EcoGrow Farms is not a technology company that named itself after agriculture. We operate land in Nigeria — growing food, managing labour, navigating seasonal risk, and living the daily reality of African agribusiness.
That reality is what drove us to build our own intelligence tools. No software on the market was designed for African soil, African weather patterns, or the African smallholder. So we built it ourselves — and opened it to the world.
Our crop selection is not arbitrary. Every variety is matched to the soil type, rainfall profile, and market access conditions of our Ede, Osun State farm and the wider southwest production corridor.
Crop rotation, intercropping, and cover cropping schedules are set by CropSentinel modelling — which evaluates historical yield data, NDVI trends, and soil readings from SoilPulse to determine what goes where, each season.
Our highest-volume staple. Drought-tolerant varieties planted on the Ede, Osun State farm. Primary grain source for institutional buyers and feed markets.
Apr – Aug · Nov – FebRoma and cherry varieties on drip irrigation. Price-sensitive — HarvestIQ determines our sell window. Supplied to urban wholesale hubs and processors.
Oct – JanTatase and Shombo varieties for fresh and dried markets. High-margin relative to maize. Exported to processors and spice packers.
Oct – DecUgu (fluted pumpkin) and Ugwu for peri-urban markets. Fast-cycling; grown in rotation between major crop harvests.
Year-roundTMS and IITA improved varieties. 12–18 month cycle. Primary buyers are starch processors and garri producers. Long-cycle crop provides production stability.
18-month cycleDual-purpose: grain for processors, and nitrogen-fixing rotation crop that reduces fertiliser inputs on the following maize cycle. Ede farm rotation crop.
Jun – OctLayer and broiler operations integrated on-farm. Feed sourced from our own maize harvest. Manure diverted to compost programme, closing the input loop.
Continuous cycleMucuna, cowpea, and lablab rotated between cash crop seasons. Soil restoration programme informed by SoilPulse NPK readings between cycles.
Rotation-scheduledDrought-resilient export crop grown on well-drained Ede parcels. Exported via commodity aggregators to processors. Low-input, high-margin.
May – SepEach operational area on the farm is paired to an intelligence product. The software was not bolted on — it grew out of solving our own problems.
Variety selection, planting density, input programme, and harvest timing are all driven by data. CropSentinel fuses Sentinel-2 NDVI imagery with our IoT field sensors to give us a 6–8 week forward view of how each field block is performing — before a problem becomes visible on the ground.
We do not irrigate by calendar. IrrigateAI combines satellite evapotranspiration data, 7-day weather forecasts, and SoilPulse volumetric water content readings to generate a daily drip schedule for each zone. The result: less water used, less energy spent, and less waterlogging stress on root systems.
Post-harvest loss in Nigeria can reach 30–50% of crop value. We structured grading at harvest, cold-chain handling for perishables, and let HarvestIQ price signals determine when and where to sell — not urgency or proximity to the nearest market road.
Every input applied, every irrigation event, every harvest batch, and every dispatch movement is digitally recorded. Our documentation pipeline is aligned with SON and NAQS standards — and structured to meet EU and UK Deforestation Regulation supply-chain requirements that international buyers increasingly demand.
Our farm is located in Ede, Osun State, Nigeria — within a southwest production corridor with access to regional markets, road links, and a reliable base for field operations.
CropSentinel is piloted across southwest states in Nigeria, giving our team a practical environment to test models across different soil, rainfall, and crop-management conditions.
Serious institutional buyers — UN agencies, export processors, government procurement — require a documented chain of custody. We built our traceability system before we had those buyers, because building the infrastructure after the relationship is too late.
The same digital records that run our farm operations produce the compliance documentation that institutional and export customers need. No re-entry, no manual compilation.
Every input — seed lot, fertiliser batch, pesticide — is logged with supplier, quantity, application date, and GPS field coordinates before it enters the ground.
Batch ID assignedCropSentinel and SoilPulse generate a continuous timestamped record of field conditions, irrigation events, and alerts issued — forming the audit trail through the growing season.
Auto-generated via IoTHarvest date, field block, grader name, weight, grade, and moisture reading are recorded per batch at the point of harvest. Each batch carries a scannable ID from this point forward.
Physical QR tag + digital recordTemperature and humidity are logged in storage and transport for perishables. Entry and exit timestamps recorded for each storage bay. Transport vehicle and driver ID attached to batch record.
Temperature-loggedDispatch documentation — quantity, destination, buyer reference, vehicle — closes the batch record. Buyers can request a full traceability PDF from seed to delivery against any batch ID.
SON / NAQS alignedEcoGrow is not managed from a city. The people who built our intelligence products are the same people who walk the fields, talk to the labourers, and deal with the reality of a failed irrigation pump at 5 a.m.
Builds and maintains the LSTM ensemble models behind CropSentinel. Former IITA research fellow. Combines remote sensing expertise with an obsession for African crop stress data.
Runs day-to-day field operations across both sites. Agronomist by training, data convert by necessity. Interprets CropSentinel and SoilPulse outputs and translates them into field action.
Manages relationships with humanitarian agencies, government ministries, and agri-insurance partners. Former USAID supply-chain programme manager.
Designs and deploys the SoilPulse sensor network. Builds low-power LoRaWAN infrastructure that operates in areas with no GSM. Former embedded systems engineer.
Manages farm financial operations, SON and NAQS compliance filings, and the documentation pipeline that supports institutional procurement. CPA, previously with Deloitte Nigeria.
"No software on the market was built for African soil, African weather, or the African smallholder. So we built it ourselves."
In 2021, after two consecutive seasons of preventable losses — a tomato crop lost to early blight we didn't detect in time, and a maize block that failed in a drought we had no 6-week warning of — we concluded that the tools we needed did not exist. Every precision agriculture platform on the market was calibrated for US Midwest or European conditions, priced for large commercial farms, and assumed infrastructure that does not exist in rural Nigeria. We started building CropSentinel for ourselves. When it worked on our farm, we opened it to others.
If you want to procure our produce, partner on our products, or simply understand how we built what we built — we want to hear from you.