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Jehiel Oliver

The biggest contributor to child labor is the agricultural industry because you can't send your kid to school if that kid is hungry. So, when we talk about introducing mechanization, we're not just talking about some cool new app. We're talking about technologies that we take for granted that literally can provide the space for a kid to have the food they need and make time available to go to school which will open up all sorts of new innovations that these young people can now, through education, have access to.

Matt C. Smith

The truth is that humanity can save itself and our planet. And right at this very moment, there’s someone who took on the challenge and is on a path to solving an incredibly tough, global problem. This podcast was created to tell you about them.

You’re listening to Better Heroes, a show from the global EY organization about the untold stories of entrepreneurs devoting their lives to impactful innovation. I’m your host, Matt C Smith.

Many entrepreneurs start their ventures because they don’t feel satisfied in their current roles. Maybe they don’t feel challenged enough, maybe they feel underappreciated, or, like our next guest, they crave purpose!

Jehiel Oliver is the founder and CEO of Hello Tractor. This app helps marginalized farmers in sub-Saharan Africa access tractors. And if it’s not immediately clear how big an impact Hello Tractor is making, don’t worry. This passionate entrepreneur is eager to tell you. Jehiel saw that tractors do way more than increase revenue for smallholder farmers. They improve education, decrease child labor and increase food security. Jehiel recognized all of this and dove in. That is the definition of the entrepreneurial spirit — and of a Better Hero.

Oliver

I started my career in investment banking and I worked in real estate investment banking for five years. And so, leading up to the financial crisis, I really had my own personal career crisis where I was thinking about more interesting ways to apply my time and really fell in love with the microfinance industry and this movement to use commercial finance in interesting ways to reach the base of the pyramid, low-income populations.

Smith

I've come across microfinance too, but can you just, sort of, give us the broader definition of what microfinance actually is?

Oliver

Microfinance includes tiny loans to support low-income individuals in income smoothing. So, like how we use credit cards, people who don't have access to those products can access micro loans. And then, for small business owners, think about, you know, a woman who owns a small shop who needs a $200 loan to buy toilet paper in bulk to then resell it as individual rolls. These are the types of businesses that microfinance supports.

Smith

While working in the finance sector in the US, Jehiel felt himself being pushed in another direction. He developed his knowledge of microfinancing to help low-income populations and then he was off.  

Oliver

I was working in the US as a banker. But then I was volunteering, doing deal structuring work globally for microfinance institutions looking to raise capital and also for investment funds who are looking to deploy capital into these banks, but on a pro bono basis, not being paid for it. And I got the opportunity to do some work full time that coincided with the financial crisis, and that was just the push that I needed to quit that job and take on this new role full time. And I started consulting. I remember what my two-week notice was. You know, I'm stressed out at this job. I don't like it anymore. I'm leaving. I'm going to Afghanistan for my first project in microfinance. And I did that. That stint in my career was an interesting adventure.

Oliver

But what I quickly realized is that microfinance institutions don't often lend in agriculture because of the risks.

Smith

What are the risks?

Oliver

You got what they call covariant risks, which are systemic risks in economics. You have pests like desert locusts, which we just got impacted by here in East Africa. Literally billions of locusts covering an area the size of three New York Cities, converging on these locations and eating the equivalent of what 80 million people eat every single day.

Oliver

Then you also have things like climate risk, which is becoming a bigger challenge. You have flooding and drought. And so, the reason they call them systemic risks is because you're a bank working in Kenya. You would have confronted droughts, which we're going through right now, and a year prior to that desert locusts, which probably would have ruined 50 to 70% of your portfolio. Banks don't like that type of risk. It's difficult to diversify and it’s difficult to underwrite. And they're no longer edge case risks. With climate change, these things are happening more frequently.

Oliver

And that's just a couple of the many risks that exist in agriculture. And so, I thought there has to be a way to provide these farmers with commercial solutions to meet their needs, while circumventing a lot of the risks that I was observing in the industry that were scaring away these microfinance institutions. And it was that kind of thought journey that ultimately led to Hello Tractor. And what's interesting about tractors and mechanization is that farmers pay for that service upfront before the season even begins. They need to have a tractor in the field to get their crop established.

Smith

We've heard the word digitalization, right? You know, that's obviously amplifying or platform-a-fying various services or tools. Right?

Smith

I grew up with this — digitalization, globalization, urbanization, gentrification. But mechanization is actually a boomer term, right? Because that is talking about machinery and that kind of, you know, mechanization revolution.

Oliver

Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that I'm a baby boomer?

Smith

Not at all. But I'm curious.

Smith

The mechanization and farming, you know, you're saying you're going from plowing fields to tractor-pulling of large areas, right? That is sort of what you mean by the mechanization of those processes.

Oliver

Yeah. Mechanization is effectively the replacement of manual labor and/or animal labor with machines, such as tractors or combine harvesters. Any form of machinery doing what humans either can't do or don't do very well. And so what you're seeing in Africa is a demographic shift, like rapid urbanization, or aging foreign population. There's not enough labor to do the work. And so, you need equipment to fill that power gap that exists. And that's what I refer to as mechanization. And I don't think that's a baby boomer term, but it could be.

Smith

I’m joking with Jehiel about using a baby boomer term like mechanization, it indeed predates baby boomers. The time of mechanization was during the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1940s. Jehiel describes how Africa is currently going through their own Industrial Revolution, but in agriculture. Can we call it an Agriculture Revolution? I think so.

Oliver

The world is very cyclical. History repeats itself. If you look at the pre-industrial revolution in the United States, we had labor shortages. We supplemented that with forced labor that was displaced by the cotton gin and other forms of mechanization. We moved on to the Industrial Revolution. We had this mass migration of individuals leaving the farms, similar to what we're seeing in sub-Saharan Africa right now, going into the cities. That would be the Detroits, the Clevelands where I'm from, the Pittsburghs and the New York City. And these megacities formed around mass production. And then you saw the assembly line, which was an innovation both in business processes and mechanization that brought more efficiency and that increase in efficiency displaced things like child labor.

Smith

Providing the proper tools to farmers improves their quality of life and in turn the lives of their families and communities. Jehiel says simply providing better equipment can get kids out of the fields and back into school!

Oliver

What do you see in the developing world today? Agriculture is the economic engine in many of these economies.

Oliver

The biggest contributor to child labor is the agricultural industry. Because you can't send your kid to school if that kid is hungry. So, when we talk about introducing mechanization, we're not just talking about some cool new app. We're talking about technologies that we take for granted that literally can provide the space for a kid to have the food that they need and the time available to go to school and, open up all sorts of new innovations that these young people can now, through education, have access to.

Smith

I think it's a valid point because, like you mentioned as well, child labor in the agricultural space is easy because obviously if you live in a rural setting, it's almost seen as happy to help the family to support the family. Right?  And smallholder farmers are an enormous subset across sub-Saharan Africa.  So, that's sort of your target audience.

Smith

I was curious. I'm speaking to entrepreneurs who have a passion, which is basically how it makes you feel. What do I live for? And other entrepreneurs who build that passion through their purpose. Purpose being how does it make others feel.

Smith

So how did you go from your background in the US, seeing this purpose and getting involved in the Afghanistan projects of microfinance? How did that evolve to your interest in agriculture on the continent and specifically in Kenya?

Oliver

I would say that for me, the journey is much more personal. I have a genuine delight in enabling the dignity of work. I come from a community that is low income, but certainly it is not anything like what we see in some of the markets that we work with. But relative to other income levels within the US, certainly we were viewed as a community on the margins. The way people engaged in those communities was all about what social services, what handouts, we could give. And I mean, to be honest, I grew up around some of the strongest entrepreneurs that I've ever engaged with, some of the most brilliant thinkers that I've ever had the opportunity to have close relationships with. They didn't have opportunities, right? They didn't have access to finance to capitalize that idea. And to me, that was the real injustice. And so, taking that same passion for seeing others unlock that value and make these meaningful contributions to this global community that we're all part of is inspiring for me, which is a very selfish motivation. I genuinely enjoy it.

Oliver

When I see people having the opportunity to access machinery to maximize their productivity and income and having that machine owner earn more income by delivering that service, when that symbiotic relationship plays out, it just makes me happy. I love seeing that and I'll continue to enjoy that.

Smith

That's the value prop right, kind of hit the nail on the head there.

Smith

What was the first problem you tackled when you came to look at this problem statement of supporting agriculture and smallholder farmers?

Oliver

So, once you plant, you're exposed to all the risks. So, if your business is reliant upon the outcome of a season, you're exposed to these same risks that we just covered.

Oliver

My thesis was to be at the pre-production level and identify the types of interventions that can be introduced at the pre-production level and have an outsized impact and focus there. The other benefit of tractors is that they're mobile assets. So, if I have a part of Kenya that's facing a drought, those growers aren't going to produce that year. I can redirect those tractors to Western Kenya, where it might be incredibly wet and ready for a strong season. It's that rebalancing in real time that also helps mitigate some of the risks that we cover. And so that's why we've kind of landed at mechanization, the mobility factor and also the piece around pre-production, which exempts you from a lot of the major, major risks.

Smith

And why tractors? I mean, was that the obvious outlier?

Smith

Was it that blatantly obvious when you started to look at this challenge? Or did you try other things? What’s been this journey to discover the specific solution?

Oliver

We started with tractors and mechanization more generally. We knew that this was what farmers wanted most. So, we were just listening to our customer and turns out that it makes a lot of sense. And the ancillary benefit that proved to be true was that because farmers want machines most, beyond any other input, because of the drudgery and the difficulty and seeing your kid out there working every day instead of going to school, that's a problem. As a parent, you know that. The extreme value in that asset also helped to organize that last mile and form demand clusters around a tractor. And if you go to any agricultural community across our markets, when you see the tractor, you'll see farmers queuing, saying, “I want the tractor next, I'm patiently waiting.” And so, you start to see these distribution channels where you can now introduce other products through partnerships. Because, again, we don't work in production. But companies can now plug in and say, “Wow! Hello Tractor is organizing 200 rice farmers in one specific location.” They're all commercial. They're smallholders, but they're all commercial. They're small, and they're living below the poverty line. But they are commercial, they invest in their field. And that's an important distinction. I would like to sell to that group of rice farmers, improve rice seed varieties so they can actually grow more. Or I would like to sell fertilizer. And through that organized network, you can now transact at economies of scale. And it was the tractor that enabled that. And that was the insight that came maybe a bit later on. But it started with the tractor and that underlying hypothesis, that at the pre-production stage it is a lower risk and high reward intervention.

Smith

The user journey of it, so obviously the product now you have, a two-sided platform and you have some elements to the devices and the tractors themselves. But talk me through the sort of evolution of that. If I were a farmer right now, how would I reach your product? How does it work?

Oliver

We started with a direct-to-consumer model where farmers could text because they have these feature phones. So, we thought, well, we can reach them directly through a shortcode or SMS. And it turns out these transactions are far too important for a farmer to just casually whip out their cell phone and dial 311 for tractor service. Right, that wasn’t realistic. The reality is that the transaction is really based on trust. And that's not trust that we could have manufactured organically. So, what we decided to do was recruit people in the community that already have relationships with large networks of farmers and put them on an aggressive commission plan where they can organize and book on behalf of farmers in their community. They receive a commission for that. And that then digitizes that demand. And they're not just pressing a few buttons. They're actually going out to the farmer’s field, surveying it, taking pictures and walking the plot boundary with an app to measure the exact size of the field.

Smith

You use GPS for tracking the geolocation and geotagging it. They walk the perimeter of the fields and you know exactly the land mass they'll be using.

Oliver

Exactly. Yep. So, we use that. They all have low-cost smartphones, right? And that means one agent who understands that digital journey with one smartphone can cover hundreds of farmers, and in some cases, thousands of farmers. So you have a one-to-many ratio. And once those demand clusters are digitized, then we can actually interact directly with the farmer, because now we have a number associated with that digital footprint and all the basic information about the grower: the name, primary and secondary crops, location of the fields.

Oliver

So that is when the journey begins. When the tractors go out, the tractors have GPS. So, we're tracking whether they're on schedule or not. We're watching the tractors go into that digital plot boundary and we're watching their sweeping motion go as the tractor goes back and forth, completing the job that triggers the algorithm to notify the farmers.

Smith

Real time.

Oliver

Near real time. Sometimes the tractors are in low connectivity areas. So, the data is stored locally and then updated when connected. When there's connectivity, then real time, when not, there's a delay, but you get full visibility across the entire workflow. And when the job is complete, we notify the tractor owner, “Hey, we think your tractor driver finished the job.” or “Hey farmer, we think the job is complete.” If they notify us that the job is in fact done, that closes out the transaction and releases the payments and people go home happily.

Smith

Are these tractors automated yet? Do we have any driverless tractors yet? Is that on the horizon?

Oliver

You joke, Matt, you joke, but we're testing autosteer and guidance this quarter. So that's the first step to full autonomy. When they go with the tractor into the field, we have these low-cost guidance units that we fit onto the steering wheel. It is calibrated to the GPS, so the tractor can go directly into the roads and not drive over crops or spray double pass and, waste fuel. All sorts of cool things are unlocked with that basic technology. So, we're getting there. We're not autonomous yet, but we at least will be introducing guidance and what they call autosteer in the ag-industry.

Smith

I love it. From the outset, it seems like a really interesting solution, but it has such an impact.

Smith

I'm just curious, though, how do you measure that impact and what does impact mean to you?

Oliver

It's a lot of challenges here, and we're still working through some of those challenges, but how do we measure impact? We look at our farmers income. We look at the time they save. You know, 55% of our farmers access machinery for the first time through us. And 93% of those farmers have seen a meaningful increase in their yield in income. So that's number one. But then number two, we track the satisfaction of the tractor owners, because ultimately, while the core of our business and the foundation of our business is the farmer, none of this works if the tractor owners aren't satisfied with the work. So, we track things like NPS, which is pretty common in the technology world.

Smith

Net Promoter Score.

Oliver

Yeah, exactly. So how likely are you to recommend this product to someone else? And we're sitting at 82%, which for agriculture in general, that's a high NPS. For agriculture. It is incredibly high because in agriculture, this is the toughest customer you can imagine.

Smith

Jehiel sees vast opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Oliver

If you pan out. You look out. Why are we even doing this work? There are a few things that we're also really interested in. Number one, we believe that there are pockets in Africa where if we close the yield gap, meaning growers are let's say level three, if we can get them up to level eight, we can actually establish the region as a global breadbasket. Not just food secure countries; not just one smallholder farmer with a few extra bucks to send their kids to school. And that's fantastic. But truly converting food deficit countries to net exporters and the value in that is our food system is not as resilient as we thought it was. And we do need more diversification in where we get our food. We get most of our food from the Midwest and the US and the Canadian Prairies, Eastern China, Northern India, Ukraine, Russia.

Smith

According to Jehiel, Sub-Saharan Africa has the opportunity to fill the gaps in our global food supply chain and feed the world!

Oliver

When we saw the overlap in these shocks, we had supply chain disruptions because of COVID-19. Quickly after that, we had a climate change event that reduced yields in Northern India. Like, that's an insane amount of disruption. And so, our grain and calorie reserves have been depleted. And now policymakers are saying, “Wow! Wait, actually, like one of the most productive regions in the world with the most land, the most fertile soil, the most water and definitely the sun. We need to light that market up.” How do we do it? And you have to do it in a way where the value is equally distributed, not just so we eat more but also for the farmers to benefit. And we measure our success ultimately in our ability to bring that global food system resilience through not just us but also our partners, whom we can now bring into this more organized market with these distribution channels. Through those partnerships, you can create equitable income and rural growth in these rural economies while helping to feed the world.

Smith

You touched on a really interesting point, which is the continent of Africa being the breadbasket of the world. Nigeria is the largest uncultivated landmass on earth currently, and there are more smallholder farmers in Nigeria than the majority of the other continents combined.

Smith

Governments and NGOs, and all types of bodies and commercial entities are now realizing that based on the issues I've seen with you. So, in terms of the climate aspect you touched upon, how do we light up Africa without adding to the climate issue?

Oliver

I think it is about intensification, right? We have enough land under cultivation now to create these breadbasket outcomes. But I'm not talking about cutting down forests and extending land under production. Just by intensifying, we can achieve these goals. And if we do the intensification in the right way, like we've been pioneering with some really strong partners over at UNFAO, UNEFAD, the World Food Programme and Farm to Market Alliance and our private sector partners to introduce regenerative agricultural practices through our platform. And so, what is that? Minimal till, no till operations and deep ripping. You're building climate resilience at the field level so the farmers can better adapt to these swings in extremely dry or too wet conditions, while simultaneously sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. This is a win-win for the farmer. They get to grow more on a risk-adjusted basis and they are growing more. And they can better adapt to the volatility in the climate while sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.

Smith

It's all about you saying intensifying, but I would change that word to making it more efficient. If we farm this square hectare, this square mile or a square acre of land. And Africa actually has some of the least efficient and effective horticultural, farming and agricultural processes, right?

Smith

And if we start to change out different types of farming practices, different types of, you know, plants and things like that we farm with, those with that square acreage, we take out different types of nutrients, allowing other nutrients to replenish, allowing us to actually have more carbon capture in the plant. So, actually, one of the biggest impacts we can make from a climate perspective is to increase agricultural practices in sub-Saharan Africa and around the continent and make them more efficient. And a way to do that, I guess, is sort of, the premise that Hello Tractor is all about.

Oliver

And promoting these regenerative agricultural practices. I mean, it's not about farmers making sacrifices for the sins of the world— the industrial world. This is actually this weird opportunity where everybody wins. We need to sequester carbon. We need to bring nutrients back into the topsoil. We need a lower-cost form of mechanization and farming our land because these are lower income communities with low levels of liquidity. So, you can't overinvest like we do in the United States, for example, we've actually overfertilized our soil which causes other issues like runoff. There's a variety of reasons why this should happen, but it does still take an ecosystem of partners to first educate the community of growers on these best practices and how it benefits them.

Oliver

They know what higher yields and lower input costs mean for their bottom line. And they know what, over time, healthier soils can do for the health of their household bottom line. And so, we focus there, and we have partners who've done an amazing job of educating those growers. And then once that demand, which is the pull in the market is created, we can come in and say, “Hey, by the way, we can make sure you actually get access to the right equipment to meet this new demand that's now come."

Smith

How many tractors and how many farmers have been using and are active on the platform today?

Oliver

We got just over 3,000 tractors and combine harvesters. 630,000 farmers growing on 1.7 million acres.

Smith

Quite an impact so far. Jehiel, So what's next for Hello Tractor in the next year, the next 10 years? Are you going to ten times? Can you ten times? Have you already solved the problem?

Oliver

We haven't solved the problem yet. I do believe we're on the right path. We launched a new tractor finance product at the beginning of the year to address the pent-up demand for services that we were seeing routinely every single season. These booking agents were really going after it, booking farmers in their community, and there just wasn't enough equipment to meet that demand. And so, we started financing new equipment so that these booking agents can now be equipment owners and not just middlemen or middlewomen. So in the first six months, we did about five million. We need billions of dollars’ worth of new equipment. So that's a model that we're paying very close attention to because it's a huge unlock to create these channels for bigger players like tractor manufacturers to say this is a wide-open market opportunity, put their money to work in Africa. But they need to be able to manage risk and get the money back. And so, we're proving out these new primitives with the hope that we can unlock more commercial investment in sub-Saharan Africa, not just for Hello Tractor but for the broader community of growers who need this commercial support.

Smith

How would you encourage others who may be in a corporate setting and maybe looking to take that step to have an impact outside of their daily lives?

Oliver

Well, I mean, first of all, your time is what's most important. And so, for those of us, for these professionals who are interested in doing work that's meaningful and genuine, I love my work. I don't even consider it work. If it weren't for my two daughters, I could work all day, every day. My wife will tell you that even on vacation, I pull out my laptop. I just can’t stay away.

Oliver

Yeah, it's pretty sad, actually, but I do enjoy the work and I love the markets that we operate in. I love them here. And I would encourage all entrepreneurs or people who are actually entrepreneurially minded to think outside of the corporate box and explore like what genuinely makes you happy — is it working on serious problems that can in a very meaningful way move the needle on humanity and not in the weird Silicon Valley way where every new dating app is going to revolutionize something, right? No. I mean, really bringing things like resilience to our food system, bringing economic opportunities to communities that have far too long been ignored and abandoned and doing it in a way that also scratches your intellectual itch, because I think that's also important. It's amazing. I couldn’t be convinced to do anything else. And I think it's an opportunity now. And there's a movement of professionals who also see the world this way. And so, I would invite you all to explore opportunities in more meaningful careers at Hello Tractor or the many other great companies and/or organizations operating in these markets.

Smith

Encouraging the next generation of farmers to come in with this innovative mindset using products such as yours, I think has that been sort of an offset or unexpected benefit, that you sort of see an uptick in agricultural activation from a youth perspective? Again, I'm just theorizing here, but I would imagine that would be something that could happen. You sort of inspire the next generation because it's not about hiring 15 people or having 15 kids to plow and mow the lawns. It is using a digitalized product that they are more akin to.

Oliver

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you remove the drudgery, right? You bring in some pretty cool technology. I mean, if you look under the hood, it’s technology that, you know, any firm based in Silicon Valley would get excited about. I'm a bit misleading, right? I'm apparently a baby boomer.

Smith

You’re never going to let me let that go.

Oliver

We have young people on our team who are much cooler than me, and yet much younger than me and who are also living and breathing examples of what you're describing. People who are now interested in coming into agriculture, because that’s our approach to solving these problems. It is done with a bit more charisma, a bit more style. Just because it's agriculture doesn't mean it can't be cool. So, we try to discipline ourselves to do work that inspires us both from a design perspective and from an impact perspective across the board. And I think that is also alluring to young people who want to spend their time doing things that inspire them.

Smith

So, we've come full circle here because you’ve gone from finance into farming and then you've created a financial product out of farming. You know, you've kind of created an instrument that allows farmers to use products that they wouldn’t have access to because of the hurdle of having to buy it to use, scale and grow and increase their yields. What is next? Are you hiring? How do we get involved?

Oliver

Well, definitely reach out if you're interested in joining the team and applying your talents to the work that we do. Also spread the word of Hello Tractor to a community of people both within and outside the company that have aligned around a very important mission. And the more people I think that know about it, the more support comes in. And so spread the word about the work that we do. And if you're looking for a job, hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm too old to be on those cool platforms.

Smith

Thank you so much, mate. It's been a pleasure chatting to you, hearing about the incredible work you're doing. I wish you the best of luck. Thanks for joining us and stay tuned for the next episode.

Thank you all for joining me on this episode of Better Heroes. You can learn more at hellotractor.com. And you can learn more about EY Ripples and all of our impact entrepreneurs at www.ey.com/eyripples. Links are in our show notes.

Please don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, Better Heroes wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also rate and leave our show a review to help others find out about the amazing work of our impact entrepreneurs. Before we go, we’d like to thank our podcast producers Hueman Group Media, who helped us bring this show to life (pronounced ‘human’).

That’s it for today’s episode. We’ll be back next week.

Music

Better Heroes is a project of EY Ripples, a global program to mobilize people across the EY network to help solve the world's most urgent social and environmental challenges. By extending EY skills, knowledge and experience to impact entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis and forging collaborations with like-minded organizations, EY Ripples is helping scale new technologies and business models that are purposefully driving progress toward the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals.

The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made. 

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