“In the beginning, even my staff, when they first come on board, are more likely to listen to my husband before me,” said the founder of Fresh Direct Nigeria, which grows vegetables hydroponically — farming in water instead of soil.

Why it matters: Women make up nearly half the global workforce in farming, but many lack access to resources such as land and credit.

“These challenges make you hungrier,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Adelaja-Kuye is among a small but growing group of women entrepreneurs who are helping to change that, many using new technologies to produce food in more sustainable ways.

The 35-year-old, who started farming in the heart of the Nigerian capital Abuja in 2015 and uses shipping containers, said she wanted to support those who did not conform to the stereotype of the poor, uneducated subsistence farmer.

Four of the six staff at her farm are young women who previously worked as household help.

“I want young people to see agriculture as a solution for them, one that makes good money,” she said. “If I’m changing the narrative of who a farmer is, I’m happy with that.”

She has that in common with Awa Caba, a computer scientist who co-founded a platform for Senegalese women farmers to sell their produce online.

Caba’s company Sooretul — meaning “it’s not far” — sells more than 400 products from about 2,800 rural women online.

“My background is not agriculture,” she said. “But it’s more sensitive for me to use my knowledge as a woman to target underprivileged groups, and give them more access and income.

“My vision is to have a pan-African e-commerce platform where you can find different agricultural products produced by women in Africa.”

Sarah Nolet, who works as a consultant to the agricultural technology industry, said more women were getting involved in the growing sector.

“When you take agriculture, it’s male dominated, and tech is often male dominated,” said Nolet, the Sydney-based chief executive of AgThentic, which consults on innovation in food and farming.

“So you would think AgTech would be worse. But we actually see, especially in Australia, a lot of female founders starting AgTech companies.”

Investment gap

Globally, women make up 43 per cent of the agricultural workforce, but they tend to have less access to land, credit, technical advice and quality seeds, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

If women farmers had the same access to resources as men, they could increase yields by 20 per cent to 30 cent, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said.

But much depends on having the right role models.

“We have to change mindsets and show women in lucrative, high-value markets, with access to technology, and innovation,” said Tacko Ndiaye, the FAO’s senior gender officer.

In 2018, companies working on food and agricultural technology globally raised a record $16.9 billion, according to AgFunder, a San Francisco-based online investment platform for these businesses.

Yet estimates based on available gender information show only four per cent of that went to start-ups with one or more female founders, said Louisa Burwood-Taylor, head of media & research at AgFunder.

“However you slice the data, there’s clearly a very big gap in the level of female entrepreneurship in food and agriculture technology,” she said.

“The reasons for this gap are broad including educational and investment biases, so we are investigating how they can be overcome.”

Benjamina Bollag, who co-founded Britain-based Higher Steaks with stem cell scientist Stephanie Wallis, is among those who did receive funding — at least $200,000 since setting up 18 months ago.

Higher Steaks hopes to bring laboratory-grown pork to consumers within the next three years.

Several companies are seeking to produce cell-based meat, promising less waste and dramatically fewer greenhouse gas emissions than livestock, but most are focusing on beef or poultry.

Bollag said being a woman in a male-dominated industry had its difficulties, but added, “there are times when it was helpful too, where people were like, ‘actually, we want to diversify so we will pick you’.”

Ensuring women’s voices are heard in farming was a key motivation for Rose Funja, whose company uses aerial surveillance to help farmers in Tanzania avoid crop losses to insects, disease and other pests.

Funja, one of the country’s only female drone pilots, said she made a point of going to farms in person because that was the best way to meet the women who worked on cultivating the crop while the men tended to focus on sales.

“They let me know what their actual needs are and how these technologies can help them. So we have been able to have very good conversations with them as compared to men,” she said.

“They (the women) say they feel safe to talk to another woman about their needs.”

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There is currently an “overwhelming lack of knowledge” on basic questions such as suitable species, their housing and feed requirements, managing their waste and that escaping insects do not wreak havoc on the ecosystem, they said.

Unless such issues are studied and discussed in a critical manner, “we risk creating an industry that replaces one environmental problem with another,” they wrote in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Globally, growing demand for animal protein has led to expanded cultivation of soybeans to feed livestock and poultry, but critics say the system is unsustainable and leads to deforestation and overuse of farm chemicals.

Nutritionists and scientists have been touting insects as sustainable and cheap sources of protein to feed a growing world because they are high in protein, vitamins, fibre and minerals.

Insects emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cattle or pigs and require significantly less land and water than cattle, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

More than 1,900 species of insects are edible, according to the FAO.

Businesses are already jumping into the sector, producing burgers made of buffalo worms, sweet potato soup made with bugs, grubs as pet food and DIY insect farms.

However, “future environmental impact of the mass rearing of insects is largely unknown,” said the Swedish scientists.

“How do you produce the feed they eat, where do you produce it, what do you use? There are so many questions,” said Asa Berggren, a conservation biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the paper’s co-author.

“Are we going to use fossil fuels for heating and cooling the facilities (where insects are grown)? What about transportation?” she said to the Thomson Reuters Foundation via phone.

“One of the biggest threats to both natural systems and production systems the world over is invasive species. What happens if insects are accidentally released in a country to which they are imported? Insects are tiny and they get out,” Berggren said.

“We don’t believe it’s good enough to just switch from some species to another,” she said.

Other outstanding questions include whether reared insects that fall sick risk transmitting diseases to consumers, how the insects’ wastes are disposed of, and how animal welfare should be measured in insects, the researchers said.

Further research is also important, Berggren said, because “there could be a lot of insects that could be very good for us to eat but no one knows because no one has looked at that.”

— Reporting by Thin Lei Win for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, women’s and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking and property rights.

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The 30-year-old owner of Gashora Farm knows what a difference that makes.

“You need more role models,” he said, standing among knee-high rows of chilli plants. “If you have young farmers, they have land and they drive to the farm, (others) think, ‘Why can’t I do that?’”

Twahirwa, a university graduate, bought a friend’s tomato farm six years ago for $150. He made $1,500 back in two months.

“You have to link (farming) with entrepreneurship and real numbers,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Why it matters: Developing opportunities in agriculture for young people will be key to reducing poverty in Africa.

Many young Africans are abandoning rural areas, choosing not to toil in the fields — a job made tougher by climate change.

But Twahirwa is one of a growing band of successful farmers working to jazz up agriculture’s image on the continent.

Some 1,000 farmers now produce chillies for him. He is starting a fourth farm of his own, and exports fresh and dried chillies and oil to Britain, the United States, India and Kenya.

Africa has the world’s youngest population and 65 per cent of its uncultivated arable land.

Yet accessing land and loans is difficult, while African productivity is low with crop yields just 56 per cent of the international average, according to the United Nations.

“Agriculture is mainly associated with suffering and no young person wants to suffer,” said Tamara Kaunda, who has put her career as a doctor on hold to buck the trend.

She believes African agriculture needs a makeover to shed its old-fashioned image of backbreaking work with a hoe.

“Show young people with tractors, green fields, nice irrigation systems, smartphones,” she said.

A relative of Zambia’s first president, the fast-talking 29-year-old runs Billionaire Farmer Agric Solutions, supplying vegetable seedlings across Zambia and in neighbouring countries.

Getting young people involved in agriculture does not mean they have to work on a farm, said Nigerian Olawale Rotimi Opeyemi, 29, whose agribusiness company JR Farms Africa has projects in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Rwanda.

For example, in coffee production, the beans go from the farm to the washing station, then to be separated from the husk.

“There are people in the coffee value chain who just build washing stations and lease them. You just have to find a place to plug in,” he said.

Modern methods

Stepping up the use of mechanized equipment and new technology is another key way to attract young people — and will also improve productivity, experts say.

Today, 50 to 85 per cent of farm work in Africa, such as plowing and sowing, is done manually, according to the Malabo Montpellier Panel, a group of international agriculture experts.

From servicing farm machinery to operating equipment for processing, packaging and distribution, mechanization would “open up a lot of business opportunities for young people”, said Ousmane Badiane, the panel’s co-chair and Africa director at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Modernizing agriculture could also help turn it from seasonal to year-round work, said Rouffahi Koabo, director general of CIPMEN, Niger’s first business incubator.

“People need jobs not for only three months but… revenue for the whole year,” he said.

Rwandan Felicien Mujyambere, 35, was ready to migrate from his remote northern village after his wife died and his family’s income dropped.

But in 2017, he received a chick hatchery from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) under a project that provides rural youths with business opportunities.

Since then, he has used the profits from selling eggs and chicks to buy another hatching machine, as well as start a banana and maize farm and a bee-keeping business.

He now employs 10 people, and has almost tripled his monthly income.

Eric Hakizimana, meanwhile, dreamed of becoming a government official but after high school, a lack of jobs led him to sign up for the FAO project.

He received about 300 chickens, a coop and a hatchery. At 27, he has three times as many birds and is building a new coop.

Most young men in his village in eastern Rwanda move to the capital, or even Kenya and Uganda to look for work, he said.

“But now there are many who want to do this,” he added.

Leadership lacking

Nonetheless, young farmers struggle to get loans.

Interest rates are high and few banks are willing to take the risk of lending to them, said Ruramiso Mashumba, chair of the Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union youth wing.

Interest rates of 30 per cent or more are not uncommon, farmers and business owners told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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