Lumipad is a non-profit program of Kennemer Foods International, based in Davao, Mindanao. We train rural Filipinos to build and fly low-cost agricultural drones, then deliver NDVI crop surveys to cooperatives growing cacao, coffee, coconut, and abaca.
Lumipad has two parts that share a name. The training program is a 6-week cohort that takes rural Filipino trainees from no drone experience to running their own NDVI-survey microenterprise — building the drone they keep, learning to fly it for cooperative survey work, registering as a Filipino microenterprise, and graduating into an alumni network that supports them through their first 90 days.
The data platform is where survey imagery lives — alumni upload their captures; cooperative members access NDVI maps of their plots; the cohort program references historical imagery for instructor calibration. Both are non-profit. Neither is the product; together they are how rural Mindanao cooperatives get the same crop-health data that large commercial farms have had for years, at a price cooperatives can actually pay.
Lumipad is a program of Kennemer Foods International — a Mindanao cacao company with a long-running cooperative-network model. Kennemer started Lumipad in 2023 because they saw the same problem repeatedly across their cooperative network: cacao farmers who would benefit from NDVI surveys couldn't afford the commercial services that delivered them.
1. The farmers should own the drones. Not a company, not a platform, not a subscription. The pilot who built the drone keeps it. The cooperative who pays for surveys deals with a local person they know, not a call centre. The data lives with the people who fly.
2. Open documentation is infrastructure. Every BOM, every wiring diagram, every lesson plan — published under Creative Commons. If a partner org in Visayas wants to run their own variant of this program, they can. The curriculum is the product we give away; the alumni network is what you can't replicate from a PDF.
3. A working microenterprise is the only meaningful graduation metric. We don't count certificates issued. We count graduates who are still flying paid surveys 12 months after cohort end. 7 of our first 10 graduates are.
4. We update what we publish when we learn something. The curriculum library you're reading is version 1.0. The cohort history page is honest about what didn't work in earlier cohorts.
Cohort 03 is in progress — 12 trainees, the largest cohort yet. The curriculum is the version documented across this library. The data platform is in early access for Cohort 02 alumni. The remote cohort (international) is accepting applications for the first time.
The alumni network is small but active. 7 of the 10 graduates from Cohorts 01 and 02 are running microenterprises serving cooperatives in Davao del Sur, Davao City, and Davao del Norte. Median monthly survey count: 6. Median monthly income from drone work: above local agricultural minimum wage.
We're cautious about expansion. Cooperative leaders in Visayas and Northern Luzon have asked about variants of the program in their regions. The Mindanao model works because of specific Mindanao conditions — the cacao concentration, the cooperative networks Kennemer has built over a decade, the partner farm relationships, the alumni network density. We'd rather expand slowly with partner organisations who already have cooperative networks than expand quickly and dilute the model.