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Leading agricommerce company, WayCool Foods, is planning to add a suite of products and solutions to its recently launched agri superapp ‘Outgrow’. The platform will also add new languages, as it plans to expand its geographical outreach to farmers across the country.
“We are doing a couple of pilots on providing crop solutions, including farm inputs, crop finance and insurance as a package for farmers. The idea is to have a full-stack app that will help farmers go from soil to sale,” Sendhilkumar N, Head, Outgrow & Farmer Engagement, WayCool Foods, told BusinessLine.
Outgrow is WayCool’s flagship agriculture extension programme. Started four years ago as a small pilot with 60 farmers managing about 70 acres, the programme was helping farmers with information, resources and knowhow in areas such as soil health, irrigation and disease management. It then scaled up to cover 3,000 farmers and over 10,000 acres with 30 different crops.
Outgrow currently functions in two modules: an offline model where a four-acre model farm has been created in Hosur in Tamil Nadu to demonstrate natural farming and regenerative agriculture practices.
In March, the digital version of the programme was launched through an AI-powered app ‘Outgrow’. The platform provides comprehensive advisory and personalised solutions to farmers, including real-time Mandi prices, crop health, automated soil testing, and holistic farm advisory. Farmers can also avail of instant assistance from agronomists.
“We already have around one lakh users/ farmers on the digital platform,” Sendhilkumar said. Currently, the app is available in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, and English. During the launch, the company said Outgrow will initially support farmers from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
“If you take the six languages, it already covers more than 12 States. If we consider Hindi, then it covers Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh as well. We are planning to add three more languages and enter four new regions. However, this will be after we have extensive content and context building within the app for these languages,” Sendhilkumar said.
Currently, the platform has information on over 100 crops and 1,000-plus diseases. The platform also has artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions for disease detection. A farmer can click an image of a diseased leaf and upload it on the platform, and get to know about the disease and recommendations for the remedy.
“We have 20-odd crops and 70 diseases covered under this AI module. Our goal is to move towards 100-plus crops and 1,000-plus diseases ,” Sendhilkumar added.
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