Country: Canada
Organization: Gorilla Gardener
2) Sector of activity: Agriculture
3) Description of your products or services: I am designing a web site to explain how-to grow productive, long lived, robust and low imput seedling trees that give delicious fruits and nuts in a permaculture setup with useful companion plants and mushrooms.
4) Description of the operational model: The web site will be funded by selling ad spaces. All the info for growing will be free to download. Multiple versions of document will be available: for childrens, big or small farmers, foresters, homeowners, gardeners. A maximum of pictures will be used.
5) Description of the financial model: Low income peoples download info for free. Sustainability will be reached by selling ad space and paid services for special customers.
Client fees represent this approximate percentage of operational budget: 99%
6) Key operational partnership: Business, social, governement and other actors have their place as promoters: using a blog on the web site or paying (or exange of service) for their ad or link. Response to my initial sending of «Gorilla Gardener» and «Nature Libre» base documents that explain the project is very good. The main challenge is before putting the web site on air is to reach a maximum or peoples by e-mail and other means to have a reaaly complete web site.
7) Current outreach:
We are at the Start Up stage. As a farm worker, my available time, energy and money is very tight. The next stage is being totally involved and confortable in that project. I still need pictures and drawings that I couod use on the web site. Translating to other languages than the current french and english version is the third step.
How many clients have benefited from your product/service in total? Over the last year? As a writer I made a few menu featuring trendy and expensive raw recipes. Also some low-cost fast food menus for another client.
What percentage of your clients is below the poverty line ($2 per day)? 0% That will change as soon as the web site is up and running.
What is the order of magnitude of the potential demand for your products or services? Which
other low-income groups, countries or regions could benefit from it? Try to quantify (number
of clients, market size in currency):
If we also grow seedling for resale, the market is in the magnitude of many millions dollars. Demand for free documentation shoul also be tremendous if the web site is properly and often renewed. A good gardening, forestry and farming web site brings clients from all over the planet. Schools are another big low income client.
8) Scale-up strategy:
How many low-income individuals do you plan to benefit in three years from now? How are you planning to scale up or replicate your solution? What are the major constraints to scale up?
All of them directly or indirectly. To scale up, large scale implementation of orchards described in «Gorilla Gardener» and «Nature Libre» will have to be started on the planet. Benefits to individuals are the free accessibility of information, others paid services and consulting, and the availibility of fruits and nuts plus the ecological and social benefits of planting productive trees and the plant companioning them.
Which specific areas - and why - in your field would benefit most from investment by corporations, foundations, and other investors:
Information about growing fruit and nut seedling is diluted because we stopped around 1800 (in northen hemisphere) to use seedlings for industrial agriculture.Building a database about the subject is paramount. Fruit and nut trees breeding programs that uses real fields instead of greenhouses are now lagging and planting seedling the way I explain it is also a way of breeding better trees from which we can take seeds and grafts to use in the future. Tools are another sector that need brainstorming. As the inventor of a high-tech portable pneumatic seed planter, I think we can use wind to power seed planting robots that would wander in desertic places of the planet and plant savanas or forests or hedges. They are so much other agricultural tool that could be useful if we put the information in a web site.
9) The organization: How does the initiative fit with your overall organization's strategic goals and priorities? How did the initiative start?
It is my own initiative, started 35 years ago when I decided to work in the agricultural sector. At the earliest I had that crazy idea about growing fruits and nuts from seeds and I began assembling documentation and putting it on computers.
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10) On the mosaic diagram, which of these factors is the primary focus of your work?
- Factor: Poor understanding of the human and social capitals of low income communities
- Principle: Design products and services that tap into the wealth of poor
Contact Information:
Name: Sylvain Picker
Organization: Gorilla Gardener
Mailing address: Montreal
Country: Canada
Email: sylvainpicker@hotmail.com
Tel: 514 716 1772
Organization's legal status: owner of copyright
Number of Employees: 1
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