Root Capital

Spoke with Andrea Montoya and Claudio Castro Badilla on Mar 8.

The purpose was to compare notes on our respective work and see if there are any points of intersection.

We agreed to a few followups:

• DG to share more info on Farmstack and consent manager. RC interested in how cooperatives who are using their Digital Business Intelligence and Cultivar platform can better integrate data from various sources (eg, climate risk indicators from CIAT) and share cooperative data with stakeholders (right now, the cooperatives just share a dashboard with summary info with their coffee buyers and there may be a better way to share their data)

• RC to share info on their soil regeneration loan. This is a new product where the proceeds are used by farmer groups to fund projects that improve soil fertility over a multi-year duration. This is active in Central America. Another product that is being piloted is a loan for solar panels in Kenya

• DG to share info on multi-channel advisory. RC is working with PxD to send advisories over SMS in E Africa and are intrigued about our experience doing advisories over Whatsapp, IVR, etc.

Some additional notes

• RC mostly works w coffee cooperatives, extending to cocoa and macadamia

• Their starting point was to digitize the member surveys/inspections that cooperatives were doing to maintain their certification. So, there was already someone in the cooperative responsible for this work and the need for data collection was well established, RC provided tools to digitize an existing paper based process

• RC’s Digital Business Intelligence tool is basically a dashboard that used by farmer cooperatives to manage their business (some elements of the dashboard look like KDE but RC’s is more robust). Cultivar is more a back-end data integration tool. See one-pagers below.

  • Trying to drive the cooperative towards more data driven decision making using the BI dashboard (eg, go beyond checking the box on certifications); for example have a chart that shows volume of coffee collected during harvest compared vs buyer contracts

  • Want to layer in additional services to the dashboard by integrating datasets via Cultivar. Example, is showing some climate vulnerability information based on info provided by a risk assessment model from CIAT (who is a technical partner); also looking at integrating weather forecasts and historical patterns

  • Technical Assistance Monitoring: The cooperative has an agronomist who visits farmer members and collects data. Use this to decide who needs followup and technical assistance. RC wants to digitize collection of this info and monitor followup process; this would also make it easier for cooperative agronomist to share info with other experts like RC’s own agronomists or others

• Coffee quality is obviously critical and right now cooperative members don’t have visibility to the final cupping score; RC exploring opportunities here. Reminds me a bit of our work with Agnext sharing grade / quality assessment reports back with farmers (and linking with management practices they can employ to improve)

• Pilot with Sustainable Food Lab where cooperatives are capturing data via RC which is used to generate GHG emission estimates from CoolFarmTool. The idea is that growers with strong environmental credentials will be able to leverage this info for better pricing; the cooperatives RC work with practice agroforestry and other management practices and they expect this to show up in the CFT emission estimates (though not quite sure what they are using as a benchmark for emissions to demonstrate improvement)

• I asked about data ownership but didn’t get a super clear answer, we can followup on this in future calls