We watched the first attempt fail.

I am from Grand Bassa. My family has three hundred acres there, running a poultry operation on a fraction of it. Feed was the biggest cost and importing it made that worse every year, so they decided to use the land they already had and grow it themselves.

I was in Uganda at the time, finishing a civil engineering degree. We were all in the same WhatsApp group where the farm updates came through, and that is how I watched it go wrong. There was no irrigation system to buy in Liberia at any scale that suited the farm. So it was people in the field with jerry cans. You start careful. Halfway through you are tired and the watering goes uneven — and it was guesswork before the tiredness set in.

Then the rain came late, and then came all at once. By the time the ground was ready, the season had moved on and the buyer had found someone else.

The infrastructure beat us. That is the whole story.

I had just finished a year of software engineering with ALX Africa. Putting that against the civil engineering, I built a first version. It was the same one-size-fits-all system everyone else was selling, so I started again.

SaharaSprout is the second attempt. We are building it for the farm we already know, in the country we are from, and then for farms like it. Not somebody else's system with the price crossed out — one that assumes what our farms actually have. Sun, land, buyers, and no grid.