Smart farming for every farmer — even without internet or electricity.

Founder Story

From My Grandmother's Farm to Smart Farming.

I was raised by my grandmother, a subsistence farmer in Cameroon's Northwest Region. For us, agriculture was not a business. It was survival. Every planting season came with uncertainty. Would the rains come on time? Was the soil ready? Would the harvest be enough to feed the us and pay for my school fees? Like millions of smallholder farmers across Cameroon, my grandmother made critical farming decisions based on experience and instinct because she had no access to real-time agricultural information. As I grew older, I began to understand that the challenge was not a lack of hard work or knowledge. Farmers were doing everything they could with the limited resources available to them. The problem was that they were making important decisions without the data needed to make them confidently. Years later, during my TechGirls experience at Virginia Tech, I began exploring how technology could help address these challenges. That journey led to the creation of SAMS — the Smart Agricultural Monitoring System. SAMS combines solar-powered sensors, artificial intelligence, a mobile application, and USSD technology to help farmers access real-time information about their crops, even in communities with limited internet connectivity or electricity. I built SAMS because I know what it means when a family's livelihood depends on agriculture. I built it for farmers like my grandmother, whose resilience feeds communities every day but who are too often left behind by technology. Because no farmer should have to rely on guesswork when data can help them grow.

- Britney Moukoko, Founder