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In a world that seems anything but exempt from technology, it can be easy to forget that plenty of people don’t have access to the information we so often take for granted. Checking the week’s forecast or reading up on market trends may not take more than an opening of an app, but for over 500 million farmers worldwide, it’s not as simple.
Golden-based global health and agricultural company aWhere is out to change that. Originally created in 1999, aWhere was an agricultural climatology consulting company, but pivoted to a cloud-based SaaS company in 2008 when it rebranded and renamed. Despite the founders and several others having experience and backgrounds in agriculture, aWhere was mainly concerned with the consumer packaged goods industry until realizing its best value was as agricultural software company. In this industry, aWhere could help solve a bigger problem; aWhere could be part of a bigger purpose. With this final pivot, aWhere hit its sweet spot.
“Our focus is now entirely on providing our online platform and agricultural smart content to the agricultural value chain,” said COO Dave Lundberg. aWhere works globally to address the information gap, collaborating with clients and projects impacting small and large farmers and organizations across Africa, South Asia and the United States.
Apps have been built in the past targeting some of the same issues aWhere addresses (like lack of data for farmers), but they are focused more on U.S. farmers. Reaching the 500 million farmers outside of the U.S. is where the challenge lies.
“Our smart content provides real-time, hyper-local information to farmers to help them make better, evidence-based decisions for their specific operations,” said Lundberg. aWhere offers aggregate views of local conditions, giving rural farmers a better look at important factors – weather, disease or pest pressures, crop status, food security, and project investments – that play a major role in producing a crop.
Used by international development organizations, farm service providers and commercial growers to ensure this information lands in the hands of necessary parties, aWhere can dispense information as simply as basic mobile technologies like SMS. aWhere also uses intermediaries to deliver the data for better understanding amongst some farmers.
aWhere is changing the way farmers get the information they need to feed their families, their neighbors and the world. It’s a tall order, but someone has to do it.
