AgriTech platforms helping farmers achieve financial independence

By Leandra Monteiro

Farmers are significantly facing pressure to feed an ever-growing population and their challenges are far more complex due to the complicated agricultural value chain. Apart from apt foresight and good judgment, there is an acute need to adopt modern, sustainable farming practices backed by technology in order to ensure a steady flow of income for farmers looking at the current challenging economy. However, being sustainable comes at a price which at times becomes difficult for framers to meet.

Across the world, advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, remote sensing, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), multispectral images, cloud computing systems, etc. have played a significant role in increasing the yield by deploying fewer resources. All these tools have equipped the farming community in planning and predicting the production cycle with greater accuracy. Here is a list of platforms that are helping farmers achieve the digital financial agriculture goals:

Agribazaar: India’s premier one-stop agritech platform recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare (DAC&FW), Union Ministry of Agriculture to promote digital agriculture in rural India with a scientific approach. The Digital Agricultural Platform (DAP) will enable and empower the Indian farmer to approach farming in an integrated manner, with a single source enabling agri-tech platform.

The project will entail the development and implementation of a digital agriculture platform with solutions in crop identification & estimation using remote sensing technology, advisory services to farmers, post-harvest intelligence for farmers and market connect as well as providing financial access to the farmers.

AgriBazaar is enabling and empowering farmers with better, speedier & transparent information, crop advisory and price realization. This project will extend agribazaar efforts to ensure that the Indian farming community uses technology to deliver crops with higher and predictable quality, traceability and consistency.

AgNext: With its deep-tech solutions, AgNext is poised to transform the Agri value chain at a global scale. Farmers benefit from instant food quality assessment technology supported by AI-on-the-edge.

In the traditional configuration, the farmer spends several months planting a crop. When he sells the crop, he will subjectively and manually analyse the quality of his food. This is a process with a high error rate. By using technology to standardise food quality inspections, farmers can ensure fair pricing of agricultural products and thus obtain higher profit margins.

Unnati: Unnati is helping farmers become entrepreneurs by becoming a farming enterprise. From helping them acquire high quality branded inputs at minimal rates to procuring credit at a much lower rate or without any collateral, Unnati has redefined the conventional ways of farming.

The start-up has successfully impacted over 250k farmers’ lives through its network of 17k uStores. Unnati is empowering farmers through the way of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPO) and is enabling them with tech-led business solutions enhancing their economic strengths and marketing linkages for improving their income.

Unnati is equipping the FPOs to leverage their collective strengths and bargaining power to access financial and non-financial inputs, services and technologies, reduce transaction costs, and tap high-value markets. Unnati’s predictive farming model is shaping the future of farming with its sophisticated technology.

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