It was 2023. I’d been running agricultural operations in Ghana for twelve years. The business worked. We had buyers, we had and to end systems, we had processing capability. But I was exhausted by the constant friction.
Fiction mainly came as a gap between wanting to run as an institution that had workable systems, and the reality on ground, with workforce capacity sufficient to actually drive efficient systems, having enabling technology, and just the massive gap between where we were and where we were trying to be with the status quo. 
I kept thinking: there must be a way to engineer this so the friction is gone. Not managed better. Gone.
The wrong question
I got into Agriculture on the premise that I was going to play a part in helping make the world a better place. Pretty altruistic. Like many people I wish the world was safer, and more peaceful. I wanted to do something about it. I believe I could do that through Agriculture and creating real change by providing jobs, giving people a sense of dignity, and giving people the opportunity to make better decisions because I didn’t have to compromise from being hungry.
I started asking a different question. Not: how do I operate inside this broken system better? But: what would a system look like where this friction is structurally impossible?
That question changed everything.
I realised I’d spent twelve years optimising individual components while leaving the system itself broken. I’d been patching holes in a sinking boat instead of rebuilding the boat.
The insight was architectural, not operational. The problem wasn’t my farmers or my equipment or my logistics. The problem was the structure.
Production, processing, and export were three separate systems trying to synchronise through market prices. Market prices are terrible at synchronising things. They create scarcity signals. They create urgency signals. They create friction. They never create the calm, predictable flow that a processing operation needs to run efficiently.
The moment of clarity
What if I stopped trying to synchronise three separate systems and built one system instead?
That’s when I realised what I actually needed to do. Not run a farm better. Not operate a processor better. Build the integration infrastructure that makes all three work as one unit.
And that required a completely different scale. Not one farm, one processor, one logistics corridor. A corridor. A network. Multiple production zones feeding into regional hubs. Regional hubs feeding into international export gates. A system big enough that supply didn’t depend on one buyer. Demand didn’t depend on one origin. Export logistics weren’t ad hoc. Everything built so that when one component fluctuated, the others absorbed it.
The conversation that decided it
I remember the exact moment I decided to stop operating at farm scale and start thinking at corridor scale.
I was in a meeting with a processor in Nigeria. He had capacity for 30,000 metric tonnes of soybean processing annually. He was running at 40% utilisation because soybean supply was unreliable and buyers weren’t committed.
I told him: “You’re not failing because you’re a bad processor. You’re failing because the system doesn’t give you reliable input and confirmed output. Build the system first. The processor becomes profitable automatically.”
He asked: “Who builds those systems?”
I realised: someone has to. And if the system is going to be right, it has to be built by someone who understands that supply, processing, and export aren’t three separate businesses. They’re three layers of one system.
That’s when I decided to leave farm operations and build the system.
What I left behind
I didn’t make this decision lightly. I had operations running. I had relationships. I had predictable revenue. But I also had the clarity that I was never going to solve this problem by making one farm or one processor or one logistics corridor slightly more efficient.
The constraint was architectural. The solution had to be architectural too.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from optimising inside a broken system. You get better and better at managing problems that shouldn’t exist. You develop expertise in navigating dysfunction. And at some point you have to ask: is this the expertise I want to build? Is this the system I want to be good at operating?
For me, the answer was no.
What I found on the other side
What happened next: I built the blueprint for an integrated corridor. And I discovered that every single institutional buyer (every food security programme, every major processor, every commodity trader) had the exact same constraint on the supply end. They all knew their supply chains were fragile. They all knew they were too concentrated in one geography or one origin. They all knew they needed alternatives.
But nobody had built the infrastructure that made alternatives viable.
That’s the opportunity I’m building toward. Not a better farm. Not a better processor. The architecture that makes the entire system work.
Related reading: An ecosystem problem that involves food; Food Security