A horticulture farmer in Kibiti built something unusual — a quarterly gathering of professionals willing to sleep in tents, eat buffet meals, and reimagine Tanzania’s agricultural future together. This is the story of the SFO movement and the man behind it.
By Kilimokwanza.org Editorial Desk | March 2026 | Bungu, Kibiti, Coast Region
The road to Tomoni Farm, tucked in the coastal lowlands of Bungu, Kibiti, is not the easiest to travel. But in the last weekend of February 2026, more than twenty professionals — farmers, researchers, financiers, trade experts, and development sector workers — made the journey. They came not for a conference. They came for a farm tour.
Franklin Bagalla, the farmer who owns Tomoni Farm, has been growing citrus, papaya, mango, pineapple, passion fruit, and lemon on this land for years. He is not famous in the way that institutional figures are famous. But within the Agro SFO professional network — a 754-member WhatsApp group of Tanzania’s most active agribusiness minds — he is something of a quiet legend.
It was Franklin who proposed the idea of quarterly farm tours. It was Franklin who organised the first one. And it was Franklin who, when the first disease attacked nearly half his citrus orchards in January 2026, turned a personal crisis into a public conversation — asking the network for help, receiving expert advice within hours, and sharing the lesson openly so others could learn.
“We will not spend time discussing problems. Only opportunities.” — Franklin Bagalla, announcing the Tomoni Farm Tour
A Weekend That Became a Movement
The SFO Farmer Weekend Tour at Tomoni Farm ran across three days — February 28th to March 1st, 2026. Participants could choose a day visit or a full overnight stay. Tents were pitched on safe flat ground. Solar lights with USB charging ports were provided. Separate bathrooms for men and women. A buffet of scheduled meals. The cost: TZS 150,000 per night full board, or TZS 50,000 for a day visit including lunch.
Those details matter because they tell you something about how Franklin thinks. This was not a luxury retreat. It was not a government-funded workshop. It was a self-financed, self-organised learning community — one that placed real farming at the centre rather than PowerPoint slides.
The institutions represented at Tomoni on that weekend read like a who’s who of Tanzania’s agricultural ecosystem: TAHA, AGCOT Centre, COPRA, ASPIRES, AMAGRO, financial sector representatives, farmers of all scales, and livestock producers. Franklin had hoped that TOSCI, CARMATEC, and TPHPA would also attend — some did, some were still arranging travel.
What They Found at Tomoni
Tomoni Farm is a working demonstration of what horticulture can look like in coastal Tanzania. Citrus, stafeli (soursop), papaya — specifically the prized Ipb9 Calina variety — nanasi (pineapple), passion fruit, lemon, and lime. Franklin has been experimenting with varieties, learning from each crop cycle, and documenting his failures as carefully as his successes.
During the tour, participants moved through the orchards. They saw the scale of the parasitic vine attack that had nearly wiped out half the citrus trees in January — and they saw the recovery work underway. They learned about the herbicide protocol that Dr. Salum Diwani of Bytrade had recommended through the network: StellaStar, applied at half the recommended dose as a trial before full application.
But the conversations extended well beyond pest management. Around the evening fire, participants discussed value chains, cold storage, contract farming, and the persistent gap between what Tanzania produces and what it can command in markets. The consensus that emerged was pointed: Tanzania does not have a production problem in most horticultural commodities. It has a value-addition, consistency, and market-linkage problem.
“Suala la kuongeza productivity ni la muhimu. Private sector wameanza kuwekeza heavily kwenye value addition — tunahitaji kuweka nguvu nyingi sana kwenye uzalishaji.” — Franklin Bagalla
Already Planning the Next One
Before the first tour was even over, Franklin had already mapped the pipeline: Quarter 2 at Empien Farm in Rukwa, then Arusha and Babati in Quarter 3, then a volunteer-hosted venue for Quarter 4. The SFO tour model is explicitly designed to rotate across Tanzania’s farming regions — coastal, southern highlands, northern highlands — so that participants experience the diversity of the country’s agricultural environments.
Edith Mshinwa, who co-organised the Tomoni event, summarised it simply: ‘Maisha yanakuwa rahisi na kuwa na maana zaidi tunapokuwa wamoja.’ Life becomes easier and more meaningful when we are together.
That spirit — of professionals choosing to invest their own time and money in shared learning — is what makes the SFO tour model distinctive. It asks something real of its participants. And in return, it gives something that no conference can replicate: the direct experience of standing in a working farm, learning from the person who built it, and leaving with both practical knowledge and a network of people who showed up.
For Franklin Bagalla, that is enough. The advocacy and the policy debates can happen elsewhere. At Tomoni, the work simply continues.