Marcel @ FarmSentry

Farming is hard. Tracking it all on paper and memory makes it harder. I started FarmSentry to fix that. Now we're building it for every farmer.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

Advances on FarmSentry just got rebuilt.
Installment plans for big advances. Partial repayments when a worker pays you back outside payroll. Caps so you never over-deduct from a paycheck. Write-offs with reasons. Full audit trail.
Watch the demo. https://t.co/ITdzLz45P5

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@loweroddfarm @PickwickLodgeFm @duffy1972 @HefinR @Feedlync Good to hear Herdwatch is working for you. Curious what tipped the decision for you this year, was it the mobile side, medicine records, or something else? Always learning from what makes farmers actually switch.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@AgriShoot The water savings alone make this worth exploring for smallholder setups. Quick question though what's the realistic startup cost for a basic hydroponic fodder system, and how long before it pays for itself?

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@BelindaABATONI How long are you soaking after fermentation?

[The Organic Guy Podcast @TheOrganicPod]

EXPOSED: The Toxic Sugar in Your Cup. The Sugar Industry players are now repackaging toxic sugar for Kenyans to consume.

Do we say goodbye to sugar?

@The_Organic_Guy X @MaryK2022

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

Most coffee content tells you to grow it in clean rows. Half our coffee at Morceau is intercropped with bananas. Bananas shade seedlings, leaves go back to the soil, harvest income arrives 4 months apart. Clean rows are a magazine photo, not a farm.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

What 90 days of tracking taught me: the numbers I was scared to find were the ones I needed most. The expensive enterprise wasn't the one I'd guessed. The cheap one was hiding losses. "I just know" is a luxury that breaks the moment things change.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

Most painful thing my diaspora customers tell me: it's not missing the farm, it's the time zone of guilt. My manager calls at 3am their time about a fence. They can't help. They also can't sleep. That's why I built the parts of FarmSentry I'd never need myself.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@SawyerWhisler Weighing this on our coffee farm. The premium and buyer demand line up. What scares us is the 20-30 percent yield drop through transition and 3 years of organic costs before the organic price kicks in.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

My dad ran sugarcane on this same land for 40 years without writing anything down. It worked because he was here every day. The minute one of us moved to Nairobi, the system broke. We didn't lose the data. We lost the person who held it.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

If you own a farm and you don't live on it, the farm has 100 secrets and you have access to about 4 of them. Tracking isn't surveillance. It's the only way to know whether "yes boss, all is well" is actually the truth.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

My farm manager said the avocado block was producing well. The numbers said yields were down 18% from last year. Both were true. He was looking at the best tree. The data was looking at every tree. Memory is brave but selective.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@kofi_rawlings Records are the cheapest insurance a farmer can buy. They cost nothing but discipline. They tell you which field is feeding you and which one is quietly eating you. I run multiple crops where the difference only became visible after a full year of recording data..

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

Most farmers I know say "we always lose money on coffee in October." Said it myself for years. When I checked our records, the worst month wasn't October at all. It was the month nobody complained about. Feelings make terrible accountants.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

Friend texted yesterday: what does a worker on the coffee block cost you per day? 600 shillings plus lunch, sent the screenshot from payroll. Two years ago I'd have said "around 500" and been off by enough to matter at month's end.

[World Bank Group AgriFood @WBG_AgriFood]

Agriculture remains one of Africa’s largest sources of employment. Speaking with @Diop_IFC, Aliko Dangote discusses expanding investment in fertilizer, irrigation supported agriculture, and food systems — with job creation at the center. https://t.co/MN9NSF0SmT

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@kigzdeus @MAAIF_Uganda @narouganda @UGCommonwealth @FAOUganda @volcanocoffee1 @mtnharvestug @SeraWildCoffee @GovUganda @ntvuganda What's a realistic scouting threshold for black coffee twig borer before spraying earns its keep?

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@mukunzielyse @SangwaSifa @AgriShoot @Elysee0fficial Exactly. Appropriate technology beats aspirational technology every time. A tool a farmer can afford, fix, and use today moves agriculture forward faster than a tractor they will never own. Scale starts small.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

Good list. But 7 and 16 need a second look. Avoiding agro-input dealers is right, but blanket distrust of extension officers throws out real expertise. And old varieties are reliable, yes, but modern improved varieties exist precisely because old ones had gaps. Context matters more than rules.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

@kslopez77 @IITA_CGIAR @CGIAR @RadioIITA @iitatv @farmradio @FarmRadioFM @simeonehui @Leena_Tripathi @kalromkulima Growing Cavendish myself, BXW is not a distant threat. It is a question of when, not if. Gene editing that stays within the crop's own genome and clears biosafety review is exactly the kind of innovation farmers need backed, not blocked.

[Marcel @ FarmSentry @farmsentry]

Exactly this. A Kenyan farmer earns cents per kg of coffee cherry. That same coffee, roasted and branded abroad, retails at many times more. Most of our coffee leaves as the red cherry. Until value addition happens at origin, we are just subsidizing someone else's economy with our soil and labor.