Southern Sorghum Membership

For the past 3 years we have been working with smallholders in Southern Zambia to enable them to adapt to climate change. We provide everything they need to grow & sell drought tolerant crops: seeds, fertilizer - and most importantly market access. We are focused on Sorghum: an indigenous, African grain that is naturally adapted to irregular rainfall. We provide farmers with a seed & fertilizer loan at the start of the season and guarantee to buy their crop at harvest.

We have "bootstrapped" the business for the past 3 years, investing our own savings while we refined our approach and built trust with farmers, but we now have a system that works and more farmers than we can support with our savings alone. We believe that a business is the best approach to support smallholders. We have spent decades working on NGO projects and have seen first-hand the limitations of this traditional approach: short time-frames, a focus on input provision rather than market access and a relentless drive to maximise the number of farmers by providing the minimum amount of inputs.

We are looking for 100 members to join us and enable us to provide 100 smallholders with seeds for a combination of crops that enable crop rotation & support soil health: sorghum, sunflower & cowpea. We will provide enough seed for farmers to cultivate ±4 ha as well as a small quantity of fertilizer for the sorghum crop. We hope to use SMS to provide every farmer with agronomy advice & track the progress of their crop throughout the season.

In return for your membership we will provide regular updates throughout the season.