Priceless Farms — All-natural moringa reforesting Ugandan landscape
Hello Aaron, please give the readers some background about you and your company Priceless Farms.
I am a Canadian, born and raised on a small island off the west coast of Canada, and when I went to college, I realized how unbalanced some of the ecosystems and environmental problems the world is facing and how this is affecting different nations such as Uganda around the world. The living standard being directly impacted by it.
After college, I went to Uganda to develop research and produce a film on the problems faced by the nation. I started filming music videos for the local artists that had positive messages in their songs and I really started understanding what the root causes of this suffering were, both from historical and primarily the environmental context. There is nothing you can do about history, but we can do something about the environment. This is how I came to live and work in Uganda.
I saw that there was a lot of work to be done and opportunity in the sustainable agroforestry sector. I saw forestry as one of the boom industries that combines very well with food systems and medicinal systems. I started to focus on medicinal forestry and regenerative forestry to prove to the world that we can repair even the most damaged landscapes and bring back to life even the most destitute communities. By regenerating the environment we can elevate the living standard of the communities, create good ethical jobs and produce high-value products, which is what we have done with Priceless Farms. Priceless Farms is a commercial initiative we have been pushing for the last 15 years with the goal of solving poverty and environmental degradation. We believe we can create a truly sustainable business model that achieves all that by producing high-quality products and fostering those positive impacts for generations to come.
Priceless Farms is currently producing and selling moringa products. Can you please explain exactly what makes your moringa special?
Our moringa is special for a number of reasons. First of all, there is not a lot of export-grade moringa coming from Uganda and our moringa is part of that very high-quality moringa grade that is exportable. We have also met the USDA Organic standards although we are not certified just yet. We have mimicked that standard to ensure a robust system that assures top-quality moringa that can soon also be organically certified!
We grow our moringa trees inside a regenerative forest system that is totally integrated with the local community. There are 12 families living within the farm cultivating under purely organic practices. They grow their staple foods, as well as the company’s forests and the moringa that is planted in the fields within the forest. We have created immense biodiversity that has allowed us to create structure in the soil and the roots that provides a very wide range of nutrients in which the moringa plants can thrive. We have also created a balance where the pests that could damage the trees are naturally eliminated. This not only makes our product special, but it also makes it unique! As we grow moringa, the biodiversity increases, and over time and it turns the area into a jungle. When this happens, we have to move on to other areas of land with fewer trees to start the process again. We are actually reforesting while growing high-quality moringa!
Please elaborate on the farming and sourcing practices you employ.
Currently, all our sourcing is done inside our corporate property where we grow the moringa inside a polyculture system of extreme biodiversity. We don’t use any chemicals whatsoever. We make our own pesticides from local plants such as aloe vera, and herbs. We cultivate the crop with the community farmers and part-time employees that take care of the farm every day. In the future, we hope that most of our inputs will come from out-growers that we teach our practices to and in this way achieve a greater scale of production as well as scale the positive impacts. We are looking to have dozens or even hundreds of farms, without us having to be solely in charge of the cultivation as it is right now.
How do you process the moringa once you collect it from the fields and farmers?
Moringa is delivered to our processing facility within 20 to 30 minutes of harvesting. This is essential to ensure high quality! We weigh the leaves at the receiving area that is cleaned daily. We record individual plots and farmers. We know who brings how much and from where to ensure traceability.
We wash the moringa 4 times to make sure we remove all the dust and insects. Then we put it into carrying boxes to take it inside the processing facility where it first goes through 3 more washes. It goes through a 5-minute soak in a solution with 1% chlorine to eliminate all the bacteria, mold, and potential viruses that might still remain after washing. We can use a sealine solution instead for customers that do not want chlorine. After that, it goes through 2 more washes in Nile river water that has been purified in 6 different stages, including a UV treatment. After the final rinse, the stems are placed on a table where the leaves are removed.
The leaves go into stainless steel buckets and are transferred to drying racks where they are proofed, and the moisture content is taken down to about 12–15% over a period of about 20 hours. From there it goes to our driers, which bring the moisture down to about 5%. Our standards accept anything below 7% but we do try to keep it at about 5%. This ensures a long shelf life of the powder and retains the nutrients of the plant.
From there the dry leaves go to the powdering and grinding room, where we inspect and remove any stems that made it through. They are chopped with a large-scale blender and taken to a stainless-steel grinding machine. We can grind the powder to any size to meet the customer’s requirements. The powder is UV treated to purify the powder of any foreign particles. It is placed into food-safe packs that are vacuum-sealed to go into storage. We pack final white-labeled retail products into branded packages as per customer requirements.
Your company has a positive impact on the farming community you work with. What are some of the impacts and how do you achieve them?
Among the things we provide for the local community are housing, clean water, job access, and job security. We are skilling people in this new form of agriculture that is greatly more valuable than the type of agriculture they have been practicing before. As the company grows, we have a plan to increase farmer wages and their stake in the processing and the product itself. We want to increase their general income beyond what it is today, though it is already far greater than before we started involving them in our business. We’re seeing very positive impacts on the general wellbeing and health of the community we work in. Sickness is reduced, the children are properly fed and there is no malnutrition. People are putting their kids to school, with shoes on their feet, and clothes on their backs. They now live in a comfortable environment that protects them from harsh conditions.
Besides a positive social impact on the communities around your business, you also employ environmentally friendly farming practices. Please explain some of your positive environmental impacts.
Priceless Farms actively regenerates damaged landscapes and improves biodiversity to increase soil fertility and water retention. We create an overall microclimate that produces high-quality products but is also a good conducive working and living environment for the people.
We want to create a model that can be replicated elsewhere and that can make sure the positive impacts we have on the environment can be replicated across the continent to help improve the harsh environment for the better wellbeing of the people in those local communities.
I understand your vision for Priceless Farms goes far beyond the current moringa operation. Please elaborate on what you are aiming to achieve in the long run.
In the long run, we want the farming model and the factory, producing dozens of unique African herbal products that can expand to an ever-growing market. We want to become one of the world’s most recognized and established superfood companies coming from Africa, producing high-end herbal and plant-based superfoods for the world of nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals as well as the culinary and home markets. We want to expand to other territories within and outside of Uganda to expand our production capacity and to help reforest many other territories and increase the wellbeing of the communities we work in.
You are implementing phy2app to improve the transparency you offer to the market. What are you looking to achieve by becoming more transparent about your products, practices, and impacts?
We believe that transparency should be at the core of our company as we strongly believe in ethical practices that we employ, and we want to make sure to communicate those practices well.
We want our customers to know and recognize the way we produce the products, the farmers we work with, and our impacts. Customers should be proud to continuously buy our products and support our business model, and we believe that transparency is the way to go to achieve that. Phy2app will help us achieve that.
We are very excited to develop the markets and industry that are truly sustainable for everyone involved!
Aaron thank You! We are looking forward to fruitful collaboration and to see how Priceless Farms develops to become a leader in sustainable high quality moringa production.
If you are looking to learn about how transparency and phy2app can help your agribusiness or if you are interested to learn more about the East African agribusinesses we work with, please send us an email to jon@phy2app.com
