Irrigated macadamia and annual crop farming hub, with a macadamia processing facility.
AgDevCo invested $5.7m to develop a 1,170 ha irrigated farming hub of two macadamia farms, an annual crop farm and a 1,000 MT macadamia processing facility. The financing was structured as $3.7m of loans into Tropha and a $2.0m equity investment into its parent company, Jacoma Estates. In addition to using throughput from the hub estates, Tropha aims to source from over 1,000 macadamia farmers by 2026, improving these farmers’ access to a profitable value chain and developing local emergent farmers into SME agriculture businesses. The funding will also provide up to 100 hectares of year-round irrigation to local smallholder farmers to grow cash crops, such as chillies, and food crops.
In 2008, the nursery at Jacoma – Tropha was a simple operation, propagating coffee and macadamia seedlings. Since AgDevCo’s investment, new technical skills have enabled the nursery to scale up significantly and it now stocks 100,000 trees to supply smallholder farmers.
| Investment | Total invested | Start date |
|---|---|---|
| Jacoma – Tropha | $10,625,000 | 2014 |
| Kasinthula | $4,000,000 | 2019 |