Lhacienda Terra is the foundation’s field programme in the Gontougo region of Côte d’Ivoire. It is run as a direct operation of the foundation, not through grants to a third party.
Terra brings four strands of work under one programme because, around Bondoukou, they are one problem seen from four angles. A cash crop whose waste pollutes. Soils that lose their yield without technical support. An income gap that pulls children out of school. Households with no cushion when illness arrives. Treating any one of them alone produces a result that does not hold.
The four strands
1. Turning cashew waste into biochar and energy
Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s largest producer of raw cashew nuts, and the Gontougo sits at the centre of that trade. Cracking the nut leaves the shell — the greater part of the raw nut by weight — with nowhere to go. Most is burned in the open beside the processing plants or heaped until the rain carries its caustic oil into soil and water.
Pyrolysis heats that biomass with almost no oxygen. Instead of burning, it breaks down into a stable carbon-rich solid — biochar — and combustible gases. Three things change at once: cleaner air around the plants, soil that holds water and nutrients through the dry season, and carbon locked into a stable form rather than released within days. The biochar feeds directly into our agronomic work.
2. Agronomic training
Knowledge of soil health, orchard renewal and post-harvest handling exists. What is missing is the path from that knowledge to a farm in the Gontougo. Terra trains growers and cooperative staff, and runs field trials of the biochar produced by the first strand — so the two strands feed each other rather than running in parallel.
3. Health, hygiene and social protection
The distance between a household and clean water is measured in hours, and those hours are almost always walked by women and girls. Behind that daily walk sit the illnesses that follow unsafe water, and the absence of any cushion when someone falls ill. Read more
4. Women’s income and children in school
Child labour in West African agriculture is rarely a failure of intention. It is what happens when a household cannot cover the year without every pair of hands, and when school costs money the harvest has not yet earned. Terra works on both levers at once: income generated by women, and the specific costs that keep a child out of class. Read more
The record that holds it together
A programme that trains growers, places biochar on plots and follows households needs to know which plot, which household, which season. Terra is building a rural land and activity record for that purpose — and building it ourselves, because the tools sold for this kind of work assume a network, a smartphone in every hand and a bank behind every transaction. In the Gontougo, none of those three can be assumed.
What we are building
Four pieces, at different stages of development.
Terra Agent is the field tool. It runs on an ordinary Android phone or tablet carried by a field agent, and it works with no network at all: plots, households, training sessions, biochar applications and harvest weights are recorded where they happen, held on the device, and synchronised whenever that device next finds a connection. That is the whole design constraint. A tool that needs coverage in order to record a plot will never record the plots that matter most.
Terra Console is the supervision side, used by programme staff: to see what has been collected, follow a season across villages, catch what a field agent could not, and produce the figures we publish.
Terra Origine is the traceability view — the route by which a cooperative, a buyer or a certifier can see where a lot came from and under what practices, without gaining access to personal information about the households behind it. Of the four, this is the furthest from finished.
Terra Core is the shared engine underneath the other three: the record itself, the identifiers, the map layer and the synchronisation rules.
The devices in the field
The equipment is deliberately dull, because dull equipment gets repaired locally.
- An Android phone or tablet for the field agent, running Terra Agent offline.
- A certified Bluetooth scale. A weight typed in by hand is a weight that can be argued about afterwards. The scale sends its reading straight into the record, and we treat it as a condition of the work rather than an option: no certified scale, no weighing.
- A printed QR card for each producer, and a paper slip handed over at the moment of the operation. There is deliberately no producer app — asking a grower to install software in order to be counted excludes exactly the people the programme exists for.
- An SMS confirmation, so that a producer keeps a record on their own phone that we did not write.
- Pre-recorded voice prompts in the languages actually spoken around Bondoukou, so the steps of a session can be followed without reading them.
Why it is built to be checked
A record is worth exactly as much as the trust placed in it. Terra’s record is append-only: entries are added and never quietly rewritten, and a correction is itself an entry, with its author and its date. Each device signs what it records and chains its entries one to the next, so a later alteration shows up instead of passing unnoticed. Plots carry a structured reference with check characters, on the model of a cadastral reference, so that a number transcribed wrongly fails loudly rather than pointing at someone else’s field.
We are building it in stages, each closed by tests agreed in advance rather than by a demonstration. It is slower than buying something. It is the only way we know to end up with a tool that still works in the fifth village and the third season.
Three things this record is not
It is not a land title register. It records use and activity. It creates no property right, settles no question of ownership, and is designed so that it cannot be mistaken for a title.
It does not move money. The version being built handles no payment, no credit and no transfer of funds of any kind. It records what happened in a field; accounting stays where it already is.
It is not a commercial product. It exists to make the programme measurable and to give the communities concerned a record of their own.
Where the programme stands
Terra is in its launch phase, and we would rather be precise about that than generous with it. The design is set and the area is chosen. We are assembling equipment, training and the first production and field cycles.
There are no results to report yet. There will be, and we will publish them as they come — including the cycles that yield less than we hoped. A foundation that publishes only its successes is telling you very little.
What support pays for
At this stage, contributions go into three things: the pyrolysis equipment that replaces open burning, the training of the local team who will operate and repair it, and the first cycles that let us measure what the process actually yields under local conditions.
