Secha Capital and Hassium Capital have made a large equity investment in FarmTrace, a South African agri-tech farm solution.

Based in Tzaneen, Limpopo and Stellenbosch, Western Cape, FarmTrace, is the only cloud-based farm management tool that offers a diverse range of tools to help farmers manage their operations.

The FarmTrace software integrates all production activities into a single management platform and this digital data aggregation enables farmers to monitor and control their operations from anywhere in the world.

“We’ve met with many agritech companies that treated agriculture as a homogenous sector and were not built with the farmer in mind. The FarmTrace team knows the key pain points in farming operations and developed a solution to solve them,” said Brendan Mullen, Managing Director of Secha Capital.

“FarmTrace becomes the backbone to farming operations, a vertical operating system which integrates across all data and processes on the farm. FarmTrace is uniquely positioned to grow as farmers adopt technology in their farming and business practices,” he added.

Howard Saffy, Managing Director of Hassium Capital: “We met FarmTrace three years ago when they worked with a number of local macadamia and citrus farms. The feedback from the farmers was incredible; this is a great, simple solution to help transition farms into the digital age. The system provides management with an accurate, holistic, and live view of their full farming operation to improve yields and increase efficiencies across all aspects of the farm.”

“The team has done an amazing job in building a highly satisfied client base across a variety of horticulture crops, working hand-in-hand with farmers to develop solutions to meet their exact needs. We are excited to be able to support them on the journey and look forward to being part of the growth here in South Africa and beyond,” he added.

The FarmTrace software management solution helps farmers modernise their operations. Farmers delight in the customization the system offers as it fits into their existing processes, rather than forcing them to change what they have already developed. FarmTrace digitises farmers’ manual practices into actionable data and makes them more efficient, productive and profitable.

Modern farming is evolving rapidly, through increased demand, changes in best practices or regulation – all of which require the modern farm manager to keep up to date with the latest data on their farm.

However, most farms have yet to implement a modern solution as 80% of South African crops do not touch software before the farm gate. Farmers adopt FarmTrace because it is not from Silicon Valley but because it was built by farmers, for farmers.

Jacques du Plessis, FarmTrace co-founder and CEO, said: “FarmTrace started in 2015 and we have boot-strapped exponential growth by working intimately with our clients to solve their needs. We have a long back-log of interested farms, so we decided to raise capital to accelerate our growth and meet the needs of more farmers by hiring additional software developers, engineers, project managers and implementation consultants.”

This investment and partnership will not only ensure that FarmTrace can help farmers profitably position their operations for generations to come, it also unlocks sustainable growth in the local agribusiness sector by increasing exports, increasing local employment and reducing food waste.

Werner Lategan, FarmTrace co-founder and COO, added: “With this capital, FarmTrace will bring about the next wave of farming cost savings, yield and efficiency improvements. We will serve more farms, more products and more geographies and ensure that we can help farms grow sustainably and profitably.”