The Covid-19 pandemic has spread all around the world rapidly and has negatively impacted several business sectors including the agricultural sector. The nationwide lockdown also played a role in weakening the economy. India is the land of agriculture. Agricultural land in India was reported at 60.45 % in 2016, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators. Agriculture, with its associated sectors, is an extensive and wide-ranging source of subsistence in India with 82 per cent of farmers being small and marginal. Covid-19 and several other economic, environmental, and sociological factors have affected the agricultural industry.
Rural livelihoods play a pivotal role in achieving a peaceful and prosperous future free from poverty and hunger, as for a very long time, rural areas have been seen as poverty traps. They are key to economic growth in developing countries, with immeasurable potential for fiscal growth pegged to food production and related sectors. The government has laid down the groundwork to eradicate rural poverty; ending extreme poverty by 2030 is the first and foremost goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Mr. Borkar, the Co-founder of FarmERP adds, “We help farmers in contracting their businesses to initiate the digital alteration of their operations with regards to contract management and agriculture supply chain management. With the idea of sustainability, we are working on optimizing the use of chemicals, fertilizers, and water to aide farmers to grow sustainable produce while keeping the environment safe and also enabling them to reap the benefits of their harvests.”
FarmERP has been conscientiously collaborating with the government to aid farmers. FarmERP has been aggressively working with various FPO’s and allowing stakeholders to streamline their businesses by the practice of operations on this technology platform; they have collaborated with MAHAFPC to implement technology spanning across their entire operations. This will assist the working patterns of MAHAFPC in a way that helps bring their entire business operations over a single digital platform. FarmERP further achieves an end to end traceability, mitigates climate risks along with assuring consistent supply to their customers.
FarmERP works on four main objectives: – sustainability, food safety, climate resilience, and traceability. With its supply management software, it enables produce to be tracked from the initial place of production, right up to its availability in the market thus, helping farmers to understand the supply chain better.
The two major issues that most of the farmers face in India are yield and market relations. Most of them are not paid the right price for their produce and are constantly exploited by the middlemen. FarmERP helps them to get in touch with authorized buyers, farming companies, and stakeholders to make their lives easier.
In order to improve the multi-cropping patterns of some businesses, FarmERP prepared crop planning and crop schedules. The farm supervisors were trained to capture production data over mobile client application which helped them control production activities in real-time. Multiple Plot Record helps to plan row-wise farm production activities. It enables field managers to add or edit farm production activities including minute details based on the type of operations.
Not only this, but FarmERP also helps farmers to better the quality of their produce by providing them details on soil health and degradation through their “Safe to harvest” feature on the FarmERP Lite app. This helps the farmers to know when their plot is ready for harvest in view of chemicals sprayed on the land. Secondly, their “Safe to Spray” feature helps to guide farmers on which chemicals and pesticides are impervious. FarmERP’s agriculture software solutions offer three essential features – soil observation details, tree observation details, and water observation details.
Apart from this, its geo-mapping, tree encoding, and crop scouting solutions, FarmERP helps to anticipate and respond to hazardous events or disturbances related to climate, thus improving climate resilience and helping farmers to avoid risks and cut down on losses.
Various Venture Capital firms are looking at agriculture start-ups for a rich harvest. FarmERP with its future-ready, agriculture ERP platform for smart agriculture has enabled a leading fresh produce start-up in India to minimize wastage and manage the entire business on a single digital platform.
According to the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), “the Indian food processing industry has cumulatively attracted Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) equity inflow of about US$ 9.98 billion between April 2000 and March 2020”. The Indian Government has also assisted farmers during the pandemic with various Acts such as the amendment of the Essential Commodities Act Technology is currently advancing at a breakneck pace, much like the exponential growth experienced by database technology in the late twentieth century.
“Databases have grown to become the core infrastructure that drives enterprise-level software”. Similarly, most of the new value-added from software over the coming decades is expected to be driven by technology. Farmers must obtain the benefit of this digital integration with agriculture as it will not only help them become self- sufficient and organised but also help them to take on future challenges effortlessly.
