iGrow (www.igrow.asia) is a marketplace that helps under employed farmers and under-utilized land to produce scalable and efficient organic farm funded by urban people around the world.
In much of the world, there are millions of underemployed skilled farmers and millions of hectares of underused arable land in emerging markets like Indonesia. Meanwhile, the demand for high-quality organic agricultural food gets higher day after day.
UN research states that crop yields need to double within 40 years in order to keep up with world population growth. The FAO said that our food production will have to increase by 70 percent for an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050. That’s why we need a new way to create scalable and efficient farming industry.
iGrow can connect farmers, landowners, investors, and crop buyers to create a complete farming supply chain. We identify crops with stable demand, prices and growing characteristics. We find arable land and its farmers.
We raise capital for seeds from urban people and we give a Farmville-like experience to investors so they not only can see their investments, but also have the fun of knowing they’re growing beautiful, nutritious food.
iGrow has a mission that is for far more than just commercial purposes. iGrow has a big goal, which is to preserve life, strengthening our food security and empowering farmer.
The challenges of empowering farmer is to increase income of that most farmers face in Indonesia are lack of access to working capital financing, or the unfair profit sharing scheme with the "ijon". iGrow tackle these challenges by connecting people with capital and interest to invest in certain crop with the farmers who need the capital.
To date iGrow operated 1,197 hectares of land, which has the maximum potential up to 20,000 hectares, and has worked with and has increased the income of 2,550 farmers up to ~100% and with current resources can be scale up to 65,000 farmers.
At the moment iGrow use increase in daily wages as their metric to monitor the livelihood impact they create to the farmers. iGrow still do the monitoring manually through the operators, from each lands, who supervised the farmers on daily basis.
iGrow has a policy that each land operator must utilizes (hired, established partnership/collaboration) local farmers in operating the land. The operators are allowed use farmers from outside region only if locals is not sufficient. This policy also works as a security method for iGrow’s lands, because by employing/provided income for locals, locals will protect iGrow lands as well. This method also to avoid social conflict. This policy is derived from iGrow’s principles of “Pagar mangkok lebih baik dari pagar tembok” that providing food for locals is better than building high wall to secured an area.
