01/07/2020
A BRIEF BY AZOLIBE PETER CHIESOLO ON AZODFARMS' AGRIBUSINESS VALUE-CHAIN OPTIMIZATION MISSION
Today’s global agribusiness environment has seen a technological advancement in areas of production and marketing. Individuals and firms of influence in agriculture are no more mere farmers and farms but those who understand, appreciate and practice agricultural value-chain optimization.
Unfortunately, Africa as a continent is not sufficiently endowed in areas of optimum productivity, adequate value-chain optimization and sufficient technological utilization in the agribusiness sector. These pose major challenge to the future of Africa’s food security and agribusiness development.
Somewhat unlike other business sectors, agriculture in Africa is a tricky industry which has the capability of draining an investor’s investment. This normality could be partially correlated with the mindset “since everyone eats, food producers and dealers can’t lose”. Most local agro-investors believe that agricultural ventures should fetch enormous outputs and profits without course.
Agricultural investments possess their strengths and weaknesses and the only roadmap towards a successful and sustainable agro-venture is improving ones strength while mitigating it’s weaknesses. Now, challenges in running an efficient agribusiness in Africa are enormous and could range from biological nature of food production and it’s seasonality, weather uncertainty, variable market conditions, rurality of production agriculture and others.
Food is a product. A product involves series of processes from inputs to outputs. In food production (i.e animal husbandry and crop production), inputs in the form of seed, breeding stock, feed, manure and agro-chemicals are invested into nature whereby they go through biological processes and at the end, gives a product (food or agro raw-material). These processes pose range of challenges while managing an agrobusiness. In agro production processes, a manager has to be concerned with how to source raw-materials economically and efficiently, how to invest it’s firm’s resources and how best to market their products.
Due to seasonality, most foods and agro raw-materials cannot be produced all round the year unless under modern technological developments (irrigation systems); i.e, seasonality leads to frustrations in food and agro raw-material supply and hence, variations in cost of food and agro inputs.
During food production, weather variations in the form of wind, humidity, rainfall etc has it’s role to play in field agro-production (both positive and negative).
Now, after production, what next? Any production without market is as good as useless. Marketing deals with understanding one’s customer segments, their demand/need/want and satisfying these customers effectively, efficiently and economically. Bad marketing strategy most times translates to no business.
Over 90% of every agro-products and raw-materials have their primary source from rural areas of a nation. These rural areas have limited societal amenities, wide range of free farmlands being dedicated to food production and very less human population and diversity.
Generally, the basic work in agribusiness is to understand the effect of these factors on ones agro-venture and how best to manage them efficiently. Understanding these principles is pre-requisite towards appreciating agribusiness value-chain.
What is agribusiness value-chain? An interconnection of all the industries involved in getting food from mother-earth down to the table of the consumer. Think of the processes involved in getting the bread, noodles or snacks one probably ate this morning from a wheat farm to table.
Our main goal in Azodfarms is to understand our prefered agro-products’ value-chain, note areas of possible challenges, seek solutions and solve them economically to ensure efficient operation.
From experience, agribusiness have four main categories which falls within the food value-chain. Those categories encompass the production agriculture/faming, waste management and utilization, food-chain services and marketing, and input supplies. The input supply category as the name implies supplies the agro-input needed for production to farmers and factories who produce agro-products for the food service category. In the end, the food service category makes the agro-products desirable and reachable for the final consumer.
Waste management and utilization involves the conversion of wastes from agro-operations into a marketable and desirabl product to reduce nuisancy and pollution in our dear environment.
To sum up, I humbly present to you ‘Azodfarms’. Azordfarms is an agribusiness firm that has interest and mission of being one of the leading agro-research and development private firm across Africa, as well as a trusted market-driven dealer on agro-inputs and agro-products. We as a firm visualizes a conceptual agribusiness ecosystem where food producers can obtain the best agro-inputs and extension services needed for an efficient farm/factory operation and at the same respect, act as a mediator between production farmers and potential agro-markets/other stakeholders.
Azodfarms is positioned to be an agribusiness value-chain optimization firm. We research on agro-challenges in our areas of operation and solve them economically.
As a firm, Azodfarms is categorically structured into three main parts; viz, production farming, agro-mills and logistics, and food-chain services. Our production sector encompasses farming of broilers, swines and vegetables (garden egg and pepper). Under favourable development conditions, we have interest in grain mills and logistics, vegetable oil mills, and animal feed production. We also grant agro-services to clients in the form of sensitization on best agro-practices that guarantees bountiful outputs while mitigating agro-risks.
Conclusively, our end goal is to market agro-inputs to agro-practitioners, act as a mediator between food producers and potential agro-markets/stakeholders and also, establish economically viable agro-ventures. We operate our business while adhering to our economic, social and environmental responsibility for our nation, client, industry and selves.
Azodfarms manager
Chiesolo Peter Azolibe
