Can a single agri-platform multiply farmers’ incomes through the network effect?

Across India today, pioneering agritech companies like Sahyadri Farms and Samunnati have demonstrated the power of digital platforms in improving farm productivity by increasing incomes for smallholder farmers. Consider how Nashik-based Sahayadri Farms has Amulified close to 26,500 smallholder farmers in the fresh fruits and vegetables segment to export premium produce to global markets, thereby cutting out exploitative mediators and integrating cold storage to reduce post-harvest losses from 30 percent to just 5 percent.

Meanwhile, Samunnati’s financial innovations have unlocked $3.5 billion in credit for farmers, with a default rate of just 1.5 percent, by tailoring loans to crop cycles rather than forcing one-size-fits-all repayment schedules. These models have reinvented traditional collective bargaining by personalising broad-based solutions like access to finance and real-time global market linkages with individual farmers’ and their families’ needs and aspirations.

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However significant these achievements seem, they lie at the visible top of the iceberg of hidden innovations that can be harnessed if only the Indian agri ecosystem dares to backcast, i.e. imagine future growth and cultivate platform technologies that can materialise this growth in terms of higher production volumes optimised for a changing climate and food processing innovations to respond to real-time demand from global markets.

Backcasting to make Indian agri globally competitive

It is critical to assess the challenges holding back Indian farmers, many of which have strong historical or political roots, to imagine and create solutions for future growth and prosperity. Globally, the gap between India’s farm productivity and that of countries like the US, Brazil or China is staggering. An acre of land in Punjab grows half as much wheat as one in France, while China produces nearly twice as much rice per hectare as India. The reasons are no secret—fragmented landholdings, reliance on monsoons, and a lack of mechanisation and real-time market intelligence—leaving farmers guessing at every step.
The platformisation of farmer collectives by offering a range of benefits, as seen in the case of Sahyadri and Samunnati, is one way to offset farmers’ uncertainty surrounding commodity prices and crop failure. But what if the platforms went one step further, not only in offering accurate weather forecasts and granular data on soil pH, moisture content, risk of crop pestilence, etc, but also matching them with the right seeds or crop mix for higher productivity per hectare?

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Consider the example of Israeli startup Beewise, which uses AI and robotics to promote bee-pollination-as-a-service, thus increasing the chance of natural pollination of fruits and vegetables and generating revenue by harvesting honey.

Another example is that Silicon Valley startup Heritable Agriculture uses AI to shrink crop breeding time from a decade to two years. By analysing genetic data and climate trends, Heritable’s algorithms predict which seed varieties will thrive in specific soil and weather conditions, thus nudging farmers to make more informed decisions for demand planning.