Three divisions, structured to reinforce each other

Banjoko Farms is the production division. It is being developed on a site at Egbeda, Ibadan, as a modern integrated farm rather than a collection of separate smallholdings.

The production mix is chosen for commercial logic rather than variety. Greenhouse vegetables carry the highest value per square metre. Layer poultry produces income daily once the flock is in lay. Aquaculture and livestock add diversification, and the nursery supplies the greenhouse while selling surplus seedlings locally.

The activities are linked deliberately: poultry manure and aquaculture effluent support soil fertility, crop residues feed livestock, and the nursery reduces the cost of each greenhouse cycle.

AgroProcessing is where value is captured. Produce sold unprocessed at the farm gate takes the lowest price in the chain. Washed, graded, packaged and cold-stored produce, delivered to a schedule, is what a hotel group or supermarket buyer will contract for.

Cold storage does something further: it converts a perishable harvest into inventory, which is the difference between accepting whatever the market offers on harvest day and choosing when to sell.

The facility is designed to serve Banjoko Farms first, with capacity to handle produce for neighbouring producers as a secondary service.

AgriTech Solutions is the technology division, and the long-term objective is for it to earn independently of Banjoko's own production.

Its advantage is the farm. Technology intended for Nigerian agriculture has to work through unreliable grid power, intermittent connectivity, dust, heat and humidity. A system proven on a working commercial farm under those conditions is a reference; one that has only ever run in a demonstration is a brochure.

The approach is therefore to build for internal use first, prove it in production, and then offer it to other farms.