Haller Partners with Romanian NGO, Fundatia ADEPT on new App for Smallholders in Eastern Europe
The Haller Farmers app shares affordable, organic and environmentally friendlyfarming techniques with smallholder farmers across East Africa. Since its launch on both Android and iOS in 2020 and 2021 respectively, Haller Farmers has been used in more than 2000 farms across 80+ countries worldwide. The app aims to improve food security in Kenya by helping small-scale food producers revive degraded land, enhance soil fertility and produce higher yields.In 2020, we partnered with Fundatia ADEPT; a Romanian NGO that was set up in 2004 to protect the High Nature Value Landscapes of Transylvania, working with and supporting the farming communities that created them.
Considering Romania’s wide scale accessibility to mobile technology and its 60,000+ smallholder farms, we saw the opportunity to scale Haller Farmers to reach new audiences across Eastern Europe. We have successfully replicated and adapted the Haller Farmers open source code to develop a ‘sister’ app for Romania. Similar to Haller Farmers’ Square Plot Feature, ADEPT farmers incorporates its own interactive map, highlighting efficient use of the different elements involved in High Nature Value Farming. This includes a mixture of private and common land that can be some distance from a farmer’s household plot.
The My Farm feature in ADEPT Farmers showcases how the Haller Farmers Square Plot can be adapted and transformed for different audiences using entirely different practises of farming while the concept of the map stays the same. It is an effective visual explanation and clickable gateway to agricultural information.Although the app is powered by Haller, the content, both written and visual, has been developed by ADEPT from their vast knowledge and experience of rural agriculture in the area.
The innovative application is available in both English and Romanian making it accessible to the thousands of smallholder farmers across Eastern Europe. ADEPT farmers is now available to download for free from both the iOS and Google Play Stores.At Haller, we believe partnerships are vital to scaling up impact and we are always actively seeking support from like-minded individuals, companies and organisations to do so. Due to Haller Farmers’ open source code, we have the opportunity to white-label the app with content relevant to different climates, environments and cultures. Doing so enables increased adoption of sustainable farming techniques to help build resilience in the face of climate change.