Bradley Opere ’17 is the co-founder of FarmMoja, an agriculture social enterprise in Nairobi, Kenya.

Bradley joined Catalyze to share about what got him interested in the agriculture industry, how FarmMoja is working to rehabilitate land and support smallholder farmers, and why it was important for the alumnus to return to Africa after graduating as a Morehead-Cain Scholar.

For his day job, Bradley is now a consultant at Dalberg. Prior to joining the global consulting firm, he was a young leadership fellow at McKinsey & Company. The entrepreneur co-wrote an article with McKinsey colleagues in the spring of 2020 about the impact of COVID-19 on Africa’s food systems and what governments and private actors can do to respond.

As an undergraduate student at UNC–Chapel Hill, the alumnus was the first student from Africa to be elected student body president.

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Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.

Episode Transcription

(Sarah)

Bradley, thank you so much for speaking with me.

(Bradley)

Pleasure is all mine, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me, too.(Sarah)I’m looking forward to speaking with you about FarmMoja. But first, I wanted to just ask about your day job, working as a consultant. Can you share about what you do and what a normal day might look like for you?

(Bradley)

A day in my life typically is just trying to learn something new about a particular industry and offering new client insight on it. For today, specifically, I spent the whole day at a lime factory doing lime sector analysis. So, my shoes are covered in white limestone, which I absolutely love because it’s consulting and it’s an agricultural project that I’m passionate about.

(Sarah)

Well, I’d love to ask about FarmMoja now. I remember on a recent call you said “Moja” means “one” in Swahili. Can you share with us about the context for starting the startup and why you thought this would be something that you wanted to apply your skills locally?

(Bradley)

Yeah, FarmMoja essentially specializes around developing integrated value chains for transformative long-term agricultural crops. I got extremely interested in agriculture when, right after graduating, I left the U.S. to go start working in South Africa for a company called Pactorum, which is the fund managers for Fairfax Africa. And they were managing private equity funds that they were looking to deploy across different companies. And one of the portfolio companies that had already been acquired was a company called AFGRI. It’s one of the largest agricultural companies in the Southern hemisphere.

During my experience there, I realized just how significant agriculture played a role across the whole continent. In Kenya, specifically, agriculture contributes to about 35 percent of the GDP of the country. I would spend a lot of time looking at spreadsheets on different crops, meeting with different people in the ag industry, and just kind of developed a keen sense for it and a keen passion for it because of just the large numbers of people you could impact in Africa with the industry. And I luckily was taking a flight back home and met one of my childhood friends, Kevin. He was doing avocados, I decided I just wanted to partner with him. That’s kind of how I ended up with FarmMoja.

(Sarah)

So can you tell us about the crops that you are focusing on now and as well as any that you might be moving towards to account for these very different kinds of harvesting timelines?

(Bradley)

The crops we are focused right now on is . . . Our first crop was avocados. The demand and supply gap at the moment for avocados is quite large, and the second crop outside avocados that we’re looking at getting into next is macadamias. Once again, another long-term value crop that takes about four to five years before it gives you its first crop, but fetches extremely premium pricing. The final crop that we’ll be looking to get into as well is also blueberries, which is a bit of a shrub but extremely high margin and life-changing if we can get mass adoption for it due to the demand in export markets.

And all these crops don’t have established value chains yet in East Africa. We do have some players who are doing really well, but the industry is a bit nascent and so it allows you to build everything right up to the processing lines for each of these.

(Sarah)

I’m curious, too, when you were speaking about the Kenyan climate, about just how sensitive these crops might be to a warming climate, and if that is something that might make it, short-term, more favorable or if that is a concern. I’m thinking of coffee beans in Costa Rica and how the climate crisis is already causing a lot of anxiety there for the long-term plan. So I’m curious to hear if that’s also part of the calibration or if these crops are not so sensitive, that they should be fine decades from now.

(Bradley)

Most of the crops that we look at, yes, they are climate sensitive, in the sense that the production levels may vary depending on temperatures, but they are also extremely hardy. Avocados, coffee bushes to an extent, as well as macadamias, are trees. Avocados and macadamias more so, and so they remain extremely resilient to different climatic conditions. However, what does happen is the yields that you have potentially decreases depending on different climatic conditions. And so even though the tree may survive during harsh conditions, your yield, however, may start varying considerably depending on how badly the climate change effects end up being. And so it’s something we are monitoring very closely. California as well, which is a great avocado growing area, has suffered through some of these climate changes, and we’re observing how that’s affecting their production. And so it remains a constant worry, not just for Kenya, but for global food supply. Perhaps diversifying where we are planting our food is one solution.

(Sarah)

Yeah, I remember when we were on a Zoom talking about the company, you shared about some of the sustainability goals that you have and as well as some of the ways that you’re going to go about it, like rehabilitation through trees. And you shared about the link between avocado trees specifically and carbon reduction (which, as a millennial, of course avocados are somewhat self-consciously part of my diet, so was interested to hear that). But can you share more of how you’re thinking, as the co-founder of the startup, where you want to go with sustainability and how you’re organizing your priorities about that?

(Bradley)

First off, the fact that the average macadamia or avocado tree can grow for as long as 20 years is extremely good because it’s a tree and you’re just picking its fruit. So you’re not uprooting it and planting new trees as compared to perhaps wheat or maize every planting season. And that’s really good for soil health, right? Because you’re not taking anything out of the ground for the most part.

Two, we also really big on organic practices across all our farms, and so we try to use very little, if not at all, any fertilizer past the third or the fourth year of the tree establishing itself just to ensure that there’s nothing washing off into any rivers or any places. And also we eat the food ourselves, and we like to go organic as well, just because it’s healthier.

Thirdly, avocados being the tree and having the 20–25 year lifetime, as well as macadamias, also means that they end up growing huge canopies shading the soil underneath and also having a lot of carbon-sequestering ability. And so actually, how business is divided is we do have a particular unit that’s focused on developing more commercial orchards. And just this coming year, we’ll probably be putting about 9,500 to 10,000 trees, which will be rehabilitating a former wheat farm and helping to create reforestation within an area that’s just lost a lot of trees. And we’re thinking that providing trees that can offer such economic value to locals who are close to forested areas is a long-term solution, because if you don’t offer them any economic value for their land, then they’re going to chop down the trees next to where they live. And so it’s an extremely appealing . . . it’s an extremely appealing proposition for us to help increase smallholder farmer income ability, which would hopefully then allow them to more actively participate in keeping more trees in the forests because they have more income.

(Sarah)

I’d also like to ask about some of the future plans that you have. You shared about a big investment from ADAP Capital, as well as a matching grant. So, share about the initiative and what you’re going to use the funds for.

(Bradley)

Raising funding, especially in Kenya, is an extremely difficult thing. You often are having to speak to investors around the world, some of whom may not necessarily have the nuances and the understanding around how the continent works and the different nuances around specific countries.

And so we are passionate about being part of entrepreneurs who can help pave this, especially within agriculture. We got our first funding from ADAP Capital, which was $75,000. That really helped us kickstart a good number of the farming operations that we’re doing, from building our nursery to establishing our commercial orchard and helping our smallholder farmer unit begin their harvest period.

We also then got access to a matching grant based off of that funding from the Anzisha prize in South Africa of $50,000. And that’s then going to help us further build on the establishment of a commercial orchard, set up the appropriate irrigation systems, as well as expand on our nursery, which is having extreme demand in terms of our seedling production. It’s currently at a capacity of 20,000, and we can’t satisfy the demand that we’re having for that.

We are working to attract additional capital and absorb up to $500,000 over the next two years. And this will also allow us to set up a pack house. This will then allow us to do direct exports of our crops from Kenya to different countries that we’re looking to establish partnerships with, and that allows us to fetch premium prices and offer our farmers additional money, as well as our plans are underway to get the relevant organic certification that’s needed so that the fruit can also fetch premium pricing. So that’s the short-term plan. We’re still hitting the road, and yeah, it’s a discouraging road sometimes, but it’s also fun sometimes when you get the big win, but slow but sure, we’ll get there.

(Sarah)

Sounds like you certainly have a lot of momentum going right now. I want to return to what you said about how there is sometimes a difficulty in sharing with investors the kind of startups there are in Kenya. Can you share a little bit of what you meant by that and how you kind of help them understand what you’re trying to pitch in order to be able to receive that funding?

(Bradley)

We try very much to really deeply find champions within our networks, who have had some experience in the continent, who had experience investing, and are now on our advisory board, who can help us bridge some of these gaps with investors, who may not be familiar but are interested in some of the impact that can be had on the continent.

It’s a question of finding a few champions and communicating extremely clearly on what our goals are and executing unrelentingly on them and having a clean track record that other people can be able to look to and believe because it’s easier to show rather than tell. But it’s a slow process.

We think not just Kenya, but a lot of Africa is a place that a lot of people are waking up to, step by step. We saw companies like FlatAway hit unicorn status and be valued at a billion dollars in the tech scene. Primary agriculture and processing agriculture is a whole other different game altogether that’s perhaps less sexy, but there’s a lot of value as well to be had within the industry, and we’re excited to be scratching the surface and paving the way for that, hopefully.

(Sarah)

I just wanted to close with asking why it was important to you to go back to Kenya, and if you see yourself long term there or what other aspirations you might have.

(Bradley)

It was always important for me to just come back to Africa or Kenya, anywhere around Africa would do for me. I just always firmly believed every time I sat in my classes that a large number of my colleagues were from the U.S., and I thought they were really great, more intelligent than me in many ways. And I was like, a majority of them will spend a good amount of their time improving America and so I felt like America had so much talent for it that I needed to take whatever little I had learnt back home and contribute there, and so I was really happy to come home.

I felt like I would miss out on joining other leaders around the continent who are helping shape and drive things, and I wanted to be part of that story rather than look at it from the outside in. I’m happy to do anything contributing to the continent, even if I end up not working in Africa, specifically. As long as I do a job that’s helping the continent move forward, I’ll probably be happy. I think there’s a lot to be done here so we’ll see how that goes.

(Sarah)

Well, as I’ve been hearing you, it’s amazing to me because each of the things that you’re involved with could easily be more than a full-time job but it’s so clear that you’re making a big impact in the communities that you’re serving. And I really appreciate your time with us so thank you for sharing about your work.

(Bradley)

Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. It definitely is a pleasure for me. Hopefully we are successful and we can get to helping a million farmers in this continent over the next decade or two.

(Sarah)

It feels like I might be jinxing it by saying we hope that you’ll be at the next Alumni Forum or see you in Chapel Hill, but we do hope that you’ll be around at some point in your travels or work.

(Bradley)

I miss Chapel Hill. I need to get myself one of my Carolina jumpers because I’m running out of Carolina gear, so yes to that. Yeah.