5 Agri Stack Benefits That Can Supercharge Early Stage FPOs Today
March 21, 2024
India ‘Agri Stack’ is the digital infrastructure provided by the Central and State Governments to provide data and digital services in agriculture. Agri Stack helps the delivery and convergence of the Government schemes for the farmers, identification and authentication of the farmers, and enables delivery of financial services.
Farmer Producer Organization (FPOs) are using digital apps to improve their business operations. Digital apps that use Agri Stack may offer better possibilities to access the government schemes and convergence.
Table of Content
1. Why Agri Stack
2. Implementation Plan and Progress
3. Potential Uses of Agri Stack by the FPOs
3.1 Data Standardization
3.2 Integrate Different Digital Services for the FPO
3.3 Quicker Assessment and Disbursement of Financial Services
3.4 Input Quality Assurance
3.5 Shared Access to Physical and Digital Infrastructure
4. Way Forward
1. Why Agri Stack
Progress in digital agriculture in India requires the apps to use at least a few common datasets. If a farmer applies for an agriculture loan, the financial institutions should be able to identify the farmer using a common identification number. This common dataset also needed to identify the farm location and the crops sown in the farm. These three datasets alone can help augment the agricultural business in India.
Think about it. Precise data on crop sown area can help local agribusinesses plan their stocks and supply of farm inputs. Financial institutions like the bank or the Non-Banking Financial Corporation (NBFC) shall be able to use verifiable farming data to extend credit to the farmers.
Today, the Agri Stack consists of three Core Registries - Farmer Registry to help identify farmers, Geo-referenced Village Maps to provide farm location, and Crop Sown Registry to provide the crops sown in the given land parcel.
A set of Supporting Registries provide a vetted list of seed, fertilizers, and pesticide suppliers, and testing laboratories. Datasets in Core and Supporting Registries can ensure quality of the supplies (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Agri Stack’s Core Registries and Supporting Registries
2. Implementation Plan and Progress
The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare is responsible for the planning and coordinating the implementation of the Agri Stack, in collaboration with the State Governments. The Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW) has formed the National Farmers Welfare Program Implementation Society (NFWPIS) to provide the design and implement Agri Stack.
Progress
Agri Stack portal (https://agristack.gov.in) mentioned 22 states providing APIs for land records verification and more than 2000 agtech startups and companies to use the platform (as on March 16, 2024).
It has launched a Crop Survey Web Portal and mobile application called Krishi MApper in May 2023 as a pilot, covering all the districts in five states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra and 20% districts in Assam, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh.
领英推荐
3. Potential Uses of Agri Stack by the FPOs
We have identified 5 uses of the Agri Stack by the FPOs.
3.1 Data Standardization
FPOs participating in the “Formation and Promotion of 10,000 new Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs)”, often use around 10 to 15 different public datasets (2). Table 1 provides an illustrative list of the public datasets, including the ‘Crops Registry’ brought to us by Agri Stack.
Table 1: Illustrative list of public datasets for use by the FPOs
Agri Stack’s Core Registry can provide the FPOs with three datasets - a) farmers list, b) land parcel, and c) crops. These three datasets alone can speed up the FPO membership drives to reach a target of 1,000 farmers in plain areas from current 8 to 12 months to 3 to 6 months. Parcel and crop datasets will enable the FPOs to manually conduct baseline survey and generate business plans, to fulfill the funding and loan requirements.
3.2 Integrate Different Digital Services for the FPO
Agtech startups excel in selected digital services. Some excel in the retail ecommerce of produce, others focus on precision agriculture, for example.?
In August 2023, government, FPO, and agtech representatives participating in a Digital Needs & Gaps Assessment for Farmer Producer Organisations Workshop in Pune, Maharashtra asserted the need to be able to use different digital services from different agtech players. Agtech players providing services in nine agtech areas agreed to be able to bring an integrated platform for the FPOs (Figure 2).
FPOs can avail more and more interoperable digital services that can be easily integrated as they mature.
In the initial stage of the first three years, FPOs will combine digital services that help them grow and stabilize their revenues. They can also choose to deal with retail or wholesale buyers, depending on the market demands.
Agri Stack enables the agtech providers to make their apps interoperable and easy to integrate for the FPOs to cherry pick the digital services.
3.3 Quicker Assessment and Disbursal of Financial Services
Agri Stack’s Core Registry data can help the FPO to automatically generate accurate and traceable credit needs estimates. The financing services can include loans for crop (or Kisan Credit Card), insurance, farm mechanization, drip irrigation, dairy, poultry, agri clinic and agri business center, interest subvention, agricultural term loan, and agricultural gold loan.?
FPOs can choose to meet the financing gaps through loans and grants. Digital traceability of farmers, land parcels, and crops enable the financial institutions to make faster assessment and verification of credit worthiness of the FPOs.
3.4 Input Quality Assurance
Farmers and FPOs have limited technical capacity to assure the quality of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticide from the suppliers. Agri Stack registers the suppliers at all levels - testing laboratories, wholesalers, and suppliers.?
Registration of the suppliers through Agri Stack Supporting Registries and traceability of the input supplies across the supply chain shall help the FPOs to get an understanding of the quality control process.
3.5 Shared Access to Physical and Digital Infrastructure
FPOs require significant capital expenditure to create physical infrastructures such as warehouses, Custom Hiring Center (CHC), input shops, cold chain, and transportation. Digital infrastructure services include robots (weeding robots, seeding robots, and autonomous farm machineries) and drones.
In the early stage, individual FPOs don’t have full capacity utilization of such physical and digital infrastructure. Agri Stack datasets can accurately predict the demand estimation and job sheets with crops, land parcels, time, and charges for usage and engagement of these physical infrastructure. Distribution of the capex at a block level covering 10,000 to 50,000 farmers over day and night will significantly lower the opex for using these services.
Way Forward
Agri Stack has been developing the Core Registries in pilot districts and villages. FPOs operating in those areas can potentially use the services we have mentioned in this article. In the next step, the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India may consider selection of the CBBOs and FPOs in the piloting districts to pilot Agri Stack services in these five areas.
References: