Fefifo, a Singapore founded Agtech startup with operations in Malaysia, pioneering digitalised, standardised farming in ready-to-farm modern farm spaces called Co-farms. Agropreneurs, or smallholder farmers, can easily start their own commercial farms in co-farms by renting a ready-to-farm greenhouse or open farm space with managed farm services, lodgings, and other shared common facilities.
Agropreneurs can grow pre-curated short cycle cash crops using their proprietary platform, DDFN, powered by digital crop models and growing protocols to standardise and automate seed-to-sale workflows, lifting them from subsistence to commercial farming that sells to reliable, profitable contract buyers.
Co-founders Kelveen Soh and Chris Fong share some insights of the company and the key challenges they are trying to address in the agriculture industry such as capital expenditure, knowledge and lack of scale. They say 80 percent of food that Asia consumes is produced by smallholder farmers. However, 65 percent will retire in 15 years and traditional farming is not profitable enough to attract the next generation.
They also talk about:
- how they support and offer opportunities to young agri-graduates to kickstart technology-enabled farms easily using their proprietary technology platform, DDFN.
- the types of crops, the initial investment involved and the return of investment for the agropreneurs.
- the pilot co-farm in Perak, Malaysia with the first batch of two agropreneurs growing Chilli and Muskmelon using DDFN.
- the recent early-stage funding raised. They say the funds will be used to double the scale of their pilot co-farms in Perak, Malaysia over the next 6 months, grow the operations and bring in key strategic hires and expand their self-operated co-farms acreage to a total area of 10 acres of modern commercial farming operations.
- the emerging trends in the agtech industry which will drive innovation
Guests: Kelveen Soh, Co-founder and CEO and Chris Fong, Co-founder and Chief Strategy and Innovation at Fefifo
Host: Brian Fernandez
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