MBA SBM ITB held E-Talk series as a part of their entrepreneur studies. The first talk was entitled ‘Social Empowerment as a Business Strategy’. Ramavito Mountaino, the co-founder & CFO of EdenFarm, shared his experience in creating EdenFarm.
The main issue he encountered was the ironic fact that most of Indonesia’s population are farmers, but they live under the poverty line. This irony is because the products they harvested are sold at a meager price as they have to go through multiple layers of distribution before the product reaches the market. In each of these layers, people try to obtain profit, leading to the higher selling price of the products, with the farmers only obtaining a small amount of profit.
EdenFarm tries to connect directly to the farmers, using the B2B business model, to eventually reduce the distributions’ layers and increase the farmers’ profit. The farmers of EdenFarm, currently around 3,000 farmers around Indonesia, do not need to worry about whether or not the harvest products will be purchased as EdenFarm will have them.
Rama mentioned that most farmers in Indonesia do not plan ahead of their harvest. Often, by the time their products are ready to be harvested, they do not have a buyer in hand to purchase the products, leading them to sell them to a middleman, who usually offers a meager price.
Other than directly connecting with the farmers, EdenFarm also created the ‘Farmer Funding Project,’ where they provide resources like seeds, pesticides, vitamins, and monthly allowance for the farmers, as many farmers do not have enough capital to start planting. The product of this harvest is then bought by EdenFarm to be distributed to the market.
In the future, EdenFarm wishes to integrate more technology into the business. However, Rama admitted that this is a challenging step to do with Indonesian farmers because of the lack of access in several areas, the farmers’ limited capability to understand, and their unwillingness to integrate technology into their daily lives.
