Agnext & NAFED Partner To Organize Pulses’ Quality Assessment Training For Maharashtra’s FPOs

AgNext Technologies, India’s leading agri-tech company, collaborated with NAFED to organize a virtual training and awareness programme for Maharashtra’s biggest FPOs (Farmer Producer Organizations) on pulses’ quality assessment.

AgNext engaged with five FPOs – VCMF, Markfed, MahaFPC, Pruthashakti and VAAPCO - to create awareness about the quality standards of pulses, particularly toor dal, for the upcoming procurement season. The session was attended by FPO leaders, who will in turn train 40,000-50,000 farmers across Maharashtra.

The objective of the training program was to train the FPOs about the different market quality standards for toor dal. On the basis of this assessment, the commodity is graded and priced in the market. Practical demonstrations of physical assessment parameters were done to apprise the participants on how to recognize broken, damaged, immature, shriveled or weevilled pulses, foreign matter presence, moisture content in the samples, and other essential parameters. The participants were also shown how AgNext’s physical quality assessment device ‘SpecX Visio’ can instantly analyze the toor dal samples and do the physical quality check in less than a minute.

Highlighting the importance of the training, Taranjeet Singh Bhamra, CEO & Founder, AgNext Technologies said, “Traditional methods of food quality assessment are subjective and prone to manual errors. Ultimately, this impacts the price realization of the commodity at the time of trade. Better awareness and understanding of quality parameters of a commodity will help the farmers to trade better and generate more income. At the same time, tech-enabled best practices at the farm-gate and mandi level will help the farmers to improve their output quality and productivity over time. It is important to have regular training and knowledge sharing sessions among agribusinesses, producer organizations and farmers for increased adoption of innovative technologies in the agricultural ecosystem.”

Sanjay Nichal, Divisional Manager at the Vidarbha Cooperative Marketing Federation (VCMF), one of Maharashtra’s leading FPOs, said, “Uncertainty in food quality is one of the biggest reasons for rejection or low price of any commodity at the time of trade. For instance, lower quality of toor dal gets priced at a lower rate in the market and this leads to financial losses for farmers.

"It is important to generate awareness about quality parameters and new-age technologies which are being used for quality assessment by procurement organizations. This benefits the farmer producer organizations and small landholding farmers to stay up to date on the relevant information about industry best practices.”