Towards to end of 2023, I was focused on keeping our pilot project going with the farmers in Iveti, which I talked about in my last update. During my time in Kenya last summer, I met a man named Daniel when my cofounders and I visted Fred’s Ranch.

At Vunatec, we are building a digital ecosystem of smallholder farmers in Kenya. Our main goals are to help farmers reduce their post-harvest losses from 40% down to 10% or less, while more than doubling their incomes. We are doing this by delivering education and training to smallholder farmers and connecting them to market through a mobile app.

When we reached Machakos, we stayed there for a night and spent two days just visiting farmers, touring their farms, and learning about the kinds of challenges they were facing to better understand how we can help them. I have interviewed five farmers so far, all of them were women and between them they were growing avocados, maize, beans, and apples.

The answer lies in regenerative agriculture. In very simple terms, regenerative agriculture is a system of farming practices that places a lot of importance on soil health to rehabilitate the entire ecosystem of a farm. To understand these practices and how they make an impact, it’s important to understand the way modern farming works and why it isn’t working.