes sense, and whether we are the right people for it.
