South Africa's Temminck's pangolins are vanishing — one every five minutes worldwide. Panga Farm One combines conservation land, AI-driven monitoring, and community partnerships to turn the tide in South Africa.
Our Approach
We combine on-the-ground conservation with AI-powered technology — not because it sounds good, but because poachers are organised, funded, and use WhatsApp. We need better tools.
Panga Farm One is our conservation anchor — managed land in Gauteng where pangolins can recover, breed, and be monitored. Habitat is the first line of defence.
RTX 6000 Ada GPU runs vision models (qwen3-vl, gemma4), wildlife ID systems, and real-time alert processing. When a camera trips at 02:00, the AI wakes up — not a ranger.
Local landowners become partners. SA corporates adopt pangolins for ESG reporting. Structural engineers fund conservation while we build the tools they need. Revenue funds protection.
Phase 1 — Active Now
Smutsia temminckii — the Temminck's ground pangolin — is the only pangolin species in South Africa. It is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List and faces escalating poaching pressure driven by demand from Asian traditional medicine markets.
Phase 1 focuses on: habitat mapping in Gauteng and Limpopo, camera trap AI processing to identify pangolins and intruders, and building the landowner partnership network that gives pangolins protected corridors to move through.
Our GPU-based AI runs locally — no cloud dependency, no latency. A poaching alert processed in 200ms beats a WhatsApp group every time.
Why Temminck's first? Of the four African pangolin species, Temminck's is the most trafficked and the most accessible to SA-based research. Protecting it in Gauteng creates a model we can replicate across all eight species.
Technology
The same infrastructure powering our structural engineering tools runs pangolin protection. High-end GPU inference, multiple open-source models, all on South African soil.
Hardware
Hosted on Hetzner. Runs Ollama with llama4:scout 67B, qwen3-vl, gemma4, and deepseek-r1 simultaneously. Enough compute to process camera feeds from 50+ sites in real time.
Vision AI
Multimodal vision models classify camera trap images: pangolin present / absent / poacher activity / other wildlife. Sub-second inference, tuned for low-light SA bush conditions.
Data Layer
GPS collar data, camera trap grids, and landowner observations feed into a spatial database. Movement corridors are modelled to guide land acquisition priorities.
Roadmap
Giant pangolin (Central Africa), White-bellied (West Africa), then Asian species. Each phase tests and refines the technology stack before scaling to harder environments.
Take Action
Pangolin conservation runs on three things: land, technology, and money. Here is where you fit in.
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