We spent the last three planting seasons embedded with smallholder farms across Lagos, Ogun, and Oyo. What follows is a distilled field journal — the parts we wish someone had told us before we shipped our first prototype.
Results at a glance
- 42% — Average loss before FieldLoop
- 4.8% — Loss after one full season
- ₦1.9M — Median added revenue / hectare
The problem hiding in plain sight
Most post-harvest loss is not dramatic. It is a slow bleed — a degree too warm here, a humidity spike there, a truck that arrived a day late. The fix is rarely a single piece of hardware. It is a feedback loop tight enough to catch the bleed before it compounds.
"Before the sensors I was guessing. Now I know which crate goes out first and which one needs the cold room. My income doubled in one season."
— Mrs. Olufunke, tomato farmer · Ikorodu
What actually moved the needle
- Solar-powered cold storage sized for a single cooperative, not an industrial estate
- Humidity + ethylene sensors with SMS alerts in the farmer's local language
- Dispatch routing tuned to Lagos market price windows, not just distance
- Weekly drone diagnostics replacing the monthly walk-through
What we'd do differently
Trust compounds faster than technology. The farms where we showed up weekly — even when nothing was broken — adopted twice as fast as the ones we treated as remote deployments. Build the relationship first and the data flows on its own.
If you are running a similar program, start with one cooperative, instrument heavily, and resist the temptation to scale before the first cohort is genuinely thriving. The case studies write themselves once that happens.
