What happens when it does not work

These are two different parties and the difference is the whole structure. The farm owns the flock, the feed and the equipment — it is their business, run by them, on their land. We hold the capital you commit and release it to them in tranches, against milestones we have checked.

When you invest you are buying a contractual participation in that project’s economics — a defined share of its net operating profit and of the settlement when the flock is sold. You do not hold title to any particular bird, and you cannot arrive at the farm and collect one.

What that division means in practice is worth being blunt about. A farm that fails is a loss you carry. A release we approved without checking what we said we would check is our failure, not theirs.

No farm currently listed is owned by anybody connected to this platform. Where that is ever not true, it is said on the project itself and not only here.

Starting on your own farm is a normal way to build something like this — you prove the model on an operation you control before asking other people to trust it with theirs. It is also a conflict, and the two facts are both true at once.

What it costs you as an investor: no second party catches an optimistic budget, nobody outside the business says a milestone was not really met before capital is released, and the figures published are produced and checked by the same people. The controls are real and the software enforces them, but on this farm they are the owner constraining themselves rather than somebody constraining them.

Every farm applies, and an application cannot be approved with no checks recorded against it, or with a check recorded as failed still standing. That is enforced in the database rather than left to whoever is reviewing — the identity of the applicant, the company registration, how they hold their land, a visit to the site, and that the payout account belongs to the farm and not to a person.

Every check is kept: what was looked at, by whom, and what it showed. If a farm turns out to be a fabrication, that record is what answers for it. It is also, honestly, what we would be judged on.

None of this makes a farm safe. It makes a farm checked, which is a lower bar and the only one anybody can actually clear.

Nothing is distributed for that month. A distribution is calculated from the project’s net operating profit for the period, so a period where costs exceeded revenue produces no pool and therefore no payment — not a reduced one, and not a deferred one.

A losing month is not converted into a debt you owe. Your capital is not called on to cover it, and you will never be asked to put more money in. The loss shows up as a month with no distribution, and it is published in the project’s financial periods with the full figures either way.

A disease outbreak, a heat event or a ventilation failure can kill a large part of a flock in days. If that happens, the project stops producing revenue and distributions stop with it. Birds that die cannot be replaced from the project’s capital, because that capital has already been spent on the birds that died.

There is no mechanism by which a dead flock returns your capital. If the loss happens early in a cycle, before the flock has produced enough to return most of what was committed, you should expect to lose a substantial part of your money and possibly all of it. The remaining birds would be sold and the proceeds settled under the project’s settlement terms, which may come to very little.

Capital is not guaranteed and is not repaid as a lump at the end. On a layer project your money comes back gradually, out of monthly operating distributions across the months the flock is in lay, and then out of your share of the flock sale. If the months are thinner than planned, less comes back. If they are thin enough for long enough, less comes back than you put in.

What the terms do decide is the order. On a project that carries capital recovery, every naira of operating profit goes to investors until the capital committed has been returned — neither the farm nor this platform takes a share before then. If the months of lay do not cover it, the shortfall comes out of the flock sale before either of us shares in that either. A thin cycle is thin for the farm and for us first. That is an ordering and not a guarantee: it decides who is paid first out of whatever the project makes, and promises nothing about whether it makes enough.

The flock sale is a separate financial event with its own terms, and on a layer project it is a tail rather than the return — spent hens are worth a few thousand naira each. A project that has not paid you well month by month will not be rescued by the sale.

This is the risk the vetting exists for, and vetting does not remove it. A farm can be checked carefully and still be run badly, and a farmer who intends to take the money can pass a site visit.

What limits it is that they never hold the whole of it. Capital is released in tranches against milestones — birds placed, feed delivered, housing prepared — each evidenced and approved before the money moves. A farm that takes what it has been given and stops can only take what has already been released. Whatever is still held stays held, and is returned to investors rather than paid out.

That is a real protection and it is a partial one. If a farm absconds after the flock is placed, most of the cycle’s capital has already been correctly released and is in birds and feed on land we do not control. Recovering it means the courts, and the courts are slow.

The uncomfortable one, and it is more serious here than on a platform that never touches the money. We hold investor capital between the point you transfer it and the point it is released to a farm. If this company became insolvent while holding it, that money would sit among the company’s assets and investors would be unsecured creditors of it.

The answer to that is an independent custodian — funds held by a third party, released on instruction rather than by us moving our own balance. We do not have one yet. Until we do, the honest description is that your protection during the holding period is this company remaining solvent, and nothing stronger. Any platform that holds client money and tells you otherwise without a custodian is describing something it has not built.

What does exist: every movement into and out of custody is recorded permanently and cannot be edited, releases require two people, and the audit log behind every financial action is retained. That makes a failure traceable and provable. It does not make it recoverable.

Feed is the largest cost in a poultry project by a wide margin, and it is bought continuously at whatever maize and soya cost that week. Egg prices do not move with it. When maize runs, the cost side of a project moves immediately and the revenue side does not — which is the mechanism that has closed a very large number of Nigerian poultry farms, not disease and not theft.

This is not a hypothetical on this platform. A maize spike is already visible in the published periods of the running project: feed was bought at roughly sixteen per cent above the previous month while egg revenue held flat, and that alone was enough to take the month below break-even. It paid nothing, and it is on the record.

What is done about it, and what is not:

• Feed is bought in bulk at the point in the cycle where the price is best available, rather than weekly at spot, which smooths some of the movement but does not remove it.
• Every project publishes its costs monthly, so a feed shock reaches you as a published period in the month it happens rather than as a surprise at the end of the cycle.
• There is no hedge, no forward contract and no fixed-price feed supply. Nothing in this structure protects a project from a sustained rise in the maize price. A cycle placed before a bad feed year will have a bad feed year.

You have 24 hours from the moment a payment is confirmed to withdraw and have your capital returned in full, without giving a reason. Nothing is deducted, and you are not asked why.

The project cannot deploy the capital while anyone is still inside that window — birds are not placed until the last window has closed, and no release is approved while anyone can still withdraw. A cooling-off period the money can be spent during is not one.