Thread by @ruchitgarg

What smallholder farmers need is handholding in this new world order.. where they ARE going to be competing with likes of Amazon’s , Reliance and more..

Government/opposition might be able to delay/reduce competition a bit but they will not be able to stop it from happening

Farmers faces issues in three broad categories :

(1) Access to market
(2) Access to quality affordable inputs
(3) Access to financial services

But there is one underlying issue which creates all the above issues and that is ...

‘Information Asymmetry between farmers and other stakeholders in the value chain’

Simply put farmers are not getting accurate info on what consumers want, what price they are going to pay, what they can do differently to get better pricing

Most of them are stuck ...

Stuck in age old practices of what they grow, how they grow, how they sell etc

While the world has largely become smaller (product getting delivered within hours of checking out) farmers are disconnected with the new realities

Most smallholder farmers (tiny %) who are doing decent job has maybe two or three additional source of income.

E.g. farmer is a teacher in a local school, farmer’s kid is a bank manager and they live in a joint family

If they have more income sources, they are famers (the ones we like to idolize) just on paper and mostly they have given it out on rent on revenue sharing agreement with real farmers (or shall I say farm labour) actually working on the farms

Let’s call them rich farmers

Rich farmers are not the one we should be truly worried about, but worry about the small ones who still wakes up before the rooster to plough the field and puts his blood n sweat

These farmers are the ones which needs handholding, for them to be ready for new world order

Just pushing down a new piece of machinery or an infrastructure in the village is not enough but an end to end execution on how it will covert into real money.

Saw first hand where 20L worth of machine was sold on loan to a farmer co-op, which was not switched on for 5yrs

What farmers need is very focussed investments which reduces this information gaps.

That is why a internet connected smartphone in the hands on farmers is an amazing thing !

That is why a simple idea of "WhatsApp to Sell" works very effectively.

Farmers across India are simply sending WhatsApp wa.me/918284809666 to market & sell their crop

(Of course, I am biased)

But this system reduces dependency on the whole stack of middlemen and getting in front of the line literally & figuratively.

Literally -> farmers like this one harvestingfn.com/post/4425 are already marketing their crops way before the crop is harvested.

Farmers on @HarvestingFN who are as remote as that of hills of Meghalaya are now shipping their produce internationally.

They are no longer dependent on a very large chain of middlemen to get discovered and make sales.