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Diageo pledges £450,000 to African farms
Johnnie Walker owner Diageo has invested £450,000 (US$592,197) in three ‘tech innovators’ to help tackle farming challenges in East Africa.
The London-headquartered drinks firm has partnered with AquaSpy, Clean Crop Technologies and Smart Cloud Farming to provide ‘better agricultural monitoring’ to smallholder farmers in Africa.
The partnerships are part of the company’s innovation accelerator, Diageo Sustainable Solutions (DSS). Using DSS, Diageo created a competition to discover innovators with technology to find a solution to the problem facing the farmers in Africa.
DSS was launched four years ago to develop ‘pioneering sustainability solutions’ via investment into new technologies and partnerships with innovators.
John Cant, head of Diageo Sustainable Solutions, said: “One of the key challenges for smallholder farmers in Africa is their exposure to climate change and water scarcity. We’re working with partners to find new solutions that can help to ensure they get the very best from their farms.
“This technology has the potential to increase yield and remove uncertainty for the farmers, helping them to earn more from their farms, while giving Diageo the product we need to make great products.”
Aqua Spy is a cloud-based IoT agriculture platform that provides growers with a better understanding of seasonal crop roots and soil conditions; Clean Crop has developed and commercialised a technology that treats seed surfaces; and Smart Cloud Farming provides precision soil maps, created through soil monitoring and scanning.
Challenges are mounting for smallholder farmers in Africa, where droughts and floods are growing in frequency, and there’s a gap in the capability to monitor agriculture.
Diageo’s investment enables the three technology firms to equip smallholder farmers with soil and crop insights, so they are able to respond more effectively in reducing the impact of the water and climate crises.
Last year, Diageo announced it would form a subsidiary to distribute its spirits in West and Central Africa.
In the company’s other recent projects centred around sustainability, on the other side of the world in Mexico, Diageo also invested £4.6 million (US$5.8m) in water preservation schemes.
Diageo’s wider goal is to achieve net zero carbon emissions and increase diversity in its leadership teams by 2030.
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