Podcast
Farming Reimagined: David Davies on How AgUnity Transforms Lives of Rural Farmers
Discover how David’s innovative company transforms the lives of low-income farmers in remote regions by providing them with specially adapted, low-cost smartphones.
About the guest
David Davies
Founder at AgUnity
David Davies grew up on a wheat and sheep farm in outback South Australia before building a technology career that took him from Australia to Japan, where he built and sold a mobile middleware product, then to London at Goldman Sachs (where his system won their innovation award), then to Lehman Brothers where he ran treasury technology for Asia during the GFC, then to Standard Chartered in Singapore. After the GFC sparked his interest in crypto and blockchain, he founded AgUnity, a company that adapts low-cost Android smartphones for subsistence farmers in the most remote regions of the world, giving them the digital tools, record-keeping, and cooperative coordination they need to lift themselves out of poverty.
Episode overview
Steve sits down with David Davies, the founder of AgUnity, for one of the most remarkable backstories ever to appear on Give It A Nudge. David grew up on a farm in outback South Australia, flew a powered paraglider over UNESCO World Heritage sites across West Africa including Timbuktu, worked at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers during the GFC, and then used his experience with blockchain and mobile technology to build a platform that serves the world’s most underserved farmers.
AgUnity takes low-cost Android phones and adapts them to be useful for subsistence farmers in Ecuador, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, and other developing markets where users earn about two dollars a day, have never owned a phone, cannot read, have no bank account, and cannot use an app store. The platform uses blockchain to record transactions immutably and helps farmers organise cooperatives so they can buy together, sell together, and stop being divided and conquered by middlemen.
When farmers buy things they cost more. When they sell something they get the lowest possible price. There is no collaboration. It is the worst scenario ever. And this is holding an incredibly large percentage of the world back.
David Davies
The conversation also covers David’s deep perspective on why the original promise of crypto and blockchain has been largely abandoned for speculation, why farmer cooperatives are the single most powerful intervention in agricultural poverty, and why the lesson from New Zealand dairy versus Australian dairy is a parable for the entire developing world.
Key takeaways
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Frequently asked questions
What is AgUnity and how does it work?
AgUnity is an Australian startup that adapts low-cost Android smartphones to be useful for subsistence farmers in remote developing-world communities including Ecuador, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, and parts of Africa. The phones are modified to remove barriers for users who cannot read, have no bank account, no credit card, and have never used a smartphone. The platform uses blockchain to provide immutable transaction records and helps farmers organise cooperatives so they can buy inputs together and sell produce together at better prices.
Who is David Davies, the founder of AgUnity?
David Davies grew up on a wheat and sheep farm in outback South Australia. He spent his career in technology across Australia, Japan (where he built and sold a mobile middleware product), Goldman Sachs London (where his system won the firm’s innovation award), Lehman Brothers (where he ran treasury technology for Asia during the GFC), and Standard Chartered in Singapore. After the GFC sparked his interest in crypto and blockchain, he co-founded AgUnity with John, his former Goldman and Lehman colleague.
Why do subsistence farmers need adapted phones rather than standard Android devices?
A standard Android phone out of the box is essentially unusable for the farmers AgUnity works with. These users typically earn about two dollars per day, cannot read, have never owned a phone, have no bank account or credit card, cannot use the Google Play Store, and live in areas with very limited connectivity. AgUnity works through a series of modifications to make the phone genuinely useful for the specific tasks these farmers need: recording transactions, coordinating with other farmers, and accessing market information.
Why does AgUnity use blockchain?
AgUnity uses blockchain for its original intended purpose: immutable, trustless record-keeping for people who have no access to traditional financial or legal infrastructure. In communities with no banking system and limited trust mechanisms, recording transactions on a blockchain means no single party can alter or falsify records. This is particularly important in cooperative settings where farmers need to trust that their contributions and entitlements are accurately recorded.
What is the cooperative farming problem that AgUnity solves?
Subsistence farmers selling individually always get the lowest price and buying individually always pay the highest price. They have no market information, no way to coordinate, and no leverage. AgUnity enables cooperative behaviour: farmers pooling their produce to sell at better prices, pooling their purchasing power to buy inputs more cheaply, and using shared record-keeping to maintain trust within the group. David draws the parallel to New Zealand dairy cooperatives versus Australian dairy, where cooperative structure determines how well farmers are paid.
How did AgUnity start?
The idea came from a phone call between David, who was in his sister’s kitchen in Australia, and his co-founder John, who was in a hotel room in London the night before a Singularity University hackathon. They brainstormed an idea that combined David’s farming background with their shared blockchain expertise: adapting low-cost mobile devices to help developing-world farmers coordinate and record transactions. The idea won a hackathon prize and became AgUnity.
Full transcript
Read full episode transcript
0:00What AgUnity does
Welcome to the show. Good to finally get you on here. Why don’t we start by you running us through what your company does and then we’ll go back into where it came from because the story is insane. My name is David Davies and I am the founder of AgUnity. What we do is take relatively low-cost smartphones and adapt them so they are actually useful for the very lowest income farmers in the most remote regions of the world, from Ecuador to Ethiopia to Papua New Guinea. We typically work in areas where those farmers are living well below the poverty line. Most of our farmers earn a couple of dollars a day. Most of them have never owned a phone before. A lot of them have never had a bank account and they have very limited literacy levels. So if they were to get a normal Android phone out of the box, great it could do a lot of things but they cannot read it, they cannot use the app store, they do not have a credit card. So we went through a whole sequential number of changes to adapt the phone to just do the things that they need to do in a really simple and productive way.
4:00David’s background
I grew up on a wheat and sheep farm in outback South Australia. I have been in technology all my life. I worked in Australia for a while and then ended up in the UK. I had a friend working in UNESCO at the time who said this is how you submit a grant application to UNESCO. So I did. I had a very ambitious grant application that said I would film all the UNESCO World Heritage sites in West Africa with a powered paraglider.
7:00UNESCO and paragliding West Africa
I was asking for 100,000 pounds and they approved 50,000 pounds, so I had to find the other 50,000 myself. We spent a year doing that. We were flying over Timbuktu, which is about a week’s journey from Gao across sand dunes. The heat gets up into the 50s. We had planned to be in Mali in a cooler time of the year and ended up right in the middle of summer. Driving across deserts where even in a fairly modern Land Cruiser you have to stop the car during the day.
12:00Japan and the NASDAQ exit
After the UNESCO project I went to Japan because I always had a great thing for Japan. I ended up in a small company and then ended up taking part of that company and turning it into my own. We were just in the right place at the right time. We had a bunch of banks as customers and also NuSkin came to us. NuSkin is kind of like Amway for cosmetics in Japan with hundreds of thousands of distributors. This was when the iMode phones were first coming out from DoCoMo, the first browsing phones. We built a really simple middleware product that would allow the NuSkin distributors to see what they were earning on their phone. That company got acquired by a NASDAQ-listed content management company in the US.
16:00Goldman Sachs
After the acquisition I got hired into Goldman Sachs where I built a system called Technology My Desk which Goldman still uses. It won their innovation award. Once it won the innovation award Goldman moved the whole project to New York and asked if I wanted to go. I said no bloody way. I moved literally downstairs in the same building to Lehman Brothers where I ran treasury technology for Asia.
19:00Lehman Brothers and the GFC
That is a bit like being Arthur Dent with a front row seat to the end of the universe. Because treasury funds the bank and treasury technology is vital to moving money around the world. Lehman had the best cash management system bar none, for essential reasons. In the treasury team we probably kept Lehman alive and held off the GFC for about a month or six weeks more than it would have otherwise. Banking, once you learn more about it, I am very unimpressed with what they do and how they operate. But I do not think we did any harm by keeping the bank alive a little bit longer.
22:00Standard Chartered Singapore
After Lehman crashed I got really interested in crypto. The original Satoshi writings were about the financial system being broken. It is not serving most of the world. Unfortunately most of crypto has become a mirror of the banking industry for a different group, which is a bit disappointing because I saw incredible promise in it. I then got hired into Standard Chartered in Singapore to run market data control. Market data in a lot of banks is the second biggest expense line after employee salaries. Standard Chartered spends 100 million a year on market data. In my first year I cut 10 million off that bill because they had Bloomberg Terminals given to interns that had left and they were still paying for them.
28:00How AgUnity was conceived
I was working on some crypto ledger technology, a communications protocol we called Zenect, which was a kind of hybrid between BitTorrent and blockchain. An encrypted communications protocol where you could share data and know who used it. We were targeting that to disrupt market data. A lot of people did not want that to happen and we shelved it. But then I got invited to Australia to meet with the ASX and the same week my co-founder John went to London for a conference. He turned up and found there was a hackathon on the weekend and John loves hackathons. The prize was from Singularity University. John called me in Australia and said what can we do to win this, it has got to be world-changing. We thought: low-cost mobile devices, recording blockchain, and helping developing-world farmers which are communities that do not have this. Over a phone call, me in my sister’s kitchen and John in a hotel room in London, we brainstormed it. A lot of it came from the fact that I grew up on a farm in Australia and I knew the power of farmers working together.
32:00The cooperative farming problem
When I was growing up all the dairy farmers around us were part of cooperatives and got fairly well looked after. Then the supermarkets came, got contracts with individual producers, and the cooperatives just evaporated. Now you look at Fonterra in New Zealand, which is a really strong cooperative that protects the farmers very well. New Zealand farmers get paid so much more for milk than Australian farmers do, because they are protected and working together, whereas the milk industry essentially divided and conquered the farmers in Australia. That is a big lesson I always carry. In Africa and developing markets you see 20 people with the same vegetable all sitting side by side trying to sell it at a market. When farmers buy things they cost more. When they sell something they get the lowest possible price. There is no collaboration. This is holding an incredibly large percentage of the world back.
40:00How AgUnity works
We work with a lot of aid organisations and agricultural support organisations. But I think before you give someone seeds and tools you have to address the fundamental thing: let us make sure that when they grow something they can actually get it to market at a fair price, and that when they buy things they can buy together. The adapted phones give farmers the ability to record transactions on the blockchain so no one can ever say it was not recorded or tamper with the record. It also lets them coordinate with other farmers in their cooperative and access market information they never had before.
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About the host
Steve Grace is the CEO of The Nudge Group, one of Australia’s leading specialist recruitment agencies for startups and scaleups. He is a serial entrepreneur with nearly two decades of experience building businesses and communities across Australia. On Give It A Nudge he interviews the founders, operators, and investors building the next generation of Australian companies.
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