It’s Tuesday, and today we’re covering Complete Farmer, a Ghanaian company aiming to improve farmers’ livelihoods across Africa. Founded by Desmond Koney, its latest investment round was led by the EU-funded AgriFI. Previous backers include, VestedWorld, Alitheia Capital, Proparco, Alphamundi, Global Social Impact Investment, Goodwell Investments, SAHEL Capital, and the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund.
The Context
A month ago, I wrote about Winich Farms, a Nigerian company building a marketplace for local farmers and off-takers. It’s a fascinating business, and while researching it, I got a closer look at the challenges farmers face just to produce a harvest.
Ghana is different in some ways, but many of these struggles are the same.
Agriculture might not seem central to Ghana’s economy at first glance, contributing 18.3% of GDP and 12% of exports. But the sector’s internal impact is significant. Ghana is the third-largest exporter of cocoa, and farming employs 35% of the workforce. Most farmers are smallholders — 90% of them — producing 90% of the country’s food supply.
But feeding a nation doesn’t always pay. Between 35% and 45% of cocoa farmers live below the poverty line, and up to 90% don’t earn a living income. Other estimates suggest 33% of all farmers are in poverty. Complete Farmer’s own data shows 77% survive on less than $3.65 per day — well above the 24% national average.
Why the discrepancies? Several reasons:
Knowledge access. A survey by Complete Farmer showed that before engaging with the company, 63% of farmers had never had access to similar offerings, including training. That training is usually delivered by agents. As in many other countries, both developed and developing, Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture employsextension agents — advisers who translate research and policy into practical, farm-level guidance by training farmers, advising on pest control and input application, and linking them to programs, markets, and finance. The problem is scale: there is just one agent per 706 farmers, which limits knowledge dissemination. On top of that, only about 30% of rural dwellers own a smartphone, making digital access to information difficult. This helps explain why advanced practices are slow to spread: only 21% of farmers test their soil, and most have not adopted crop rotation.
Credit access. Financing is a challenge for farmers worldwide, and Ghana is no exception. Smallholder farmers in the country have trouble accessing credit, as traditional financial institutions are often reluctant to lend to them due to the perceived risks of agriculture. As a result, only 14% of farmers have access to credit — and even then, loans are most often financed by relatives, friends, neighbours, or traders, not banks. Cost is another barrier: one study found that maize farmers face 29–40% interest rates when borrowing from banks, while microfinance loans can carry an even heavier burden — up to 60% over a six-month period.
Nature troubles. Data from Complete Farmer’s survey showed that over a 24-month period, 75% of farming communities experienced irregular weather, 59% faced pest outbreaks, 26% battled droughts, and just 18% had no nature-related issues. While such challenges are common in agriculture, they are harder to manage without the right knowledge — for example, how to adjust irrigation during prolonged rainfall or how to apply pesticides without damaging crops. Even with the knowledge, a lack of capital often prevents farmers from acting.
Inputs quality: While Ghana performs better than Nigeria, it still lags far behind the global average in fertilizer use — 24 kg per hectare annually versus 113 kg globally. Quality is another issue: government data shows that between 25% and 35% of agrochemicals imported into the country are fake or banned. This directly affects yields. For maize, Ghana’s average yieldis 2.78 t/ha, compared to 6.35 t/ha in South Africa and 11.25 t/ha in the U.S.
On the buyer’s side, most problems are supply-chain related. With a market dominated by smallholder farms, centralizing purchases is difficult, and middlemen emerge to fill the gap. Because farms are not technologically advanced, buyers cannot easily verify product quality — there’s simply not enough data. As Koney explains:
…Big food buyers — there are certain quality specifications that they have that these farmers do not even know about or even know how to meet. So for example if…[an] FMCG is looking for soybeans to produce baby food there's certain protein content there's certain characteristics of that soybean they look out for, so that they can have consistency in their products that they sell on the market. Most of our farmers may know how to grow soy beans but may not know how to meet some of these specifications
There’s also the issue of time. If buyers don’t get the raw materials they need on schedule, their production stalls. That hurts margins in two ways: the company loses sales because the end product isn’t delivered, and fixed costs are under-utilized, driving up the cost of each unit produced.
To summarize, farmers struggle to grow quality food products and earn a sustainable income, while buyers lack reliable information about what they’re purchasing and from whom. With that in mind, let’s now turn to what Complete Farmer is doing about it.
The Product
Complete Farmer is a platform that helps farmers improve yields and quality by providing standardized crop protocols, inputs, training, and post-harvest support. It does all this with a single overarching goal:
That last point is critical — we’ll dive deeper into why it matters in the business model section.
For now, let’s look at how the company evolved and what the product looks like today.
How it Started
Complete Farmer launched in 2018 as a crowdfunding platform where users could invest in sustainable farms and monitor agricultural activities remotely. But when the pandemic hit, crowdfunding lost its appeal for investors, and the company pivoted — this time to operating its own farm.
It acquired a 4,000-acre property producing chili peppers, sweet potatoes, and other crops. During this period, Complete Farmer developed its own cultivation protocols aimed at boosting yields. Thanks to founder Desmond Koney’s engineering background, the focus wasn’t just on farming more efficiently, but on standardizing processes so they could be repeated and scaled.
While running a farm had value — it gave the company firsthand insight into the problems farmers face — it was neither highly scalable nor especially attractive to investors.
Instead, combining all that experience with Koney’s engineering tendencies, it led to what Complete Farmer is today.
How it’s Going
Since its transition to the new model, the company’s focus has been on connecting farmers and buyers. The goal is to deliver to the market — specifically the buyer — agricultural products that meet defined quality standards and specifications. To make that possible, Complete Farmer has built an ecosystem of products centered around three core solutions:
CF Grower — a farmer-oriented platform aimed at both newcomers looking to start a farm and existing farm owners. CF Grower provides:
Land acquisition — access to a marketplace of farmland available for lease, targeted at new farmers.
Training — at the heart of the product are standardized farming protocols designed to ensure consistent quality and improve yields. Farmers receive daily recommendations and voice messages explaining how to apply them. If a farmer lacks a smartphone, an agent can assist. Recommendations are informed by data from sensors, EOS satellite imagery, and on-the-ground agents, enabling the company to monitor soil quality, water levels, crop health, and more. This allows for timely interventions — for example, reschedulingfertilizer application. Farmers can also visit distribution centers for in-person training.
Distribution — assistance with delivering the final product to a distribution center, where it is packaged and exported to foreign buyers.
Management — an option to hire a manager to oversee day-to-day farm operations, useful for those new to farming or wishing to outsource.
CF Transact — a fintech wallet for savings, credit, and payments, currently in beta. Linked to a mobile money account, it allows farmers to pay vendors for inputs, receive buyer payments, and access additional capital for expansion.
CF Storefront — Complete Farmer partners with verified vendors to give farmers access to high-quality inputs at more stable prices. Orders are delivered to the nearest distribution center, helping lower costs further. Recommendations are tailored to each farmer based on their farming protocols, ensuring inputs and services match specific needs. Through CF Storefront — accessible online or via phone —farmers can request inputs, book services like land preparation or harvesting, and lease equipment. For vendors, the platform offers the benefit of aggregated demand, which is usually highly fragmented, along with transparent pricing and payment processes.
CF Buyer — a buyer-focused platform for FMCGs and food processors to source directly from local farmers matched to orders based on crop quality. The system offers market price guidance, price floors and ceilings, and negotiates fair transaction terms. Functioning much like an e-commerce site, buyers can select products, get matched with farmers, and place orders. Since Complete Farmer collects data across the supply chain to ensure quality and traceability, buyers can both track delivery progress and be confident in the final product’s specifications.
Today, the company works with 5,000 farmers, with a goal of reaching 50,000 by 2028. It operates in Ghana and Togo, with planned expansion into Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
The Business Model
Let’s get back to the company’s goal I mentioned earlier — connecting farmers with international buyers.
It might sound straightforward, but as you’ve seen by now, the reality is far more complex.
Complete Farmer pulls five main levers to deliver on that goal:
1. Aggregation. To make the model work, Complete Farmer has to aggregate supply and demand from all sides — farmers, various types of vendors, and buyers. It’s not a pure-play marketplace, but it shares the same dynamics: if one side isn’t present in sufficient numbers, the other side loses interest. Quality assurance is another key part of aggregation: farmers want trusted vendors, and buyers want certified growers
2. Technology infusion. The company uses both general technology (e.g. for building its marketplace) and agri-specific tools (e.g. EOS satellite imagery). They also talk about developing a ChatGPT-like tool, which could be transformative for both the business and the farmers. It could cut the company’s variable costs significantly, while increasing farmers’ information intake by a 100X.
3. Human intermediation. Another core aspect of the model is its network of agents, who serve as on-the-ground link for smallholder farmers — helping them access inputs, place orders, and report on performance, especially for those without smartphones. They provide support from planting to harvest and conduct quality checks before produce is shipped. Unlike government agents, they have a deeper understanding of each farmer’s needs and can dedicate more time, with roughly one agent per 50 farmers compared to 1 per 706 in the public system.
4. Streamlining. Agriculture’s value chain is often tangled and inefficient. The first step is to break it down into its core components The next is to strip away redundant steps and refine each part so it runs smoothly, with minimal intervention.
5. Embeddedness.The market is still in an early stage, so to deliver the value both growers and buyers expect, Complete Farmer has to engage at nearly every point in the value chain. At each step, it adapts to the unique regional environment and tackles new problems as they arise. The further the company integrates, the more robust the value chain becomes and the more resilient the business is.
Two other points are worth noting for understanding how the business works.
First, Complete Farmer takes an industrial approach, with Koney likening the company to a Chinese factory. You see it in the level of integration, the attention to detail, and the push to automate and standardize processes.
Second, the company raises farmer margins while earning revenue itself by focusing on crops with less government involvement and higher margins. By also cutting out middlemen, farmers on the platform earn an average of 22% more than those outside it. Net profit margins for on-platform growers average 52%, compared to just 20% for those selling through middlemen.
Monetization
For now, Complete Farmer takes a 20% commission on the price the buyer pays. With the financing product under development, there are clear opportunities to add new revenue streams in the future.
The Bear Case
Working with international buyers enables higher margins for all parties, but it also introduces a key risk — buyer power. These buyers source globally, always looking for the best available product, so Complete Farmer’s growers — and the company itself — compete on an international, not local, stage.
That means: a) It’s difficult for Complete Farmer to be the exclusive supplier for any one buyer; and b) A buyer can always try to squeeze Complete Farmer’s margins under the threat of switching to another supplier.
If Ghana becomes less competitive in certain commodities, Complete Farmer could lose out not to local rivals, but to producers in entirely different countries.
The Bull Case
Nine out of ten growers who have worked with Complete Farmer say their productivity and profits have increased since joining the platform. Only 16% believe they could easily replace Complete Farmer.
Combine that with the difficulty of building such an ecosystem — and the resulting high switching costs for farmers — and you get a business with the potential for a strong moat as it scales.
All the protocols, access to inputs and services from vetted vendors, stable buyer relationships, and a largely automated sales process all make switching away difficult, and choosing Complete Farmer the easier path.
The Takeaway
I often regret not being able to do this full-time because there’s so much more I could explore, so much more to uncover, that I don’t feel I do the business full justice. Complete Farmer in particular seems to have thought through countless challenges farmers face, including things we might never consider, like farmers not wanting to receive payments via mobile wallets, making Complete Farmer to deliver cash by bike.
Another takeaway for me is that, from a purely business model perspective, agricultural companies are some of the most compelling. It’s remarkable how they operate and what it takes to deliver real value to customers. I’ve mentioned Winich Farms before, but the same applies to Elevarm, Eratani, and Puna Bio.
