Agri-business value chain experts called for the promotion of technologies that give farmers price visibility and phygital (physical and digital) infrastructure to help them discover better price.

Dushyant K Tyagi, Chief Executive of Farmgate Technologies Private Limited, said there is an urgent to build infrastructure, particularly at the farm level, in order to help farmers plan their sales and choose a better market – an electronic platform or a physical mandi, to get a better price.

“We need hybrid solutions to help the farmers on the production side and other stakeholders on the market side to provide them with the visibility (of demand and supply),” he said.

Taking part in the panel on ‘Building Resilient Supply Chains’ at businessline Agri and Commodity Summit – 2024 here on Friday, he felt that not having the right kind of regulatory mechanism and basic infrastructure were the two major constraints. businessline organised the conference in association with the State Bank of India, Nabard and NCDEX. “We also need to have a digital layer over the physical infrastructure,” he said.

“We have been asking farmers to grow more and grow better. To ask them to do more and grow better, it is like asking them to lose more. After 70 years addressing issues like subsistence, we have reached a stage we are in a surplus situation,” he said.

3 key hurdles

Arun Yadav, Senior Vice-President (Products) of NCDEX, said the agri supply chain was facing the three major challenges of climate change, infrastructure due to which they are losing more. While climate change impacted the supply side, the infrastructure shortcomings were leading to losses.

“The third major challenge is price volatility. If you can produce and store but if you are not able to manage price volatility, you can’t have a resilient supply chain. Because everyone in the supply chain is impacted by the volatility. Farmers, traders, stockists, and processors are all impacted. Unless these issues are addressed, it will be difficult to build a resilient supply chain,” he pointed out.

“We help every part of the value chain to manage the price volatility. If a platform ensures a farmer choose the price 2-3 months down the line, he will go for the best one. For a buyer, he is able to determine a price at which he would buy,” he said.

Varun Khurana, Co-Founder and CEO of Otipy (an e-com platform for fruits and vegetables), said they could reduce the farm-to-home delivery time to 12 hours. “We are able to minimise the wastages to just 3-3.5 per cent against the wastage levels of up to 30-35 p.c in the perishable sector,” he sector.

Talking about the importance of price visibility to empower farmers, he said that his start-up gave the price to farmers one day in advance. “We monitor the order patterns and predict the demand for the following day,” he said.

The start-up sells 120-130 tonnes of fresh fruits and vegetables in Delhi and 25-30 tonnes in Mumbai a day.

Prabhudatta Mishra, Deputy Editor, businessline, moderated the session.

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