The Backsaver story.

Michris Janse van Rensburg, farmer, inventor, and founder of Backsaver, works with small-scale farmers in South Africa and throughout the African continent.

He often faces a question in his travels, "How will we get the youth back into farming?"

The obvious answer is "through technology."

With a cellphone, every small-scale farmer can leapfrog to a growing range of increasingly powerful digital tools.

Yet, Michris notes, "those same small-scale farmers still have to break their backs just to insert seeds into the ground, using their fingers to cover kilometres of rows."

With this problem in hand and a farmer's pragmatic approach in mind, Michris got to work.

That work has produced a series of back-saving, hand-propelled applicators that make small-scale farming easier. These tools have added much-needed precision and speed into small-scale farmers' operations, reducing pain and increasing yield.

Michris founded Backsaver Farming Equipment in 2010. Earlier that year he had entered a farming innovations competition and won. His disarmingly clever small-scale tools for the small-scale farmer have been a hit with the market and the media ever since.

TEDxJohannesburg, a local chapter of the global TED Conferences platform, invited Michris in 2018 to share his story with the world. There he met Ithateng Mokgoro, entrepreneur, multi-disciplinary creative, and the event’s curator.

Shortly after, the two combined efforts to form a brand new associated company focusing on packaging and marketing Backsaver products.

They named the company Backsaver Farming Solutions, a farmer's Boer-maak-’n-plan approach combining with an innovator's scale-and-replicate-it instinct.

Backsaver's massive transformative purpose is to supply African farmers with the tools they need to reach the global goal of food security for all by 2030.