Lessons from AgriCentral 10M downloads and what agritech can do better for farmers

This year, our farmers service app for India, AgriCentral, hit 10 million downloads. It has become a household name amongst farmers in India. How did we get there and the things that we learned that helped us build our products better??

In the fifth episode of The Crop Chronicles podcast, our Senior Content Specialist, Nea Ningtyas , talked to AgriCentral’s Senior Product Manager, Akanksha Barot , to discuss the journey of AgriCentral: Smart Farming For All ; how we got predominantly rural farmers to adopt and embrace technology, what we did to reach the correct farmers demographic, and all the learnings from building a digital product for farmers that is different from urban users.

At the end of the conversation, Akanksha shared her views on how agritech can do better to serve smallholder farmers.

This article is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Listen to the uncut conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON OUR MEDIUM PAGE.

I would like to hear more about AgriCentral. Can you briefly introduce it and how is it helping farmers in India?

So Agri Central is a free mobile application specially designed by Jiva? for Indian farmers. It's available in seven languages and it is created to help Indian farmers make critical decisions in the farming business to increase productivity and profitability. We have quite a few valuable features on the AgriCentral application. These features have been quite appreciated by our farmers as well.

Just to give you an example, we have a feature called Market View which informs users of the latest prices of their crops in nearby markets. AgriCentral currently has the largest collection of prices covering more than 100 crops, about 2000 markets in India, and approximately 20,000 price points, which are available. But on an average, you will see about 12,000 active price points on the application.

Armed with this information, farmers can decide when and where to sell their produce. You also have a feature called Crop Care, which lets users detect pests, disease, and nutritional deficiencies which are affecting their crop. All the user has to do is basically just click a picture of the problem, upload it, and through image analytics, we show them what could be the problem and how they could control this.

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Indian farmers, like those in Indonesia, are predominantly living in the rural areas – they might have limited digital literacy or access to digital infrastructures. So how did we get to 10 million downloads? What do you think are the things that we got right in terms of building digital products and pursuing technology adoption for farmers?

You're right. Digital literacy and smartphone penetration is not as great as in urban areas. But what I would say is that smartphone penetration [amongst Indian farmers] is definitely better as compared to Indonesia. Indonesia obviously will get there. But the price point at which data is available, as well as price points and access to smartphones are available – I think all that contributes to, you know, India definitely being a little more advanced in terms of the usage of smartphones in rural areas.

To answer your question, we launched AgriCentral on the 31st of December in 2018 on Playstore, and ‘till June of 2019, we definitely saw that the adoption was quite slow. This was predominantly because we focused on reaching farmers mostly through ground activities, through field teams. We did not have a very clear idea on which farmers would have smartphones, who would not. But when we transitioned to taking AgriCentral to users through platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube, we saw success and we were able to reach the right user persona.?

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The things we focused on from the very beginning – ease of use, quality of content, and always being cognizant that we were developing all of this for a user who was not very tech savvy, but who was also very keen on receiving the right information.

I think one of the things about Indian farmers is that they want to know, you know, they are going on to different platforms, joining groups pertaining to agriculture and trying to get more and more information on how to do farming better. So we wanted this to be a one-stop shop for farmers to access information on farming.

I think this is what has led us to being the app of choice for about 10 million Indian farmers.

So what do you think is different about building digital products for farmers compared to, for example, a more urban demographic?

So farmers in general use their phones very differently as compared with you and me. Over time, as frequent users, we have become used to interpreting and interacting with signs and symbols used in smartphones; our minds are trained to accept that certain symbols are used to represent the meaning that they wish to convey without using words, right?

For example, you see an envelope sign on an application. You will know that this is an email or a message and this is just one example. But our farmers are still in the process of adopting technology, so we need to focus on how they currently interact with their smartphones and whether what we are trying to create is in line with that. How are they interacting with other applications that they are comfortable using??

These things play a very important role. Like, how do they hold their phones? Even that is important. How do their eyes move on the screen? What colours do they respond to better? What is it that confuses them? Where do they give up?

How can we make that experience less intimidating for them and show that they have a good user experience? Just to give you a parallel example: when you see individuals, maybe your parents, when they use smartphones, they are really scared; before they do something, they'll ask, like, should I do this? Because they are a bit intimidated by technology.?

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You've told me about the things like the things that we've learned from our mistakes in the past and how it works now. How are we using those insights from the learnings that we've got in the past in the ways that we are building our products today?

What we’ve learned in AgriCentral will definitely help us build more robust and futuristic solutions to cater to the entire agri-value chain, not just to farmers, but also the other stakeholders in the ecosystem. We would be able to create some new income sources to uplift entire regions. That's what we are looking forward to doing.?

From a specific user standpoint, there's so much that we're doing – the learnings that we have from AgriCentral – there's so many things that we can put to good use on the Petani (farmers) application as well. Market prices – giving users access to that. Giving access to credit, giving access for users to sell their produce, to buy good quality inputs. All of this is definitely a possibility. And since we've done it before, we know how to do this.?

From your perspective, in what ways can agritech do better to serve the rural market, especially smallholder farmers, to help them improve their livelihoods? What are the things that haven't been done but should be? How can Jiva get there?

Agritech definitely has the potential to significantly improve the livelihoods of farmers by increasing productivity, reducing costs, and helping them mitigate risks. Just to list a few things, I think it can positively impact access to affordable and farmer-friendly tools, services, and equipment, information and service dissemination, and development of mobile applications like we are doing, which provide information on middle market prices, agricultural best practices, and creation of solutions that are tailored to the specific needs and conditions of individual farmers or regions or crops.

With technology, this is all possible today. One of the very important things is that agritech can enable data collection and analysis through the use of satellite imagery and IoT sensors and drones to gather data on soil quality, crop health, and weather patterns which can be used to provide a more personalised recommendation to a farmer, or for planting, irrigation, and pest control.

Another thing is providing access to affordable credit and insurance products for farmers. This is very important. Leveraging agritech data and analytics to assess the credit-worthiness [of farmers], which is something that we are trying to do at Jiva as well. This will lead to financial inclusion, you know, having financial transactions in the agri value chain going through a digital payment system, [because] right now, everything is very unorganised.?

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Read more about the work we do to achieve our mission of improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers by visiting our website and following us on YouTube, Instagram, and Medium.