How ICT innovations can help farmers

Public and private actors are looking for effective solutions to address challenges in agriculture, including how to address the abundant information needs of farmers and make agriculture profitable for them.

Farmers need updated information to empower themselves in taking research to land, avail timely and adequate credit, seek and act on market intelligence reports and access market and negotiate prices. This critical information may increase farmer’s productivity, income as well as protect their food security and livelihoods.

Using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in innovative ways through ICT-enabled services helps in disseminating timely information on agricultural advisories, financial services and agricultural marketing and risk transfer to the farmer to improve their capacity and mitigate risks.

Farmers’ information priorities include accurate local weather forecasts, crop specific advisory sequenced according to the stage in the crop cycle and price information. ICTs helps in capturing real time weather parameters through remote sensors, collect commodity prices through mobile technologies and acquire updated research findings regarding crops through the web-based platforms of agricultural universities and research institutes.

The information, thus, collected is stored in database and triggered automatically to disseminate localised and personalised information on weather, commodity prices and crop cultivation to registered farmers through Short Messaging Service (SMS) and Interactive Voice response (IVR) over the mobile communication channel. This updated information empowers farmer as they are better informed and prepared themselves to utilise their resources profitably.

Availability and access to adequate, timely and low-cost credit from banks is of great importance for sustainable and profitable farming. The challenges to bring all farmers within the banking reach at affordable cost have been fulfilled through remote bank transactions assisted by hand-held biometric transaction devices.

The Banks facilitate financial services such as savings, credit, insurance and remittance with the help of these devices accessed through smart cards. Smart cards hold farmers’ information regarding the land details, crop history and financial transactions, which help bank to process and sanction crop loan faster. Thus, the farmer needs to initiate the loan procedure through the hand-held device available at the village and visit the bank to collect the loan amount upon confirmation on loan sanction. This saves the farmer valuable time and energy to obtain institutional loans.

The agriculture market size and its reach have increased manifold over the years due to linkages with distant and overseas markets. Farmers are using various ICT platforms viz. mobiles, web-portals, information kiosks, e-markets, etc for marketing their produce. ICT platform adds market knowledge and give farmer greater confidence in understanding the demand and enhance ability to the control production and manage supply chains. It also helps farmers to deal directly with large wholesalers or traders or directly with the processors rather than small-scale intermediaries.

Thus, ICT platforms assist in developing a broader network of contacts which helps in making better decision regarding transportation and logistics, price and location, supply and demand and cheaper access to inputs.

Volatility in commodity price and the threat of climate change have increased interest in risk transfer instruments such as insurance and price hedging more relevant and affordable for farmers. The ability of mobile platform to facilitate financial transactions, capturing real-time data about crop loss and automatically perform damage assessment can definitely help in scaling up risk transfer instruments for farmers.

Similarly, accessing the futures and national spot markets for agri-commodities with real-time price dissemination help farmers or farmer groups to hedge their positions or opportunity to sell online at the spot markets.

Robust and economical mobile infrastructure is imperative for exchange of vital information between farmers and service providers. Further, the use of smartphones and tabs for information dissemination is more efficient and tailored for the users as it facilitates to install software applications for getting advanced risk mitigating strategies such as early warnings and advisory information. It also helps in integrating supply chain with GPS which provides mapping functionality.

Thus, ICT innovation empowers farmers by facilitating timely access to localised and personalised information for greater control of their production, risks and thus market their produce to identified market opportunities.

The writer is Associate Director - Commodities & Currencies, Angel Commodities Broking Pvt. Ltd. Views are personal.

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