Over 70 percent of Uganda’s work force is in agriculture. Yet, that collective workforce represents less than 25 percent of Uganda’s GDP. With over 7 million farmers in the country earning less than USD 2 per day and fighting the severe effects of climate change, it is clear that a new model is needed to lift subsistence farmers out of poverty while protecting the environment. After spending over a decade trying to find a solution to this problem, we developed the Secure Income Program (SIP) to address shortcomings in the solutions offered to farmers.

Raintree Farms was founded on the belief that a well organized supply chain in Uganda’s agriculture sector could deliver a double bottom line – a profitable enterprise and direct impact to the farmers in that supply chain. After many years attempting to create the right supply chain that could power the company’s ambitious goals and also deliver much needed relief to farmers in need of a pathway to market, the Company discovered two opposing commonalities at the last mile shared by all farmers: 1) They had an under-utilized asset, land, and 2) they lacked the capital to commercialize that land, often not even capable of maximizing its use for subsistence farming. The Company offered farmers the opportunity to grow moringa oleifera with a guarantee to buy everything farmers planted. However, farmers failed to raise enough capital to cultivate the land beyond what they absolutely had to for food security.

The Secure Income Program (SIP) is a new “subscription farming” model that uses climate-smart, “food forest” design principals to combine multiple perennial crop verticals into a single, manageable plantation for the farmer using moringa oleifera as the base crop.

A recent academic paper on SIP, was written by the founder of Raintree Farms, Teddy Ruge and published by The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. In it, Mr. Ruge breaks down the need to develop new agriculture models for the over 7 million farmers in the country.

SIP was conceived at Raintree Farms as an ambitious out-of-the box model to revolutionize agriculture supply chains. But it can’t work without customers like you. If you’re interested in procuring moringa (now) and other future agricultural commodities from a high impact supply chain, get in touch with us today.