Jennifer Elem says she’s dreamt of running her own farm for years. She thinks she’s found a chance to kick off her pursuit of this dream. But she hasn’t gone for manured ridges and battery cages just yet. Instead, her sights have turned to Instagram, where she’s launched
Ada Farms,
an agricultural produce delivery service.
Starting out the honey way
Elem doesn’t intend for Ada Farms to be a mere first incarnation of an eventual agro based business. It’s the start of the real thing. This online farm produce delivery venture appears undeterred by its early stage status, and is operating as a contemporary remote store, taking and dispatching orders to its customers on a regular basis.
Elem wants to build Ada Farms into a widely sought after outlet for organic farm produce; she’s able to turn her business in this direction, thanks to its partnership with a farm, which she linked up with after hunting around Lagos for a suitable source for her business’s produce.
At the moment, Ada Farms supplies
honey; there are plans to expand its product range, along with the aerial scope of its operations. Ada Farms is based in Lagos, where Elem presently also works an 8-6 job. For now, she’s focused on taking orders from customers residing in locations across the city – a process which she says she enjoys.
Doing business on Instagram
Elem recognizes
the platform Instagram grants her business; but she is frank about the challenges she still has to deal with in building up her venture. While she holds down a job which takes up most of her waking hours on weekdays, she has to tend her business’s online presence as well. As she points out, this involves a range of finance-draining and time-consuming things,
“from the creation of valuable content to the consumption of data, and the hope that someone would see your content, like it, and trust you enough to purchase your product.”
Although she concedes that selling on
social media isn’t always plain sailing, Elem is quick to note that she’s inspired by her successes on Instagram, and the positive reviews she’s gotten from her customers and followers thus far.
“When, finally, that one customer trusts me enough to purchase my product and pays me for it… it gives me a reason to continue. It helps me know that I am doing something worthwhile.”
— Elem
