science

WeFarm

WeFarm is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand WeFarm rather than just read about it. In short: Wefarm was a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing social network for smallholder farmers in the developing world. The network enabled users to ask and answer questions and share tips about agriculture and business, via SMS or online, enabling farmers in rural areas without internet access to share information.

Key takeaways

WeFarm belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect WeFarm to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of WeFarm from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Wefarm was a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing social network for smallholder farmers in the developing world. The network enabled users to ask and answer questions and share tips about agriculture and business, via SMS or online, enabling farmers in rural areas without internet access to share information. Wefarm claimed to be the world's largest farmer-to-farmer network. It raised more than $10m in venture capital before going out of business in 2022.

History Wefarm was developed as a project in 2010 by the Cafédirect Producers Foundation (CPF), a British charity that works to support smallholder tea, coffee, and cocoa farmers and their producer organizations to build innovative, community-driven projects. Wefarm was piloted, tested, and developed in 2011 and 2012 as a CPF project with funding from the Nominet Trust. This initial prototype of the system was tested in partnership with smallholder farming organizations in Peru, Kenya, and Tanzania. In 2012 Wefarm won the Knight News Challenge, run by the Knight Foundation, providing support to build a more robust, scalable version of the proof of concept system. In 2014 Wefarm was an overall winner of the Google Impact Challenge, providing funding to launch Wefarm in several different countries around the world and take it to scale. In October 2018 Wefarm announced it had reached over 1.1 million users across Kenya, Uganda, and Peru with plans to expand into the rest of Africa in 2019, beginning with Tanzania.

Technology The service is free to use and only requires a mobile phone to send and receive SMS messages – technology which is tried-and-tested and widely used by farmers in the developing world. Farmers text questions to a local number; Wefarm uses machine learning algorithms to identify the most appropriate responders, and transmits the message to those users with similar interests in the area, who reply. Although the platform also exists online, over 95 percent of users choose to use it offline. Farmers using the service typically receive three to five local answers to their inquiries within a couple of hours, and often farmers from other countries begin to send advice within 24 hours.

Business model In January 2015 Wefarm was launched as a social enterprise subsidiary of CPF, with a for-profit business model to achieve long-term financial sustainability and scalability. Wefarm plans to partner with local, national, and international companies who want to increase sustainability and transparency in their supply chains and access isolated farming markets.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with WeFarm

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what WeFarm claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to WeFarm before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about WeFarm ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of WeFarm

In research: WeFarm appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses WeFarm in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: WeFarm is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Agricultural education, Internet properties established in 2015, Peer learning, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for WeFarm outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study WeFarm in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what WeFarm means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain WeFarm out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is WeFarm in simple terms?

Why does WeFarm matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study WeFarm?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on WeFarm.