The Rise of Digital Agriculture Platforms
Across Kenya, digital agriculture platforms are being promoted as the future of farming. One of the biggest players is Safaricom’s Digifarm, an app that connects farmers to loans, fertilizers, pesticides, certified seeds, and even digital training. Farmers must, however, sell their harvests back to the platform at so-called “competitive prices.”
Other platforms follow a similar model. Microsoft’s Azure Farmbeats collects farm-level data on soil, water, and crops, then offers recommendations through chatbots like Kuzabot. Startups such as iProcure, DigiCow, and HelloTractor promise services ranging from veterinary care to tractor leasing.
The pitch is simple: digital platforms will modernize agriculture, increase yields, and raise farmer incomes. Promotional videos often feature smiling farmers who testify how apps improved their lives. The story sounds convincing—until you dig deeper.
The Promise vs. The Reality
Take Digifarm’s promotional video with farmer Geoffrey Kimathi. He explains how the app gave him access to inputs and loans, boosting his harvest and allowing him to send his children to private school. His smile becomes the symbol of a digital success story.
But behind these carefully crafted narratives lies a more troubling reality. These platforms are not only about supporting farmers. They are also about extracting data, reshaping farming into corporate-controlled business models, and locking smallholder farmers into systems they cannot control.
Big Ag Meets Big Tech
Over the past decade, control of the global food system has concentrated in just four agribusiness giants: Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta/ChemChina, and BASF. At the same time, tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have entered agriculture, seeing farming data as the new frontier.
This merger between Big Ag and Big Tech is powerful. For example, Bayer’s Climate FieldView platform collects farm images, analyzes crop health, and recommends Bayer’s own pesticides. Syngenta’s Cropwise and Corteva’s Granular operate in similar ways.
In Kenya, Digifarm’s partnership with Syngenta illustrates this trend. Farmers who sign up for the app are nudged toward certified Syngenta seeds, shifting them away from traditional practices of saving and sharing seeds. Over time, seed diversity shrinks while corporate control expands.
The Hidden Cost of Free Apps
Digital platforms often advertise their services as free. But as tech ethicist Tristan Harris famously said: “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.”
By signing up, farmers hand over personal and farm-level data—soil quality, crop choices, yields, even financial behavior. That data can then be packaged and sold to insurance companies, banks, pesticide suppliers, and large food corporations.
The platforms also impose strict conditions. Research by GRAIN shows that Digifarm farmers must buy inputs on credit at high interest rates, sell crops at fixed prices, and even pay transaction fees to receive payments. Miss a repayment, and farmers face penalties, blacklisting, and exclusion from other lenders. What is marketed as empowerment quickly becomes mass contract farming under corporate control.
Narratives That Shape Farming
Why are farmers embracing these platforms despite the risks? Much of it comes down to narratives.
Promotional campaigns often portray farmers as ignorant or incapable of making informed choices. Digifarm videos, for example, show farmers listening silently to company experts, reinforcing the idea that only digital solutions can save them. Farming is rebranded as a business, and farmers as entrepreneurs whose worth is measured by profit.
This narrative also fits into a broader global belief: that technology is the ultimate solution to complex social problems. Known as the “techno-fix” narrative, it overlooks deeper issues like land rights, market inequality, and food sovereignty.
A Different Path: Agroecology
There are alternatives. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and farmer movements across the continent point to agroecology as a genuine solution. Unlike digital contract farming, agroecology builds on traditional knowledge, seed saving, biodiversity, and community resilience.
Instead of locking farmers into debt and data extraction, agroecology strengthens their independence and sovereignty over food systems. It offers long-term solutions to climate change, soil degradation, and food insecurity—without handing control to corporations.
Conclusion: Who Really Benefits?
Digital farming in Kenya has been sold as a revolution. But beneath the promises of higher yields and better incomes, it is Big Tech and Big Ag that benefit the most. Farmers provide the data, buy the inputs, and bear the risks, while corporations secure new markets and profit streams.
If smallholder farmers are to thrive, Kenya must ask a harder question: Do we want a food system built on corporate control, or one rooted in sovereignty, biodiversity, and farmer-led knowledge?
Because while apps may seem free, the real cost is far higher—and it is farmers, not tech giants, who pay the price.
