When Sam Rigu was a kid, growing up on a maize farm in central Kenya, his grandmother made a disturbing prediction.

“She said something I’ll never forget,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Twenty years ago we were harvesting double this. Twenty years from now we might have nothing to feed our children.’ That really scared me.”

It wasn’t until many years later, when Rigu first learned about climate change as a university student, that he realized just how right she was.

After college, Rigu began managing his own maize farm, and saw firsthand the toll that rising temperatures and unpredictable rain had on his corn. He sought solutions, but he was never much of a green thumb: His dream was to help farmers with