FarmERP: Empowering Farmers to Self-Sufficiency

Agriculture and its allied sources form the largest sources of livelihood in India. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, about 70% of India’s rural households primarily depend on agriculture, with about 82% of these being constituted by small and marginal farmers. India is also the largest producer, consumer and importer of grains and pulses in the world with its involvement in the dairy industry not far behind. 

FarmERP caters not only to the consumer’s perspective, but majorly focuses on the benefit of the farmers as well. The organisation functions on four main pillars- sustainability, food safety, climate resilience and traceability. To address the need from the consumer’s point of you, FarmERP enables complete traceability to the produce with its vast supply management software, which enables produce to be traced back to where it was initially produced, where it was taken for checks and right up to the availability in different markets.  

Being brought up in an agricultural background, the CEO of the organisation, Mr. Sanjay Borkar understands the difficulties of farmers right from lack of education, resources, information on weather, understanding of supply chains and getting the right value for their produce.  

Farmers in India face a majority of issues in two areas: productivity and market linkage. They do not have a knowledge of where to sell their products, and who would give them the right value for it. FarmERP comes into play here, and the organisation helps them get in touch with buyers, contract farming companies and stakeholders with a relative ease in the process. The ultimate goal is to increase the efficiency of the supply chain and thus increase productivity and empower these farmers. 

A significant rise in growth of the contract farming landscape is indicating the potential growth in the number of smallholder farmers getting involved in contract farming arrangements. However, with the increasing number of farmers come more and more difficult challenges for contract farming businesses to manage their value chains as well as supply chains. Consequently, an effective farm management platform has become indispensable for contract farming businesses to prevent pervasive market failures by efficiently managing smallholder participation and contribution in contract farming arrangements. 

FarmERP’s farm management system automates this entire process of farmer registration. Once all the details have been fed to the system, it creates and manages farmer profiles according to their unique identification numbers. It also assigns these farmers to different collection centres, where field supervisors can track their farming practices while managing these farms. Based on the collected data points, field supervisors and managers of contract farming firms can make informed decisions about what type of contracts to sign with suitable farmer profiles. The feedback loop created in the agriculture management system also enhances the smallholder participation in the process, which ultimately helps boost productivity of the entire contract farming activity. 

In most contract farming operations, resource sharing operations involve the provision of inputs in terms of goods such as fertilizers, seeds, and pesticides. However, all these inputs are offered on credit in most cases. FarmERP’s agriculture management system keeps complete track of which inputs are offered free of cost and which services are chargeable. Based on this data, the system manages the entire cost component of each contract. With the help of these features, FarmERP helps contract farming businesses to commence the digital transformation of their operations vis-a-vis contract management as well as agriculture supply chain management. 

The research and development team at the organisation focuses on processes to not just make faming efficient for farmers, but also to reduce the negative impact of traditional farming practices on the environment.  

With sustainability being one of their focus areas, FarmERP does not promote the use chemicals and fertilizers with farmers. Instead, they are working on optimizing the use of chemicals, fertilizers and water to help them grow sustainable produce by which the environment is kept safe, while also enabling farmers make more profit by connecting them with buyers. 

FarmERP's platform, thus helps small and marginal farmers be more professional, independent, and self-sufficient while helping them grow more produce which is sustainable, traceable and safe and make better profit from market linkages.