Description
Zemjodelie.mk began (≈2017) as an agricultural information website and has grown into a multi-channel ecosystem for North Macedonian farmers: the website (news, market prices, advice, machinery, funding, rural tourism, recipes), a large Facebook page and group, a Viber trading group, a niche farmer social network ("Boom Maka"), a free online marketplace, and "Stojna," an AI assistant that answers farmers' questions and diagnoses crop problems from photos. It is built and run single-handedly by founder Milan Lazareski as a volunteer project. Founder authors content himself, drawing on agronomy faculty textbooks, and prioritizes topics from questions surfaced in the Facebook group.
Technology
WordPress-based website. The flagship feature is Stojna, an LLM-based (ChatGPT/cloud API) conversational assistant embedded across the site (and with its own access point) that responds 24/7 in Macedonian, requires no login, and performs image recognition — farmers upload photos of crops/disease and receive answers. Stojna is tuned with local-language, local-crop and local-knowledge context. The site also includes interactive quizzes (e.g., tomato-disease learning). Community/commerce runs through a Facebook page and group, a Viber group used for selling livestock and produce that Facebook prohibits, the "Boom Maka" social network (low uptake), and a free marketplace.
Target
The primary users of Zemjodelie.mk include farmers, farm managers and agribusiness owners with an interest in industrial news, and those seeking agricultural knowledge and practical information. Private sector businesses, on the other hand, use Zemjodelie.mk to advertise their agricultural products and services. Finally, rural communities benefit from the site’s promotion of tourism to villages in North Macedonia.
Business model
Zemjodelie.mk is a free and publicly accessible platform that generates revenues primarily through advertising on the platform.
Impact
Zemjodelie.mk provides its users with easy access to agricultural knowledge and information, and helps farmers keep abreast of industry news, market prices, best farming practices, funding opportunities, etc. In this regard, it supports improved decision-making through its creation of a better-informed agricultural community. The promotion of rural tourism, on the other hand, supports local economies by attracting visitors to the villages of North Macedonia.
Four Betters
Better production
Better life
