The Opportunities for Technology to Transform Agriculture
By Harsh Vardhan, Technical Lead at nurture.farm
Hello World!
If you’ve ever written code, you know this is probably the first program you learn to code. And, just like that, at nurture.farm, we are only at the beginning of an inspiring and ambitious journey to enable and empower sustainable farming practices around the world.
The mission and vision of nurture.farm is quite extensive. We are aiming for a wholesome change in the world of agriculture by creating access for farmers to better inputs, advisory, mechanization, information, and logistics to the market. But none of this can reach millions of farmers around the world without a strong investment in technology-backed capabilities.
We are engineers, product managers, designers, and analysts with years of experience in building systems that have powered experiences for millions of users in multiple domains. We thrive on the idea of solving one the biggest and the most fundamental challenges for human existence — and that is the challenge of Food Security. The agriculture sector needs to feed 7+ billion people right now and about 11 billion people by the turn of the next century. To rise to this challenge, we need to provide our 500 million farmers worldwide with several innovative and affordable solutions. We need to protect our planet’s limited resources for a better future. Let’s look at some of the prevailing challenges in agriculture globally, and how technology can help tackle them.
Fragmented land ownership
The land available per farmer for farming has decreased due to the lower availability of new land for agriculture, as well as the division among the successive generations in traditional farming families. The economics of small landholdings do not allow the farmer to buy modern machinery or access to scientific know-how. This, in turn, leads to low yield and poor incomes to the farmers. This also puts small farmers at a huge disadvantage vis a via large, industrial farms which have resources to employ agronomists, buy modern machines, and use technology to optimize their ROI. But what if we can aggregate the land virtually and provide machines, access to technology, and scientific advice at a community level? This can enable amortization of this cost across a larger number of farmers, making it affordable even for the farmers with small land-holdings.
Crop failure
A crop can fail due to many reasons. Pest attacks, drought, and floods are some of them. A possible mitigation is to accurately predict rainfall and provide timely information to the farmers and help them select the right crops and seeds. Similarly, machine learning algorithms can analyze crop imagery and inform us about an upcoming pest attack, which might have gone unnoticed until it was too late.
Ineffective sales channels
Currently, a farmer has limited ways to sell his harvest. The sales channels have multiple hops, which lead to unattractive prices offered to the farmer. Similarly, there is a demand for organic and sustainably grown products but the requirement for products to be tagged as organic is stringent and unknown to many farmers. We can leverage technology to make sustainability a core tenet in farming, by bringing verifiable certification of processes followed at the farm level and by connecting farmers digitally to buyers who value such products.
Lack of Information
A typical farmer in a developing country does not have access to soil nutrient profiles. His use of nutrients is based on anecdotal experience rather than science, which is often a wastage of resources and further degradation of the environment. Easy access to soil testing as well as expert advice will surely increase efficiency and yield per unit area.
Monetary constraints
A large number of farmers struggle to have a steady cash flow. Couple with the fact that many of them are under-educated, this presents a big problem to most of them, as they look for resources to purchase inputs for their farms each season. Rural areas don’t have good access to modern industrial institutions like banks, insurance as well as healthcare. Such services, when they are present, the costs are often prohibitive. Technology can make many such services more efficient and hence, more affordable. For example, a significant cost of insurance in crops comes from the difficulty in assessing crop loss. The rise of mobile apps and data penetration helps to remove many barriers and makes it easier to monitor and assess losses, thereby reducing the cost of risk underwriting. Similarly, bringing the farming ecosystem online and creating a digital trail of their work can help bring access to formal credit.
Storage Issues
Farmers often do not have access to facilities where they can store their produce in the right conditions prior to the sale. Farmers have no option but to sell at whatever price the local buyer is offering. Farmers lose bargaining power due to the lack of proper storage facilities. Governments of different countries are also working to tackle the challenge. For example, recently the Government of India has instituted Agricultural Infrastructure Fund which allows funding to MSMEs at subsidized interest rates as well as relaxation in repayment to set up post-harvest storage solutions. Such welcome efforts do not reach their full potential because of inefficient implementation. The technology can play a role here by providing a data-driven platform that recognizes the right location to set up storage facilities that help the entrepreneurs as well as the farmers. A centralized web-based platform can also provide democratic access to storage facilities to all farmers by impartial allotment and free information regarding the status of availability.
What next?
These challenges in agriculture require a holistic approach which adds value to each part of the crop lifecycle. Any of these challenges can not be solved in isolation. At nurture.farm, we are working on several of these challenges using our experiences drawn from technology companies. Our collective experience of building technology at scale powering logistics, ride-hailing, and agriculture companies mean we can combine cross-domain principles together to build solutions that are scalable, sustainable, and add value to all stakeholders.
If you like what we are doing, please follow this space, where we will keep you updated through our journey.
