The recent quarantine of the greater Lautoka City area coupled with the economic downturn, in particular the tourism industry, has caught many families by surprise. Without a regular source of income many families are in a difficult situation and are concerned about where their next meal will come from.

Online forums for local agriculture have seen exponential growth in the number of people joining to find seeds, seedlings or technical advice on growing food. There is an obvious growing interest in backyard gardening as families look for food alternatives.

Interventions like backyard gardening are good for the medium-to-long term but they won’t address the immediate food security needs. Some organisations, including FRIEND and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), are working hard to identify areas with excess surplus crops that can be bought and redistributed to those that need it urgently.

This becomes a logistics challenge which requires good information and effective real-time data management.

How TraSeable Farms can help

TraSeable Farms, a mobile app and web platform, was designed and built by us with the intention of being the one-stop-shop digital agriculture platform that caters to everyone in the agriculture value chain – farmers, agribusinesses, middlemen, farmer organisations, and Government agencies. It currently caters for farmers growing crops, raising livestock, dairy farmers, and tilapia farmers involved in aquaculture.

This could very easily be the central point for data collection from farmers who are selling their crops. The app will help identify the farmers, their location, what they have available for sale and at what price. This information will be easily accessible through our web platform to organisations like FRIEND and MoA who can use it for planning their logistics.

The app could also be used to centralise the collection of requests for assistance from families in urgent need of food without people having to leave their homes. Regular update notifications can be pushed directly to users of the app in the three main languages so that they can be kept informed.

TraSeable Farms aims to:

  • Help bridge the information gap for agriculture stakeholders, especially farmers – through the app we provide curated agriculture news/events (local and international), technical content (farm manual, training information, etc), available assistance, a directory of contacts for agribusinesses, suppliers, exporters/importers, equipment providers, etc.

  • Provide timely agriculture information like daily weather updates, market pricing of commodities from around Fiji, etc

  • Provide simple digital recordkeeping tools to be used on the farm for crops, livestock, dairy farming, and aquaculture that can be used through the various farming cycles involved with each.

  • Provide a digital marketplace for farmers to advertise what they are selling and also what they are looking to buy.

  • Provide central digital management of farmer’s information – transaction history, cooperative memberships, important documents, etc.

Contact us today to get on TraSeable Farms.