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The Hopper-Dean family has graciously agreed to match donations to PlantVillage up to $2.5 million to drive forward its work helping tens of millions of farmers across Africa cope with the immediate challenges of climate change. The Hopper-Dean family has kickstarted the campaign with $500,000 and will match donations 1:1 up to $2m over the next two years.

“This is an unbelievably generous donation,” said David Hughes, founder of PlantVillage and Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Food Security at Penn State. “Hundreds of millions of farmers in Africa urgently need the knowledge and tools to cope with a rapidly changing climate.”

PlantVillage is a global platform that helps smallholders cope with pests and climate change through a novel community based approach that integrates local youth, AI and farming families to bring hyper local advice to farmers. PlantVillage reaches over 9 million farmers per week and this gift allows for considerable scaling. Jeff Dean is one of the leading AI researchers at Google and has been a strong advocate of PlantVillage’s deployment of AI solutions in East Africa, where he lived for 18 months as a kid (in both Uganda and Somalia).

“The potential of giving farmers all over Africa access to better information about local growing conditions, assessment of crop diseases, and other technical tools is why we are excited about and happy to support the work that PlantVillage is doing in collaboration with local communities.” said Jeff Dean.

Through this donation, we will continue to support farming communities cope with climate change. $150 phone can be shared by 50-100 farmers in a community and all of them getting access to our AI and knowledge base. $2,000 allows us to send a weather alert message to 500,000 farmers. $80 allows us to buy tree seedlings and cover crop seeds for a farm which helps keep moisture in the soil. $2000 allows to provide a rain harvesting system families can capture and store rainwater.

Help us help them grow food! Take advantage of this kid gift to see your impact doubled.