I always say that the Bible is the best financial book ever written. All these financial books we have today trace their references to the Bible. The Bible is the primary source...
There has never been a more critical time to rethink how we grow food. The decisions being made today around agricultural technology will determine whether the world can sustainably feed itself in the decades ahead.
The global labor shortage in agriculture is not a distant problem. Speak to any farmer, small or large, and the reality becomes clear immediately. At the same time, populations continue to grow, and fewer people are choosing farming as a livelihood. That shift is happening, and it demands a different approach.
Trying to get more people into manual farm work is not a real solution. What we need are machines that can take on that workload reliably and precisely, without driving costs up.
Over the past four years, my co-founder (@koffi_cobbin) and I have been deeply convinced that robotics will define the next era of crop production. We started with very little experience in building hardware and have worked our way up to developing a platform that can handle the realities and extremes of farmland.
Our robots operate without GPS. They navigate using AI-driven vision and ranging systems, interpreting their surroundings and making movement decisions in a way similar to how a human operator would when driving a tractor across a field, constantly adjusting based on terrain, crop rows, and obstacles. They are versatile enough to work anywhere, from the coastal farms of West Africa to the flatlands of the American Midwest.
The world is beginning to pay attention, and that means everything to us.
Incredibly grateful for the support of @alexisohanian and the @776foundation who have believed in this mission alongside us.
We are just getting started.
IT'S TIME TO BUILD 🚀
Amazing work by @oxncgen and the @3farmatebots team. Building hardware in Ghana is not for the faint-hearted. I’m proud to have seen the team’s journey up close and can only be excited about the prospects of FAMA for Africa’s food security. Technology like this, shaped by an understanding of local realities is the kind of leap Africa needs to produce food at scale.
Farming has a global labor crisis and @776foundation climate fellow @oxncgen is building the fix — autonomous robots that plant, spray, weed, and monitor crops. Real hardware, real fields.
@3farmatebots is building from Ghana for the world!
Ghanaian startup 3Farmate unveils FAMA, an autonomous robot that automates planting and fertilizing. The AI-driven machine operates without internet connectivity, addressing labor shortages and food security in rural farming communities. https://t.co/kHRnARgCsB
We recently welcomed Kwabla Farms (@kwablafarms) for a conversation about the future of their operation, and it was a meeting that left us genuinely encouraged.
Based in the Ashanti Region, Kwabla Farms has about 60 acres under management, doing both cereals and vegetables, and they have the kind of ambition that genuinely excites us. Farmers and agribusinesses with plans to grow at scale are exactly who we built FAMA for. When the goal is to scale, the biggest variable that needs to be taken off the table is workforce reliability, and that is precisely what an autonomous platform delivers.
The conversation around agriculture changes completely when labour is no longer the limiting factor. It stops being about finding enough people to work the land and starts being entirely about how much land you can cultivate. That shift is what we are working to make the norm, and meeting teams like Kwabla Farms reinforces that the demand for that shift is very real.
We look forward to continued conversations and to supporting their ambitions as they grow.
#agtech #robotics #ghana #agriculture #precisionfarming #foodsecurity #artificialintelligence
On April 4th, we hosted a live demonstration of FAMA, bringing together stakeholders from across agriculture, technology, and policy to witness what autonomous crop production looks like in practice, and the response meant a great deal to us.
Representatives from the Kosmos Innovation Center, Startup Discovery Africa, GIZ, and the Ministry of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations joined us on the field. Leaders of large-scale cereal farming organisations from Ghana’s Northern Region made the trip down. The Africa Golden Food team was present too. Students came. Media came. And the Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, Hon. John Dumelo (@johndumelo) was there to see it firsthand.
Having that breadth of representation in one place was a signal that the conversation around agricultural transformation in this country is moving to where it needs to be.
The challenges facing agriculture are well known. Labour availability, planting precision, shrinking windows, and the kind of losses that make farmers question whether the next season is worth the effort. These are problems we take seriously, and building FAMA has always been about making them a thing of the past.
The future we are working toward is one where the only conversation left is about scale. Platforms that operate around the clock, deliver consistent precision across every run, and are ready to work whenever and wherever they are needed.
April 4th was the day that future became visible. We are just getting started.
#agtech #robotics #ghana #agriculture #foodsecurity #precisionfarming #artificialintelligence
People oddly assumed that I didn’t understand LiDAR, even though I oversaw the custom LiDAR development that Dragon uses to dock with the Space Station
We sat down with @JoyNewsOnTV to talk about the future of farming and why the transition from traditional methods to autonomous technology is not a question of if, but when.
Labour availability is one of the hardest problems in farming, and it is only getting harder. Getting the right people on the field when you need them is a challenge that has constrained farmers for decades. That was the problem we set out to solve from day one, and it is the problem FAMA addresses.
The conversation around agriculture is changing. The tools have to change with it.
Watch the full interview below.