How Tissue Culture Farming is Changing the Agritech Game.

Posted on August 14, 2023 Updated on October 11, 2023

In the dynamic landscape of modern agriculture, traditional methods are evolving into innovative approaches that promise to revolutionize plant propagation and reshape the way we cultivate crops.

Among these pioneering techniques, tissue culture farming, the propagation of plants by taking small tissue samples from a parent plant and growing them in a controlled environment, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have emerged as groundbreaking solutions, each contributing a unique dimension to the agricultural sector.

According to agricultural experts, tissue culture farming is gaining steam as a commercial venture, offering benefits over traditional approaches such as higher multiplication rates and high yields.

In 2018, Arbres Biotech founder Rachel Akeyo joined @iBizAfrica through the women in tech program for business incubation and training. At the time, she sought growth for her startup, which was at the idea stage. Fast track to six years later, and she has scaled the business into one of the leading agro-tech startups in Kenya.

Curious to hear about her growth trajectory story, @iBizAfrica sat down with Rachel Akeyo.

How did Arbres Biotech begin?

It began with my family’s love for orchids. Growing up, we tried planting them but learned that it was difficult to grow them from seed. Propagation also proved difficult. Since my educational background was in biotechnology and I had grasped concepts about tissue culture techniques for different crop productions, my family decided to put them to the test. It was successful, as we managed to germinate thousands of seedlings from one pod in a controlled environment that did not need soil; it just needed the right temperature. That is how Arbres Biotech was formed.

What inspired you to join the incubation center?

We actually joined the @iBizAfrica incubator by chance; this was in 2018, slightly after we began our journey. We had not yet made any sales from our seedlings; all we had was a business idea, and we were not sure how to navigate it. Upon hearing about @iBizAfrica, we decided to look into it. At the time, we were operating under a different company, Arbres Kenya, which was set up with the intent of growing trees.

What role did incubation, mentorship, and training play in your journey?

When we joined the incubator, we did not have a business mindset and were not aware of the potential that the tissue culture technique held or how to monetize our idea. After a few months of incubation, @iBizAfrica taught us the importance of understanding our customers’ needs through research before generating different seedlings. This really opened our eyes, and we subsequently decided to diversify our value chain to include three different crop seedlings: bananas, sweet potatoes, and arrowroots.

As a result of increased requests from customers for more crop diversification, we secured a space at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization.

So how does the tissue culture process work?

The tissue culture process is very simple and involves taking a stem from the plant—this could be the leaf, the flower, the bud, the stem, or even the root—and putting it into a culture media solution in a container, which helps to regenerate the plant. It does not involve introducing anything new to the plant.

During the tissue culture process, sometimes the plant develops multiple shoots, which is advantageous as it can generate several plants within a shorter time span than conventional propagation. Through tissue culture, you’re also able to get several hundred seedlings from just one seedling.

Apart from producing multiple seedlings, what are the additional benefits of this process?

The additional benefits of this technique in farming are:

1. The seedlings produced are free from pests and diseases because they are grown in a sterilized environment to avoid contamination. This is much better than the traditional way of farming, whereby you will find a farmer from the Coastal region uprooting banana stems and taking them to Central Kenya, unaware of the diseases or pathogens they might be carrying. The danger is that the pathogens or pests, say nematodes, would be transferred from one farm to another.
2. Identical genetic copies of the mother plant are produced. This is a concern that most farmers fear: their plants having different qualities from the mother plant. With tissue culturing, genetics are retained.
3. The seedlings produced are commercially viable due to the high volumes of quality seedlings.

What are some of the challenges you faced as a startup during your growth?

As a startup, I think the biggest challenge we faced was growing too fast. That was a big challenge because we had not put our organizational structures in place. Suddenly, we had to produce thousands of seedlings within a very short time. We had to get more people to work on producing all these seedlings, but there was also a need for training in the process because not everybody can do tissue culture. So there’s training, and by the time you get people up to speed, sometimes there are a lot of losses in between. I overcame this by undergoing the Standard Chartered Women In Tech program while I was at @iBizAfrica. Over the course of the program, I was privileged to receive mentorship from one of the in-house mentors, Ms. Cherotich Ruto, who helped me understand the need to go back to the drawing board and retrace my steps, which helped me change what I was doing wrong, and thanks to that, it has gotten us where we are.

Another problem I still encounter is receiving payments from farmers. I think over the years, farmers have gotten so used to receiving free seedlings from Non-Governmental organizations (NGOs). In the agritech sector, even if the customer pays 50% upfront and they do not pay the balance, you go at a loss because these are perishables we are dealing with. Thus, in most instances, when we supply seedlings to them, getting them to pay becomes really difficult. That’s something that needs to be worked on to change the mindset of farmers as well. It is almost as though we need a whole social behavior change where farmers need to be taught to look at agriculture as a business and start thinking about it commercially, as opposed to just subsistence farming for their own food production. For now, in order to cope with this, we have changed our business model to ensure that we focus more on high-value crops that will yield more returns. We have realized that it is better to have a few good customers who will be commercially viable as opposed to having thousands of farmers who are in need of low-value crops that need us to run around tirelessly trying to get them to pay, yet some of them require a lot of manual labor over a period of 6 months. For example, for banana seedlings, if you don’t take them out after you’ve rooted them, you can’t keep them for so long in the lab. But crops like plants such as orchids or dates, for example, can stay in the jars for a really long time. So it gives you time to find a market. Even if the initial customer does not take them up, it gives you time to get other buyers for the product.

What is next for Arbres Biotech?

We are trying to set up our own independent laboratory. Of course, that will take time owing to the protocol involved, such as clearance fees. There is a lot of protocol. So with time, we hope to have our own facility to be able to grow our plants and manage our own nurseries as well. That way, even when we have seedlings that have overstayed in the lab, we will be able to take them off to the nurseries and harden them off there, because sometimes the farmers who want the plants that are ready to go do not want plants that are still in jars because they don’t have the facility or the ability to harden them off.

By Wachira Kevin.