Safi Organics : Un engrais qui change la vie des agriculteurs au Kenya

Safi Organics Fertilizer
Engrais Safi Organics

Safi Organics, une entreprise dérivée du MIT, utilise les résidus de récolte pour fabriquer des engrais organiques afin d’aider les agriculteurs du Kenya à améliorer le rendement de leurs terres. Crédit : avec l’aimable autorisation de Safi Organics

MIT spinout Safi Organics uses farmers’ crop residue to make an organic fertilizer that can increase yields and improve soil health.

Most commercial fertilizer travels a long way before it reaches rural farmers in Kenya. Transportation costs force many farmers to rely on cheap, synthetic fertilizers, which can lead to the acidification and degradation of their soil over time.

The situation amounts to a multigenerational crisis as elders have watched their crop yields dwindle over the course of decades.

Now Safi Organics is using a technology honed at MIT’s D-Lab to make organic fertilizer that can help restore such farmlands. The fertilizer is made locally using the residue from crops after harvest.

Safi buys crop residue like rice husks from the farmers and processes it nearby before selling it back to farmers at competitive prices. The company says its fertilizer has been shown to reduce the acidification of soil and increase crop yields by up to 30 percent after a single planting cycle.

Safi Organic Fertilizer

Today each of Safi’s facilities can produce fertilizer for thousands of farmers up to 20 miles away. Additionally, because Safi’s biochar is rich in inert carbon, when it’s used as fertilizer, it is sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Credit: Courtesy of Safi Organics

That’s a life-changing increase for farmers who rely on their crops to survive. Farmers have used the additional crop sales to feed their families, send their children to school, and gain financial independence.

“Safi is decentralizing fertilizer production such that it can be carried out in rural villages for the first time,” Safi co-founder and chief technology officer Kevin Kung SM ’13, PhD ’17 says.

The company has been working with farmers in Kenya since 2015. More than 5,000 farmers have purchased Safi Organics’ fertilizer to date. Kung says those farmers have reported a total increase of $800,000 in earnings from increased crop yields.

Now Safi is seeking to bring its model to India and other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

A long journey

By the end of 2012, Kung had spent upward of three years on a research project to turn organic waste like crop residue from villages in Africa into charcoal for cooking fuel. Over the course of those efforts, Kung received support from the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Fellowship, the MIT Tata Center, the MIT Legatum Center, and the MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge program.

Unfortunately, a series of failed pilot projects left him searching for a sustainable business model as his team of MIT students slowly disbanded. So Kung decided to use some of his funding to travel to Kenya in the summer of 2013 and partner with a local collaborator.

After making a job description, he was contacted by an agribusiness manager named Samuel Rigu. With Kung’s PhD work ongoing, he hired Rigu to run operations in Kenya as he returned to MIT at the end of the summer.

Soon after Rigu began heading the project, Kung began to appreciate his business mind.

Rigu learned that the charcoal they were making could also be used as fertilizer for growing crops if combined with other nutrients. The epiphany paved the way for localized fertilizer production that would offer advantages over the high cost of imported synthetic fertilizers.

Rigu knew the downside of cheap, synthetic fertilizers well: He’d grown up in a poor rural farming community and remembered his grandmother weeping as she spoke about the family’s land gradually losing its vitality.

Kung was skeptical about producing fertilizer, but Rigu convinced him to try out the idea with a small group of farmers. When harvest season came, some of the farmers using the formulation nearly doubled their yields (pH tests later showed the fertilizer helped combat the acidification caused by other farming techniques). Rigu and Kung watched with amazement as the extra income set off ripple effects in the community: Impoverished farmers used the extra funds to send their children to school and further improve their farms.

The founders decided to set up a company selling the soil formulation. They called it Safi Organics.

Today each of Safi’s production facilities can provide fertilizer for thousands of farmers up to 20 miles away. Additionally, because Safi’s biochar is rich in inert carbon, when it’s used as fertilizer, it is sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, Kung’s PhD evolved into a project to build low-cost, portable biomass conversion systems to be deployed in rural areas like the small farms Safi works with. He says his involvement with Safi helped keep his PhD work relevant to real-world challenges.

“[Safi] a commencé comme un projet du MIT”, dit Kung. “Mais nous avons dû apprendre à faire participer les partenaires locaux et à reconnaître que, parfois, ce sont eux qui vont devenir les champions de ces initiatives, pas nécessairement nous, et qu’ils auront le dernier mot sur la direction des choses.”

Partenariats pour l’impact

Les perturbations de la chaîne d’approvisionnement causées par Covid-19 ont fait des engrais fabriqués localement par Safi un élément vital de la vie des agriculteurs. Kung affirme que l’entreprise a vendu plus de 40 tonnes d’engrais rien que l’année dernière.

Cette année, l’équipe de Safi espère apporter son modèle à d’autres parties du monde où les agriculteurs ruraux paient trop cher des engrais bon marché. L’entreprise commence des études en Tanzanie et en Ouganda pour voir si les partenaires locaux peuvent créer des entreprises durables par eux-mêmes. Le modèle est également reproduit par un autre groupe en Inde avec des agriculteurs du nord du Punjab, qui ont différents types de résidus de culture à traiter.

Pour Kung, le succès de Safi a montré la valeur de l’habilitation des partenaires locaux à prendre des décisions commerciales pour les communautés qu’ils connaissent si bien.

“Au départ, j’étais assez sceptique quant à l’idée même de ce projet. [of pivoting to fertilizer]”, dit Kung. “Je ne pensais pas que c’était faisable. Mais l’équipe locale m’a vraiment prouvé que j’avais tort et a validé l’amélioration du rendement et l’impact sur les agriculteurs. Pour moi, ce fut un parcours inspirant.”

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