African Greeneurs Horticulture

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African Greeneurs Horticulture

Location: African continent and internationally | Industry: Enterprise Farms

Introduction

Enterprising Africa Regional Network (EARN) is for-profit, purpose-driven organization with a goal of creating global impact through the development of young African entrepreneurs.

Through their Agriculture Training and Development subsidiary, African Greeneurs (Pty) Ltd or AG, they aim to develop indigenous young men and women into cutting-edge agripreneurs who will be able to responsibly establish successful and growth-oriented agri-enterprises, producing nutritious and healthy foods to guarantee food security while creating jobs and increasing prosperity.

Through EARN’s Commercial Agriculture subsidiary, AG Horticulture (Pty) Ltd or AGH, they operate two farms, where they mainly grow fresh produce as well as fresh cut flowers.

Their aim is to become a market leader of healthy and nutritious produce on the African continent and internationally.

Challenge

AG Horticulture is a straight farm-to-table business. Everything they produce is sold to local supermarkets, restaurants, and large retailers. Initially, they focused their business on the production of fresh cut flowers but over time, they decided to expand their production to vegetables such as cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, and baby spinach.

To ensure their products meet the required food safety standards, they continuously need to monitor product quality, assure pesticide residue levels and stay on-par with global trends. At the same time, they need to know how much they are spending on which crop, the total quantity of raw materials used, and the costs associated with production.

‘The biggest challenge was not knowing where all our costs are. For example, we would buy a certain amount of fertilizer and use some of it, and there would be some left in the warehouse. It was very hard to know what exactly our cost is for each item during the season but also how much we need to sell to make a profit. It was a lot of guesswork to make a calculation,’ said Kobang Maluleka, Managing Director at AG Horticulture.

Considering all the challenges they faced, they decided to look for a Farm Management Solution that would help them organize their business, and after reviewing the market, they chose AGRIVI.

"AGRIVI pulls everything in and calculates the cost every time you use the fertilizer, and it gives you a better insight into how much you are spending during your season"

Kobang Maluleka, Managing Director at AG Horticulture

Solution

The implementation of the software was quick and easy. The Customer Success Team at AGRIVI provided the onboarding materials and a dedicated Customer Success Manager to help the employees during data registration into AGRIVI.

Initially, AG Horticulture started using AGRIVI for the purpose of production costs tracking but soon realized that AGRIVI can offer a variety of other features that will significantly increase their yield and reduce their overall farm production costs, such as traceable activity planning and execution tracking.

Today, they use all the modules in AGRIVI, focusing on work orders for registering executed daily activities and related usage of farm materials and irrigation water. Their main goal is to analyze their entire greenhouse production to determine which greenhouse has a higher productivity to cost ratio and determine the reasons for that while successfully managing the possible outcomes.   

Soon after implementing the software, they started to see the changes in their daily operations and farm management. Not only did using AGRIVI help them in easier management of field activities and what needs to be done and when, but they also had real-time insight into stock inventory.

‘’Inventory overview in AGRIVI gave us the possibility to track the real time and up-to-date stock of all items stored there as well as register product waste. For every single item, we can see all changes in its stock, when and where it was used, all purchases, and storage location.’’ concluded Kobang Maluleka.

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