category · agriculture
In the fieldFarm and market tools
Software for the people who grow Zambia's food. The smallest useful version of this is usually just knowing what to do this week — and getting that answer while the signal is down.
Photo: Rogerirakoze on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
On our roadmap
We have not started here yet. The 3 subcategories below are on our roadmap, and we will take them on in time.
Crops & planting
When to plant, when to weed, when to harvest.
Most Zambian food is grown by smallholders who decide when to plant with little more than memory and the first rains.
- Planting advice
- Weather, made local
- Pest and disease alerts
Livestock
Breeding dates and hatching windows.
Cattle, goats and poultry are a savings account for millions of families, and records rarely go beyond a notebook.
- Herd records
- Vet access
- Market timing
Farm business
Whether a field pays, before the season starts.
A season is an investment, but few farmers can see whether a field will pay before the inputs are bought.
- Season budgets
- Cooperative tools
- Access to credit
What we'd build
Four ideas, in the order we would test them. None are built.
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01
The weekly crop and weather brief
Plain-language advice for the week ahead, by crop and province. Cached on the phone so it still opens with no signal, because that is the normal case, not the edge case.
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02
A market price board
What a crop is fetching today, and in which market — updated as often as we can do it honestly, and marked with the date so nobody acts on a stale number.
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03
Cooperative records
Inputs, harvests and shared transport for smallholder groups, kept by whichever member happens to have a working phone that day.
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04
Offline-first, as a rule
If a tool needs a live connection to be worth opening, it isn't finished. Data cost decides the design before features do.
Where it stands
In the field
We are in conversations with growers and cooperatives, and a first version of the weekly brief is in build. Nothing is public yet.
The honest risk: the people who need this most are the hardest to reach for feedback. If we cannot test it with them, we will say so rather than launch around them.