Zero downtime since full migration to Google Cloud
Zero security breaches
5x increase in technical capabilities thanks to platform scalability
Helps cumulatively half a million smallholder farmers maximize crop yield and income
Babban Gona migrates to Google Cloud and innovates with Vertex AI and Gemini to help smallholder farmers double their crop yield.
Babban Gona migrates to Google Cloud and innovates with Vertex AI and Gemini to help smallholder farmers double their crop yield.
Searching for a foundation to scale and innovate with AI
In Nigeria, low crop yields, along with limited access to finance and training, can make it difficult for smallholder farmers to thrive. Social enterprise Babban Gona, which means "Great Farm" in Hausa, is working to address these challenges. With its comprehensive suite of services, including credit and training, Babban Gona is helping to transform smallholders into successful entrepreneurs.
To deliver these services efficiently to tens of thousands of members, Babban Gona needs a robust, mobile-first technology platform. However, as Babban Gona scaled its operations, its previous hosted cloud environment couldn’t scale resource usage on demand, and the company frequently reached maximum capacity. This not only limited its ability to grow, it also created reliability issues, including outages for field officers working with farmers, jeopardizing the delivery of Babban Gona’s key services.
The pivotal moment came when Babban Gona wanted to build a computer vision model to provide tailored advice to smallholders. This required advanced AI training — something its old infrastructure couldn’t support. Already working with TensorFlow, a Google proprietary library, the team decided to experiment with Vertex AI and found it was optimized for its model training.
Our positive experience training models in Vertex AI led us towards our full migration to Google Cloud. It had everything we needed in one place, was easier to use than other providers, and significantly improved our reliability and scalability. With security features baked in, it was the obvious choice.
Adebayo Adeniran
CTO, Babban Gona
“Our positive experience training models in Vertex AI led us towards our full migration to Google Cloud,” recalls Adebayo Adeniran, CTO at Babban Gona. “It had everything we needed in one place, was easier to use than other providers, and significantly improved our reliability and scalability. With security features baked in, it was the obvious choice.”
Empowering farmers with powerful insights from Gemini
Babban Gona completed a full migration to Google Cloud in 2021, giving it the reliability and scalability to grow its business, along with a platform for innovation. With Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Babban Gona’s compute resources automatically scale up during busy peak seasons, such as planting, before scaling back down when traffic decreases. This elastic capacity has helped Babban Gona achieve zero downtime since the migration, enabling field officers to provide key services to smallholders without interruption. What’s more, since adopting the Google Cloud security framework, Babban Gona has experienced no security breaches.
The scalability of Google Cloud combined with its extensive ecosystem of solutions, has allowed Babban Gona to launch a wide range of services, many involving AI models and data warehousing. Adeniran estimates the platform has unlocked a fivefold expansion in technical capabilities compared to its previous infrastructure.
This focus on data and AI capabilities now brings expert knowledge directly to farmers. Before migrating, advanced data analysis was not possible. Now, with BigQuery, Babban Gona can gain rich insights both for internal decision-making and to advise smallholders. By analyzing historical data, BigQuery helps field agents provide farmers with recommendations on everything from the type of crops to plant to the optimal credit amount a smallholder can receive.
Historically, recruiting field officers was challenging as they needed extensive domain knowledge. Now, field officers can simply ask questions of the LLM we’ve built on Gemini and learn exactly what to do. This means we can recruit based on trust and experience with no need for extensive prior agricultural knowledge.
Adebayo Adeniran
CTO, Babban Gona
This data also feeds the organization's AI initiatives, including tools built on Vertex AI, which the team uses for the intensive training of custom image processing models. These models provide real-time, precise agronomic guidance, such as assessing farm health or calculating optimal plant spacing, to help smallholders maximize yield.
Babban Gona is also using Gemini 3 Flash and Gemini 3 Pro to change how field officers work. The team built a custom large language model (LLM) on Gemini that functions as a digital subject-matter expert. The LLM processes historical data from BigQuery using a RAG pipeline to give field officers immediate, specific recommendations, providing support on everything from crop management to farmer financing eligibility.
Scaling to support 50 million farmers
With its migration to Google Cloud, Babban Gona has removed the technological limits on its growth and innovation and gained a reliable cloud platform to help more than half a million Nigerian smallholders thrive. Farmers working with Babban Gona typically double their crop yield per hectare and triple their net income compared to the national average, raising earnings for their families and improving stability in rural communities. With the scalability of its Google Cloud infrastructure, Babban Gona can now focus on expanding its reach to achieve its long-term goal of supporting 50 million smallholders by 2043.
Another key part of Babban Gona’s growth strategy is the development of a new initiative: a multi-tenant platform built on Google Cloud. This commercial service allows other agricultural enterprises to license Babban Gona’s proven, ready-to-use technology system, including its mobile data collection tools and AI-powered insights engine, hosted on GKE and powered by BigQuery and Gemini for insights. This will bring a new revenue stream to the organization, while further extending its positive impact across Nigeria.
For Adeniran, the partnership with Google Cloud provided the critical infrastructure needed to support Babban Gona's ambitious goals.
“Google Cloud has given us the agility to innovate faster and respond to our dynamic business model with speed and confidence,” adds Adeniran. “It hasn’t just been a technology provider, it's been a key driver of growth, empowering us to build a more resilient and efficient technology platform for smallholders across Nigeria.”
Google Cloud has given us the agility to innovate faster and respond to our dynamic business model with speed and confidence. It hasn’t just been a technology provider, it's been a key driver of growth, empowering us to build a more resilient and efficient technology platform for smallholders across Nigeria.
Adebayo Adeniran
CTO, Babban Gona
Babban Gona is a Nigerian social enterprise that provides finance, training, and support to empower smallholder farmers to double their yields and triple their net incomes.
Industry: Agriculture
Location: Nigeria
Products: BigQuery, Gemini 3 Flash, Gemini 3 Pro, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Vertex AI
