While Indian farmers continue to protest the new farm laws, it is easy to see the significance that agriculture holds as a source of livelihood in India. It accounts for 23% of the GDP, employing 59% of the country’s total workforce in 2016, according to the report of Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN.
The sector has come up as one of the fastest booming sectors. It won’t be wrong to say that infusion of technologies such as Machine Learning (ML) and data analytics has enabled farmers to maximize their output, allowing the Indian agriculture industry to evolve.
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Still, farmers lack either the knowledge of new techniques or the ability to access these techniques. Many startups have appeared in the sector with the aim of solving these problems and ease the farmers´ path. Here are five that are using technologies such as ML, data analytics, and fintech to aid the Indian farmer.
Unnati Agritech
Unnati is a new-age fintech powered digital farming company, offering end-to-end support for farmers across the country. Driven by data, the brand provides the necessary handholding for farmers across every stage of the farming cycle, such as working capital, seed buying, purchasing the right nutrients and pesticides for crops, harvesting, and even selling the crops.
Unnati’s multifaceted app gives access to agri finance, knowledge support, cloud accounting transaction history, and even soil data. Unnati assists farmers to follow the best practices in farming while aiding them financially with the help of technology.
Agribazaar
Founded in 2016, Agribazaar delivers technology-enabled solutions to over two lakh farmers now by helping them get better prices. The startup has, since the past month, hired 200 of the 350 planned hiring this year, even amid lockdowns and massive retrenchments in almost all sectors of the economy.
As part of its service diversification, leading farm marketplace Agribazaar is planning to play a larger role in the inputs space, including selling farm implements like harvesters. The company plans to supply agri inputs like seeds and pesticides to farmers through their agri-micropreneurs on a pilot basis.
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The company also plans to offer farm implements like harvesters through these micropreneurs, whose number they plan to increase to 10,000 in the next three years from the current 485. Agribazaar will soon enlist farmers of cash crops such as coffee, cardamom, and pepper.
Ninjacart
Ninjacart is India’s largest fresh produce supply chain company that is solving one of the toughest problems in the world through technology. The brand connects producers of food directly with retailers, restaurants, and service providers, using in-house applications that drive end to end operations. Currently, their supply chain is equipped to move 1400 tons of perishables from farms to businesses every day, in less than 12 hours.
CropIn
CropIn is an intuitive, intelligent, self-evolving system that delivers future-ready farming solutions to the entire agricultural sector. The brand delivers decision-making tools that bring consistency, dependability, and sustainability to agri-businesses. Real-time actionable insights enable farm management companies to take planned and responsive business decisions. The predictability of quantity and quality of yield, combined with reduced cost of operations, results in higher productivity for the businesses.
Agdhi
Agdhi, an agritech startup based in Bengaluru has introduced vision enabled AI-based technology in agriculture. It has launched Machine Learning and computer vision techniques to detect defects in seeds and crops, thus enabling the farming community to get quality seeds and crops. The results arrive in seconds.
The aim is to bring technology disruption in seed testing, seed sampling, and crop yield, which is the need of the hour. The startup is introducing digital technology and building alternative solutions to facilitate sustainable methods in agriculture.
