About The Mbegu Master

Small scale, subsistence farmers lack low-cost methods to plant large numbers of subsurface seeds without machinery

This challenge is worsened during periods of low rainfall and poor soil conditions 

The average Kenyan farmer spends 8 hours a day or more tilling and planting seeds by hand

The manual planting process is time consuming, inefficient, and takes a toll on the body, leading to discomfort and long term injuries

Using an iterative cycle, we beta tested 15 prototypes to develop the current device

Learn more about that process here

The device accelerates planting beans, sugar cane, and onions by punching a certain number of seeds into the soil, depending on the size of the seeds

Ensures a more uniform spread of crops by depositing 5-10 seeds at once

Reduces the time a farmer needs to spend planting, and decreasing repetitive body motions

Injection-moulded recycled plastic device attached to a Jembe (hoe)

Is an inner tube with seeds inside an outer tube, with offset holes in each

Keeps the holes misaligned until one presses it against the ground, after which seeds dispense out of the aligned holes

Thereafter, a strip of rubber at the back of the tube pushes it back out of alignment

For our baseline, we measured the time farmers took to plant a number of seeds for varying sizes of seed using a normal Jembe

This baseline was then compared to time spent planting the same number of speeds using the Mbegu Master

The baseline time was 1:17.01 (77.01s) 

The final test yielded an average time of 33.75s

The Mbegu Master accelerates planting times by 56.17%