Startup Stories: Argus Ecosystem (Greenhouse Farm) Solutions

“A poultry cage secures your birds from pests and helps them maximize feeds and other resources. That’s the same thing for a greenhouse. A greenhouse is a controlled environment where you can control all the factors that make crops grow so that you can maximize harvest with minimal loss of resources.

My journey goes back to my days at the Kwame Nkrumah University in Kumasi. But before Kumasi, there was my time in OAU. I had first attended OAU. While I was there, I was friendly, reserved and always quick to point our new discoveries or discrepancies in lectures to my lecturers. I guess my lecturers recognized this but also didn’t like that much. By my third year, my lecturers had begun to love me but by then too, things had gone bad. Parts of my 100 and 200 level results were missing and no one could explain how.

In the end, I had an extra year and graduated with a third-class. This did not go well with my father, he wouldn’t bear to have his son finish with a third class and so he offered that I go to Ghana and have my degree all over again. Reluctantly, I agreed.

In Ghana, I studied Environmental Sciences because I had always been interested in environmental issues – especially renewable energy and the likes. During my program there, I took a course in Systems Thinking & Stakeholders Analysis. For that course, I did a research at the Ayinsa Abattoir in Kumasi and that became my foremost foray into Agriculture. Eventually, I graduated from Kumasi with a Second-Class Upper degree and I wasn’t even thirty years old at the time. Upon my return to Nigeria, my parents believed that it was time for me to settle down and get a paid job. Getting a job was hard. I submitted my CVs in various companies but nothing came forth.

While I was waiting for a job to come, I built a nursery at the back of my father’s house. This was at the time when there was scarcity of tomatoes in the country due to a disease called Tuta Absoluta. It was also called the Tomato Ebola and it ravaged major tomato plantations in the north and destroyed the harvest. Due to transportation of infested tomatoes, plantations down south had begun to be infested too. In my nursery, I recorded zero incident of Tuta Absoluta. As I observed my success, I saw that I could have a shot of growing healthy tomatoes.

The African Leadership Foundation in conjuction with the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Oyo state government run a program called the CBN Entrepreneurship Development Course. The program admits business people and trained them for real, practical business. I started the program in August 2016. All of this was happening when I got a job offer with a pay of N80,000 per month and I was going to take the job until I met one of the directors of ALF who showed so much faith in what I was doing with my nursery. I did my internship at the Greenhouse in UI’s teaching and research facility. On the internship, I was supposed to spend 6 weeks, I ended up spending 3 months. It was during this internship period that I met Patrick whom I carried on along with me when we finally built our greenhouse.

Right after the internship, I had an experience. I went out to meet a potential client. This client was a farmer who wanted to build a greenhouse. At that time, I already had my design and I had the statistics to support my theoretical design. So, I went into this meeting armed with knowledge and I made up my mind to blow him away with it. When I done, still feeling pretty impressed with myself, the client turned to me and asked: “have you built a greenhouse before?” My answer was “no”. Then he asked me if I had planted in a greenhouse before, my answer was no. He then further asked me if I had maintained a greenhouse before and I said no. Right there, from my answers, I felt very unfit to build his greenhouse. Then he said that when I had done any of those things, I should come back. My knees buckled, but I also learned a lesson: never march out there without ever testing your knowledge first. Never!

The journey to where we are today has not been a roller coaster ride. It’s been one helluva ride. First, it was getting investors to build my nursery. From the very start, I had wanted to just get one of the foreign greenhouse models. I made enquires and I realized I would be spending between N2million-N4million to acquire the smallest greenhouse from these foreign companies. I decided to check at IITA and it was worse – I required $20,000 to get a greenhouse from them. Where will I get that kind of money from? I put myself in the average farmer’s shoes and I realized that these greenhouses were unaffordable and out of reach of such a farmer. With this, I began to explore on a full-scale the idea of building my own greenhouse.

In February 2017 when we first attempted to put up the nursery, I had drawn out my design for the greenhouse and so I met with the people who were to do the construction. I explained to them what exactly I wanted the nursery to look like and they gave me an estimate and so we sourced for the funds. It turned out that they did a very crappy job and on top of that, we had been overcharged. We lost N140,000 to these sharp guys! Finally, in March 2017, we set up the Argus Ecosystems nursery and then a new problem: everything we planted died. Still we did not give up. We cleared it all out and started again.

We were able to tweak the idea of greenhouse and customized it to suit the tropical climate which we have around here. In short, we built a greenhouse that was just perfect for the weather/climate in a place like Nigeria. Not only did we build it but we built it cheaper and because it is cheaper, the farmers we build for make faster returns unlike if they had had to build their greenhouse using the materials from European or Israeli companies. From all of our mistakes, mixed with our passion, we built something foolproof with unbelievable results. We built a structure that is beautiful, and yet very functional. Not only that, we train the people who maintain our clients’ greenhouses. We run an online interactive platform where follow-up on our clients’ needs for as long as two harvest cycles.

With my nursery success, I began to look for who would invest into my idea. My parents already made it clear that they would not give me a kobo for business, they wanted me to take the job so I didn’t bother them. I got so many “Nos” on the way till finally, the CEO of Cadelys, a furniture company decided to put in some sum of money just for try out. The harvest from the greenhouse was great and then my parents began to chip in bits. So, given that I had and begun Argus Ecosystems Ltd with N0.00, accessing funds to start out was not easy.

It took a furniture maker to have some faith in us. A furniture maker!

Business has been good so far, of course it can always be better. So far so good, the one major lesson I have learned in business is resilience. See, ehn, people will say all sorts to dampen your morale. You will meet people who want you to jump steps and who would want you to undermine the process. Don’t bulge. Let your resilience make you stand tall. Our society wants quick and easy don’t give in to it. If you’ve building solutions, build sustainable solutions. Everything will attempt to bash you, people will try to pull you down, even the economy will try to bash you but in the end, stay resilient; stay strong. That’s how I have come to learn to run business.”

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