Almost none of their economic activity is recorded in a form that a bank can use, an insurer can price, or a consumer can trust.
Fertilis is building the system that changes that.
Start a conversation Kericho County — Phase 1, 2026Kenyan consumers cannot verify the quality of what they buy. A farmer's pesticide use, growing practice, and post harvest handling are invisible to the person paying for the product. Trust has eroded in categories where it matters most: vegetables, free range chicken, eggs, and honey.
Kenya's smallholder farmers are economically active every season. Almost none of that activity is visible to a bank, an insurer, or a formal lender. No documented income history. No verified yield record. No collateral. The farmer who needs finance to plant cannot access it because the system cannot see them.
These are not two separate problems. The farmer's invisibility is the cause of both. Make the farmer's operation visible, verified, and systematic, and two things become possible at once: a consumer who can trust the product, and a farmer who can access the finance to grow.
That is the problem Fertilis exists to solve.
At the start of every growing season, Fertilis advances a Success Bundle to each contracted farmer. The bundle covers the four things a farmer needs to grow a verified, quality crop: seed, fertilizer, training and extension delivered on farm by a Fertilis field agent, and index insurance against catastrophic weather loss. The farmer pays nothing upfront. The advance is recovered at harvest, when Fertilis acts as the exclusive aggregator for the crop.
At harvest, the farmer delivers their crop at farm gate. Fertilis values it at a transparent, pre-agreed price, deducts the Success Bundle cost and accrued interest, and pays the farmer the net amount in cash. The farmer ends the season with income, not debt.
Every step of this cycle is recorded through the Futuris Aggregator Portal. That record becomes the farmer's credit profile: a verified, portable financial identity that belongs to the farmer and travels with them. Over successive seasons, the profile builds into something a bank can lend against, an insurer can price against, and a formal lender can rely on.
The produce that passes through the Fertilis programme is sold through xsokoni, our market linkage brand. xsokoni is what makes the harvest off take guarantee to the farmer commercially possible, and what makes every traceability claim verifiable, because the record behind every product xsokoni sells begins at the point the seed was delivered to the farm.
The Fertilis operating cycle
The Fertilis operating model depends on physical and data infrastructure that most agricultural programmes do not have access to. That infrastructure is built by Futuris Infrastructure, our Kenyan partner, founded and operating in Kenya.
Futuris builds three things that make the Fertilis model work in practice. MajiDepot is an integrated rainwater harvesting, underground storage, and solar powered drip irrigation system that gives contracted farmers year round water security. The design target is up to three full growing seasons per year, against the one to two that rain fed farming typically permits in most Kenyan smallholder contexts. The Futuris Aggregator Portal is the system through which the Farmer Contract Programme plans each farmer's Success Bundle, records every field agent visit, captures soil and crop data across the growing season, reconciles the harvest, and builds the farmer's credit profile season by season. Chilly, currently in development, is a solar powered cold storage product that will allow xsokoni to hold produce for longer and sell into a better price window.
Neither entity fully achieves its purpose without the other. Futuris infrastructure installed on a farm without a contracted programme is water hardware sitting on a plot. The Fertilis Farmer Contract Programme without the portal and the water security infrastructure is an input credit scheme without the data layer that makes the credit profile possible. The two entities are designed to work together, and the farmer is the direct beneficiary of that design.
Fertilis is currently in Phase 1: a single contracted farmer at a single site in Kericho County, Kenya, running the Farmer Contract Programme end to end for the first time. The Futuris Aggregator Portal is live. The first harvest is expected in November 2026.
Phase 1 is small by design. Its purpose is to test whether the model works before committing the capital and organisational effort that the next phase requires. The conversations we are having with funders and impact investors are built on that same evidence led logic.
Every season a farmer completes in the Farmer Contract Programme adds to a verified record of their income, their inputs, and their repayment history. That record becomes the credit profile that formal lenders and insurers can act on. A farmer with two or three seasons of documented performance behind them is a fundamentally different proposition to a bank than a farmer with none.
On the consumer side, every product sold through xsokoni is traceable to the point the seed was delivered to the farm. That is the answer to a question the mainstream Kenyan market currently cannot answer.
Fertilis is a Kenyan agricultural business built on a simple conviction: that making a smallholder farmer's operation visible, verified, and commercially productive is good for the farmer, good for the consumer, and good for the formal financial system that has so far been unable to serve either of them well. We are at the beginning of that work. We intend to do it carefully, honestly, and at the pace the evidence supports.
If you are a funder, impact investor, or development finance institution whose mandate aligns with what you have read here, we would like to hear from you.