With the advent of information technology, many sectors like banking, governance and logistics have seen advancements in terms of speed of execution, efficiency, and data-backed decision-making. Now we are witnessing a similar kind of disruption happening in India's agriculture sector.
Let us understand how Fasal is changing the Indian farming landscape.
Farming History in India
Agricultural practices in India started almost 11,000 years ago. People during that period mostly cultivated wheat and grains and followed simple agronomical practices like thrashing and planting crops in a row.
Fast forward to 2022, farmers of New India are growing a wide variety of crops like dragon fruit, avocado, kiwi and kale, while following advanced agronomical practices like drip irrigation and mulching. Farmers are also leveraging information technology to assist them with farming decisions.
Agriculture contributes around 18% of India’s GDP and employs almost 40% of the Indian workforce. This GDP is expected to rise at 12.3% CAGR in the next 5 years.
To understand more about which type of farming does the most contribution to GDP, let us understand the different types of farming followed in India.
Different Types of Farming in India
Based on the land holdings and needs of the farmer, farming can be categorized into 2 broad segments:
a. Small-scale farming/Subsistence farming — also known as family farming as it deals with the needs of the farmer’s family. Mostly they use low levels of technology, household labor and have small land holdings.
b. Commercial Farming — farmers having large land holdings produce harvests that they can sell on the market. These farms are the major contributors to the revenue of the country’s economy. These are farmers who are more inclined towards maximizing produce, generating profits out of their farms, and take advantage of technology to maximize yields.
Fasal.co started in 2018 with an aim to provide technology-assisted farming; i.e Artificial Intelligence, IOT, Drone Imagery, Satellite Imagery and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to help commercial farmers in producing better quality yield and make higher profits.
In addition to the above, commercial farmers also collaborate with farming organizations to sell their produce. To understand how these businesses work, let us understand enterprise farming.
What is Enterprise Farming?
Farmers with large plot holdings decide to collaborate/contract with organizations to sell the harvest for a fixed period of time. This is called Enterprise Farming. Enterprise Farming also belongs to the Commercial Farming Segment.
In India, about 75% of total farming land is involved in enterprise farming and is expected to grow at about 4% year on year.
Fasal.co caters to the needs of enterprise organizations at multiple segments. Let us understand more about enterprise farming segments and the way they operate.
Enterprise Farming Segments
Seed RnD: They breed and analyze the hybrid seed varieties to check their performance under various climatic conditions, disease/pest resistance and sell it to farmers and other enterprise organizations.
Seed Production: They produce/multiply the seed in large numbers and sell it to farmers.
Plantation: They do crop plantation on large farms owned by them and sell/export the produce/finished goods.
Spices: They do contract farming with farmers and make them follow best practices to produce better yields and then they export them to the desired country.
Horticulture: They generally have their own farms / collaborate with FPOs to sell/export the harvest.
Wineries: They have their own farms, they produce their own harvest, convert them into wines and sell the finished/packaged products to the markets.
To understand how Fasal caters to the requirements of the above enterprise segments let us understand Enterprise Fasal product.
Fasal’s New Product Offering: “Enterprise Fasal”
Fasal App was designed keeping the needs of our retail customers in mind. As our Institutional Business customers grew in number and a lot of potential corporate leads started showing serious interest in our product, we knew it was time to launch a new product, that catered specifically to the needs of our enterprise customers.
Some of the aspects of our retail Fasal App that we thought couldn't match the needs of our Enterprise Customers were:
- locating desired plot from a large number of plots
- real time monitoring of disease/pest issues on every plot
- managing and priortizing alerts/advisories
- managing various users and assigning different roles
- analyzing real-time and historical data related to sensors, plots, performance etc.
- customizing advisories and chemical recommendations according to customers need
- on field data capturing from farmers
Thus, Enterprise Fasal was born, which is a completely configurable system aimed at providing customer-specific advisories and recommendations to customers at scale.
Here, the Customers can visualise farm data at scale, configure and customize the following actions according to their needs in addition to Fasal’s native advisories
- configure and prioritize disease/pest advisories.
- configure custom scheduled and unscheduled plans.
- configure customer-specific spray recommendations.
- configure various on-farm activities that needed to be captured from farmers/plots.
- capture unforeseen events on farms by the field staff and send them to the reporting staff.
- managing new users and roles inside the organization.
- configure reporting structure within an organization.
- analyzing the historical and real-time on-farm data to draw insights in the form of visualizations and Dashboards.
Enterprise Fasal is the go-to product for all Farming Companies to effectively manage their farming operations, reduce input costs, increase their yield and ensure best quality produce every season.
