SA’s Divisi is helping farmers know what to grow, when, and how

**South African agri-tech startup Divisi is a farm management platform that helps smallholder farmers know what to grow, when and how, in order to minimise losses and consistently achieve high yields. **

Founded this year by Isaac Chikutukutu, Divisi computes agronomy for one farmer’s actual field, rather than their district. A farmer adds the field’s boundaries once, and from there the app scores over 70 crops against that exact plot’s soil, climate history and terrain, works out when the planting window opens and closes, and turns the crop cycle into dated jobs.

Under the hood is the FAO’s Global Agro-Ecological Zones methodology — a suitability cascade refined by agronomic researchers since the 1980s, which cuts a crop’s potential back step-by-step by temperature through the growing cycle, water against crop demand, soil chemistry, and terrain.

“It is deterministic – the same field and the same crop parameters return the same answer every time, and every score names the factor that limited it. No part of a recommendation is generated by a language model. That kind of analysis has existed for decades for anyone with a GIS workstation and a budget. What hasn’t existed is that computation on a smallholder’s phone, telling them what to do on a Tuesday,” Chikutukutu told Disrupt Africa.

Start with the farmer. Most smallholders have no formal agricultural training and no reliable way to know what to plant, when, or how.

“So a season is closer to a coin flip than a plan. The weather information they do get is broadcast – forecasts pitched at a whole province, El Niño coverage on the evening news. Too broad to act on, and functioning as entertainment rather than information. So people copy whoever did well last year, and follow the herd,” Chikutukutu said.

“Then the records. Paper is fragile, admin is nobody’s favourite job, and most farmers finish a season without knowing which crop is profitable or whether they made money. That absence of information affects the entire value chain. An agri-financier looking at a farmer with no training credentials, no verifiable production history and no financial record has no way to price the risk — so they price it high, or they don’t lend at all.”

Divisi looks to fix all that – helping farmers increase their yields, demonstrate their performance, and access finance to grow. One month since its launch, it already has 500 active users, and is now looking for a research institution, NGO or development agency to run a trial with it.

“We’ll open the methodology, the parameter tables and the anonymised data to make it possible,” said Chikutukutu.

Divisi is totally self-funded.

“No outside capital, nothing raised. The past year went into building rather than fundraising — I wanted a product worth showing before asking anyone for anything. That changes now – we’re currently making grant applications and pursuing B2B customers in parallel so we can scale our impact and help mitigate against ElNino risk in the upcoming season,” said Chikutukutu.

He believes Divisi has global potential.

“Africa is the focus and SADC is where the roots are, but the tool works anywhere by design. The engine runs on global soil databases, global climate reanalysis and global elevation models, so there’s no country-by-country data acquisition step between us and a new market — most agronomy tools have to buy or build a soil dataset per country, which is what makes their expansion slow and expensive. If a farmer in Peru or India adds a field tonight, and they have, the cascade runs,” Chikutukutu said.

The startup had built paid tiers before it launched, but chose to remove them.

“Farmers never pay — every feature free, permanently, and we don’t sell farmer data,” Chikutukutu said. “Revenue comes from B2B Divisi Partner programme – outgrower schemes, agro-processors, exporters, input suppliers, agri-finance and insurers pay per active enrolled farmer for consented visibility into fields they already work with. Government, extension services, research institutions and registered NGOs get access for free.”

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