In my last piece, I wrote about how traders and consumers often act as the real buyers in agriculture. Their preferences, what sells, what fetches premium, what is required in bulk shape what gets grown by the farmers.
But that’s only one part of the system. If you shift the lens from building for the market to empowering farmers on the ground, the story becomes more complex.
Farmers don’t resist change because they’re stubborn. They resist it because they’ve learned to be careful. With limited margins, high risk, and often no fallback, they adopt tools only when they’re useful, proven, and trusted. A weather app that helps decide when to sow, a neighbor who sees better yield after using a soil test and that’s what moves them.
Information, when accessible and actionable, makes them confident. Not because they’re being “pulled” by the market, but because they see value in their own terms. The agricultural system is not a straight line from consumer to trader to farmer. It’s a dynamic web.
Farmers make decisions based on subsidies, local prices, water availability, and peer behavior. Traders respond to what’s produced. Governments quietly shape the direction through policy. And consumers rarely see the full picture.
So yes, in business terms, the buyer is often someone downstream. But in development terms, the farmer is not passive. They’re navigating constraints, testing options, and influencing outcomes in their own way sometimes visibly, sometimes subtly.
They may not pull the demand but they hold up the system. If Part 1 was about following the money, Part 2 is about understanding the ground. Traders and consumers may pull demand they shape what gets bought. But farmers carry the weight, they decide what’s possible, sustainable, and worth the risk.
In agriculture, it’s not about who leads and who follows. It’s about how value flows and how choices are made across a system that’s part market, part habit, part survival.
Cheers!
PS: Farmer lens
Check out the previous post: So… What’s Next?
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