Drylands Farms

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City: Laren

State: Noord-Holland

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Country: The Netherlands

Drylands Farms was founded because we saw the detrimental effects of climate change on farms and food supply chains across Africa first-hand during our years of working and traveling across the continent. These effects combined with rapid urbanisation create great challenges for local populations and fantastic opportunities for an innovative approach able to bridge the technology gap between European and African farming. Our aim is to create a sustainable, high value agriculture system using controlled environment agriculture (CEA) that is resilient to the effects of climate change and dramatically increases the output of the available land. Luckily, Africa has one key resource in abundance: Sunlight. This means that our farms can achieve excellent yields year-round, at an affordable price. Besides presenting investors with an excellent investment opportunity and contributing to food security, Drylands Farms has many additional benefits such as import substitution, significant job creation and capacity building in the field of modern horticultural operations, as well as productive utilisation of marginal land. Drylands seeks to address several problems prevalent across sub-Saharan Africa today such as: Rapid urbanisation without access to fresh produce The majority of Africans rely on starchy staple crops like maize, cassava, rice, and plantain as the dominant part of their diet. A lack of fresh produce and protein-rich vegetables is affecting health already leading to obesity, vascular diseases and type 2 diabetes under the urban population. Water shortages and droughts will be more frequent Climate change is affecting rainfall volumes, patterns and evaporation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Globally no region has been more affected by this change than SSA; Several droughts have hit the continent in recent times, affecting agriculture yields significantly, bankrupting farmers and causing widespread famine and increase in food prices. Arable land is declining and forests are disappearing Food production growth in SSA is caused by increasing acreage of farmland (by cutting down forests), not by improving yield – in fact, yields seem to be declining. In addition, desertification and land degradation due to archaic farm practices and climate change poses a huge challenge for sustainable and adequate food production. Food production not keeping with up with population growth Throughout the continent agricultural output is already low, and not growing as fast as the population. This is due to widespread use of outdated farming practices, subdivision of land over generations leading to highly inefficient smallholdings of ever decreasing size, and a focus on low value staple crops which deplete the soil to reduce yields further. In addition, the effects of climate change such as drought and plagues further exacerbate the problem. Finally, due to the inefficient distribution, as much as 50% of harvested produce is lost before it reaches consumers. In summary, fresh produce is not readily available in many places, and with increasing climate change this problem will only be exacerbated. What is required is a comprehensive approach to tackle horticultural production in a way that reduces risk and improves consistency of supply and quality of produce.

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