Indian farmers adopt technology to increase efficiency
India is an agriculture based country with farming and related activities constituting to a huge chunk of the GDP and employment. Even though the government has several initiatives for helping the farmers there isn’t much that has happened over the years.
The adoption of technology in farming has been slow due to the infrastructure, learning curve and cost involved. FarmERP, a product by Shivrai Technologies is hoping to change this. The company is offering Enterprise Resource planning (ERP) software tailored for farmers. FarmERP has three SKUs starting from INR 15,000. Santosh Shinde, one of the founders of Shivari Technologies in an email said are sell their software directly to the farmers and are in discussions with the state governments to increase adoption among farmers.
Farmers in Maharashtra, Gujrat and Karnataka have deployed FarmERP to help them plan their crop growth. FarmERP offers online as well as onsite versions with features like:
- Water requirement, fertilizer, pesticide dose, spray mix, calculators.
- Data search based on crop, variety, estimated harvest, region date etc. is possible.
- Can be used to keep track of planting, cultivation, harvesting, marketing history of multiple farmers and their farm produce.
- A scheduler for the agricultural operations which directly gets converted to work done list.
- Financial transactions, assets, liabilities, income, expenses details can be stored to get various financial reports.
Having reports and being able to schedule various tasks will definitely help farmers improve their produce. Penetration of such products and upgrading telecommunication infrastructure in the deeper pockets of India is on the governments agenda. The state and central governments have projects to expand broadband connectivity and services like mobile remittance can bridge the gap between the end customers and farmers.