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M-Farm is a Kenyan agri-tech company that sends smallholder farmers market prices and connects them to buyers, mostly through simple phone messages.
M-Farm is a Kenyan company that helps smallholder farmers figure out what their crops are worth and who might buy them. It does this mainly through a text-message service: a farmer sends a short code by phone and gets back current market prices for crops like maize, beans, or tomatoes, plus a way to reach buyers. The whole point is to fix a frustrating everyday problem for farmers — that the person selling a sack of maize often has less information about prices than the trader standing in front of them.
For a smallholder farmer, that information gap is the difference between a fair deal and getting squeezed. M-Farm acts as a cheap middleman for knowledge: it gathers market prices and buyer leads and pushes them out over SMS, so it works on the most basic feature phone and not just a smartphone. Farmers pay a small fee for the service, and the business also makes money through buyer-matching and agricultural supply links — connecting farmers not just to people who want their crops, but to inputs like seeds and fertilizer. The company is based in Kenya and was founded in 2010 by Jamila Abass, Susan Oguya, and Linda Kwamboka, who built it around the idea that a simple phone can carry useful market power. It sits in the crowded field of African agri-tech, where everyone from mobile network operators to trading platforms is trying to be the bridge between farmers and buyers, but M-Farm's bet has always been that simplicity and reach matter more than fancy apps.
The hard part of this business is not the idea — it's the grind. Prices have to be collected constantly and accurately, farmers have to trust the texts, and buyers have to actually show up. That makes M-Farm a small, practical tool rather than a giant, and its value depends on whether the information it sends really helps farmers earn more than the fee they pay.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026