It's unlikely that you'd have visited our website and social media pages without catching a glimpse of the term "Agricultural Operating System (AOS)".

But what is it? What does it do? And what is the point of this article?

First, what is our AOS?

Short for Agricultural Operating System, it is exactly what we call it; a systematic way to operate and monitor agricultural practices. It increases farm productivity and profitability; decreases yield loss, wastage and enables accessibility to accurate data on crop and soil health, and weather forecast.

So, think of it as a way to manage what goes on in the farms, from the moment a ridge is built to harvesting and storage of the produce.

Now that we've defined it, let’s take a dive into its uses and benefits, shall we?

Currently, there are two apps running on our AOS

1. Agent App:

Our agents are called field officers and this application is what they use to monitor farmers and the farms before, during and after planting. Here are the activities they carry out:

Farmer Onboarding (Know Your Farmer): This is the first step in the farming process; it is done to collect farmers’ information.

Farm Mapping: This is to measure the size of the field as well as inspect its viability.

Farm Monitoring: This is to validate that the farmers are following the already established guidelines.

Harvest (Loan Repayment): This is to record the amount of goods the farmers produced and harvested.

Logistics: This is to onboard transporters and threshers to help our smallholder farmers clean their produce as well as ease the transportation to the aggregation centres.

2. Warehouse App:

As you must have guessed, this is used by our store managers. There is a web dashboard which provides visibility of the operations and basic analytics to perform some activities such as:

Input Distribution (Loan Disbursement): This is to disburse farmers' loans based on qualifications and subscriptions in the form of inputs.

Inventory Services: This is to record all activities in the warehouse and keep an inventory of all goods available.

Harvest (Loan Repayment): This is to validate the farmers’ harvests upon arrival in the warehouse.

One of the major ways we plan to build an Africa that feeds herself and the world, is to connect smallholder farmers to finance, data-driven best practices, and premium markets.

Our proprietary technology, the AOS helps us achieve just that. Aha, you see it’s all connected?

So the next time you hear us talking (and bragging) about our AOS, you should understand why!