January 7, 2015 – Novus Agro Limited, an internationally acclaimed firm involved in agriculture, marketing and research in farm products has commended the Federal Government for investing in agriculture even as oil prices continue to nosedive in the international market.
It noted that government’s intervention has been able to stabilize price of agricultural commodities in Nigeria.
Strategy Manager Novus Agro Limited Mrs. Obiajuru Luya who was speaking at a press conference said diversifying the nation’s economy remains the best option to absorb shocks from falling oil prices.
Luya explained that the Federal Government’s efforts in the agricultural sector has been able to help stabilise prices of agricultural commodities in the country.
“Since inception, Novus Agro has continued to pioneer the use of technology and information to solve critical agricultural value chain challenges.
“Our model is based on the use of a highly trained network of field agents and our proprietary mobile technology platform to provide a last-mile connection between rural farmers and markets.”
Also speaking the Head Business Development Novous Agro Limited Mr. Ibrahim Buwanhot explained that they have been able to collect commodity price data nationally and continuously in 50 markets for over four years.
” Novus Agro has built a price information monitoring system in 50 markets across 20 states in Nigeria. The system tracks prices of at least 25 major commodities on a market day basis from each of these markets. The data collected is rigorously vetted and uploaded to our price information database within hours of being collected.
“Novus Agro’s price information, analysis and trends have been patronized by various key participants in the agro space such as Sahel Capital, Syngenta, Sosaco, Tomato Jos, among others. Our data has also caught the interest of world class organizations such as GEMS,, the World Bank and Accenture. The Central Bank of Nigeria.”
To make more impact in the agricultural sector he added that the firm has also in the past year recruited and trained a network of young, technologically-savvy market facilitators in 142 communities across 10 states in the country.
” We succeeded in making it one of the largest dedicated network of market facilitators in the country. Novus Agro’s facilitators live and work in their communities providing vital commodity aggregation services to farming communities as well as playing a para-extension role to support better yield from farms.
“Novus Agro’s field operations both in price enumeration and market facilitation are reliant on our technology platform that links field operations to our online platform. The system is based on an innovative integration of web and mobile internet, allowing for deployment of first world technology solutions in some of the most remote farming communities in the country. Commodity aggregation and price enumeration is done by Novus Agro’s field agents armed with mobile devices running our custom applications. ”
He further explained that the firms wide network of facilitators and pilot operations across the network has allowed it to develop local insights to available infrastructure, logistics issues and market practices across the communities that they work in.
“Over the past year, Novus Agro has established relationships with various buyers and processors of agricultural commodities in Nigeria. We were able to generate over 40,000MT of demand through our business development effort though fulfilling only 1,000MT of this demand from our network of 6,400 registered farmers under our market test program, ” he added.
