It was a pleasure to chat with Mr Garg on challenges, opportunities in the agri supply chain and technology interventions needed to make agri supply chains climate resilient and sustainable. It is not an easy sector to work with, however, we do not have any other option than to make it resilient and sustainable. This is going to be an extremely long journey…

00:44 - About Dr. Sachin Shende

01:02 - Tell me about your journey.

03:42 - Tell us about FarmSetu Technologies. What is your core mission?

06:10 - What big challenges does India's agri-food supply chain face today?

10:48 - How are the challenges in India different from other global markets?

14:53 - How are you using IoT and artificial intelligence to benefit farmers and improve supply chain management?

16:43 - How does FarmSetu ensure product quality and traceability for end consumers?

19:16 - How does FarmSetu differentiate itself from other people who claim to have very strong supply chain platforms?

22:08 - How do you see the evolution of the agri-food supply chain in India? Where do you see FarmSetu five years from now?

If you enjoyed this video, please follow @SachinAShende and support our efforts on making the agri-food supply chain sustainable by subscribing to “The Future of Agri-Food Supply Chain” newsletter.

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One of the last sectors to be disrupted by digitalisation in India is the agricultural sector. Change is generally slow in agriculture and often comes with a steep learning curve for farmers and traders alike.

While the on-farm piece of technology is still being refined, the agri-trade has seen rapid digitalisation. Before delving into the changes, it is important to understand the challenges of agri-commodity traders.

Challenges to Agri-trading

The following structural challenges pose significant risks to the very viability of agri-trade:

1. Manual Operations: Many agri-trade companies rely heavily on manual, paper-pen processes. While computers and accounting software are already adopted by these firms, many farmer-facing transactional processes are manual and disjointed. Because there’s no seamless connectivity between these processes, end-to-end traceability is missing. The trading staff have to spend countless hours to reconcile all trades after the closing. This leads to poor business decision-making besides making the data entries prone to error.

2. Seasonality: On the demand side, certain commodities exhibit seasonality owing to either their harvest time, the market demand or both. This means a year-round market isn’t available for such commodities.

3. Weather: Climate change is a reality and the sector most affected by it is agriculture. Inclement weather directly impacts sowing/planting and harvesting operations besides affecting the standing crops at various growth stages. Any supply-side decrease owing to such losses adds to market uncertainty impacting the agri-commodity business.

4. Government regulation: Supply-side challenges lead to the shortfall and contribute to an increase in food prices and consequently food inflation. These challenges arise due to climate-linked crop damage. Paying more for the same or even lesser quantity of agri-produce directly affects the savings of the population. Thus, governments resort to remedial measures like export bans, additional tariffs or price caps. This has a direct bearing on the viability of agri-trade businesses.

5. Cartelisation: Scrupulous traders are known to create artificial scarcity by hoarding the agri-produce in the hopes of selling at higher rates later. This impacts the market dynamics and end-consumers negatively. This is where the government often steps in with more regulation making the trade more bureaucratic.

6. Quality: Quality is a function of prevalent weather and soil conditions, crop management, growing practices and the use of agro-chemicals to a great extent. These factors directly impact quality and consequently, the market rates. While agri-produce for export is often “grown to spec”, the same isn’t always the case for domestic the market.

Presently, a universal and standardised parametric quality model is missing in the market. Thus, pricing comes down to negotiations and haggling rather than robust quality assessments.

What is SetuTrade?

To address the aforementioned challenges, FarmSetu has developed SetuTrade, a software product that aims to transform small and medium agri-commodity trading operations.

Built by agri-professionals with years of experience in the agriculture technology space, SetuTrade is a SaaS product that can be quickly implemented in any agri-trading business in a few hours.

Designed as an “over-the-counter (OTC) trading terminal”, SetuTrade comprises an Android app loaded on a tablet which is connected to a thermal printer. This trading terminal is placed at the procurement desks of the agri-commodity traders who buy the produce from farmers.

The SetuTrade terminal captures all the vital details essential for a successful trade. This includes the farmer’s contact details, farmer profile, crop data etc. The daily market rates for specific commodities can be easily entered against benchmarked quality parameters. Against the benchmarks, actual quality parameters are noted which in turn determine the final rate offered to the farmer.

SetuTrade in turn can be integrated with the existing accounting software systems of agri-commodity traders. This enables real-time connectivity between the procurement function and the accounting function. This is of tremendous value to the business owner who can easily check the live dashboard to understand the actual trade volume and the financial transactions thereof. This helps in planning cashflows and bank financing.

How does SetuTrade transform Agri-Trade?

1. Digitisation: Experience end-to-end and seamless digitisation by converting manual processes into fully automatic workflows

   

2. Paperless: While we provide a printer to print and hand over the trade receipts to farmers, the same receipts can also be delivered to farmers through our app.

3. Farmer onboarding: A trading house can consolidate its farmers by onboarding their primary data on SetuTrade. It can easily notify farmers affiliated with it of the day’s rates, any service notifications, government mandates, agri-news etc. Farmers can receive digital trade receipts and view the historical and current trade ledger and associated trade details.

4. Productivity: SetuTrade fully digitises each trade thus reducing the total duration per trade. With an intuitive, bold interface, the transaction errors are also greatly reduced thus bringing in the much-needed gains in productivity and accuracy.

   

5. Transparency: All transactions are secured end-to-end and time-stamped. Thus, there’s total transparency on whether and when a particular transaction has happened and whether it was fully executed or not.

6. Past data: Historical transactions are mapped to individual commodities and farmers. As and when required, any single transaction or a group of transactions can be pulled up for further analysis and action.

7. Integration: SetuTrade can be easily integrated with most of the widely used accounting software. We currently offer integrations for Tally and SAP in India. We also help integrate a variety of weighing scales and printers making SetuTrade a highly modularised system

How does SetuTrade benefit farmers?

1. Access: On-demand access to the latest market rates, news and updates, trade and payment statuses and trade receipts

2. Tracking: Fully updated trade ledger with historical transactions, payment status and reports of all the trades executed

3. Transparency: Check accepted and rejected trades, payments made and quality reports for each transaction

Farmers will develop more confidence and trust in the buyer using the SetuFarm app. Once farmers experience firsthand the transparency and end-to-end visibility of their business relationship with the agri-trader, their association automatically deepens.

What makes SetuTrade unique?

SetuTrade is built with farmers’ collectives like FPOs in mind. It is built to serve as a secure, authentic channel between the farmers and the agri-trade. The downstream piece of the agrifood supply chain is fairly established. Where SetuTrade makes a difference is by enabling upstream to midstream traceability. This is the segment which is fairly data-dark at the moment and ripe for digital disruption.

With one seamless software connecting farmers with the agri-trading enterprise, we offer the technology backbone for effective backward and forward integration.

Implementation

What sets us apart is our maniacal focus on implementation. Our experience of over a decade has shown that after the initial euphoria, the usage of the technology solutions plateaus at first and then drops off. This leads to wasted time, efforts, investments and transformation opportunities.

We sat down with our client’s team and understood their user personae to get an idea of the end-users we were dealing with. Next, we made them pain-aware. Until we pointed out, they were okay with their semi-automatic or even manual business processes.

We closely observed the users’ day-to-day work and found many areas of improvement that SetuTrade could immediately address via configurations and integrations to SetuTrade. The users had their set of expectations which we fulfilled through specific product features.

Many agri-enterprises do not have dedicated technology professionals in the teams. We therefore decided to play that role proactively. Besides helping our client choose the right hardware, our team was there to implement the system, conduct user acceptance trials and train the users.

We also experienced some cynicism from the end-users due to their past negative experiences with technology systems they tried implementing earlier.

We focussed on training the end-users to tackle every possible scenario. Once SetuTrade went live, we closely monitored its working and deployed resources to immediately address any problems the users may encounter. Besides telephonic support, we also made available remote access-based support to resolve any niggling errors that may creep in.

The final challenge was to help integrate SetuTrade with their accounting system. This integration helped eliminate any overlapping processes or repetitive work. Each transaction recorded on SetuTrade was passed on to their accounting system which in turn ensured that hundred per cent of the trades were captured with total accuracy in real-time.

Once the client’s team gained confidence, we sought feedback every fortnight. With this level of engagement, we succeeded in delivering speed and accuracy of transactions - which was a prerequisite to scaling and our core deliverable.

• The duration per transaction dropped by roughly 40%

• The incidence of erroneous transaction recording dropped by 80%

Complementary tools like SetuCare, SetuSchool and SetuAdvice that drive farmer engagement are baked into the product right from Day One. These tools help deepen the farmer-trader connection because, in the absence of these tools, the relationship is too short-term and transactional.

In Maharashtra, we have digitally transformed Hingoli-based Dattaguru Farmers Producer Co. Ltd. with SetuTrade. The future for agri-commodity trading is here. SetuTrade is the future of agri-trade.

Talk to us today to explore how we can transform your agri-procurement operation into a digital, lean and globally competitive agri-enterprise.

― Confucius, a Chinese philosopher

This simple yet profoundly powerful thought set us thinking about the changes we need to make to continue farming for the next 100 years and beyond.

Farmers and the agrifood industry in general have to produce enough food to feed ten billion people by 2050 amidst reducing arable land, deteriorating soils, changing weather patterns and increasingly scarce natural resources.

While this big picture is clear and the challenges are acknowledged, the industry is subsumed by “keeping the lights on” and making enough money to survive in the difficult market. This is no criticism of the industry; it is just a statement of fact.

There are no clear incentives for the farmers and other supply chain players on the primary production side to tackle and invest in the solutions which will address long term challenges like soil health and climate change.

So, how do we ensure that agriculture remains a profitable occupation whilst also caring for the environment?

Are farmers and the supply chain equipped to play a balancing act of financial viability, profitability and addressing long-term challenges? Are financial institutions and investors willing to invest patiently for the long term?

Not entirely, we reckon.

The agrifood supply chain often pursues one goal at the cost of the other. At the top of their minds is their own survival due to wafer-thin margins. The industry thus chooses options that save them money in the immediate term yet damage the environment gradually but surely in the medium to long term.

With this reality in mind, we decided to work on sustainability at two levels: environmental and financial. While there is a large body of knowledge present on environmental sustainability, there’s little insight on how to achieve it with financial sustainability.

When we set out to build FarmSetu, we wanted it to be a full-stack agritech platform ensuring both, the environmental and financial sustainability of the agricultural sector. The dictum we followed was, “What’s good for the environment is good for the agri-business”.

Soon enough, we realised it’s easier said than done - especially when dealing with smallholder farmers in India, many of whom are challenged by a lack of agri-education, awareness and lack of skills necessary to tackle the current challenges.

The three big questions we had were: how to make them pain-aware, how to change their mindsets and how to upskill them?

The Broken Commercial Model

The current commercial model in agrifood supply chains is broken. This model focuses completely on access to “cheap food”.

We firmly believe that there is no such thing as cheap food. Someone else in the supply chain bears the cost. Often this is the farmer, the environment or both.

In India, the pressure is on the farmer to grow crops without a proper thought process and without planning for the development of the supply chain. There is no regard for specifications of the produce, production cost and margins, crop rotations and post-harvest activities like grading, sorting, packing and marketing.

Farmers are merely growing crops for the sake of growing and hoping that someone will buy from them for the price they expect.

Even as farmers contend with a higher per unit area output, the impact on soil and other natural resources is beyond measure and often beyond repair. Excessive agrochemical usage leads to infertile soil and alteration of its physicochemical properties such as pH and texture. Mutation in certain pests and diseases and pollution of groundwater sources due to pesticide residue percolation are other side effects. Consuming residue-laden fresh produce often has carcinogenic effects on human bodies.

Not following the package of practices diligently, erratic irrigation scheduling, underestimating the importance of weather conditions and poor operational rigour are some other causes of long-term damage to the environment.

The greatest limitation of the current commercial models is short-term profit-making over longer-term sustainable rewards. The uncertainty around agriculture owing to unpredictable markets (impacting the demand) and climate change (impacting the supply) encourages such ‘myopic behaviour’.

Ill-conceived commercial models with wrong incentives have ominous consequences.

Because the breakdown of the commercial model is systemic, the response to building a new model must also be systemic. The only way to do this is to take a hundred small steps over time rather than take one giant leap.

• Our first small step was to create a digital tool to train and upskill the farmers and other individuals working in the supply chain.

• Having built the tool, the next step was to identify the subject matter experts and create crop-specific, challenge-specific short, practical training courses.

We had to evolve a model that built the farmers’ knowledge, skills and awareness through training programmes and gave them the necessary tools to succeed with technology use. While we spoke of making farming financially sustainable, we were pursuing environmental sustainability ‘under the bonnet’.

Innovators and Early Adopters

We knew from experience that no farmer wanted to be a guinea pig for experimentation. To counter the inertia and enable change, we actively sought out ‘opinion maker’ farmers who would appreciate and wholeheartedly support sustainability as their key success metric. 

Managing radical change in agriculture is tough. Any change in agriculture is met with the inertia of years of legacy practices, processes and approaches. Besides, crops take their time to grow and there’s no way one can go against Nature’s pace to rush through technology implementation.

After a decade of persevering amidst a crop of ‘disruptive’ agtech startups in India, we chose to be consultative and collaborative.

Guided by Everett Rogers’ ‘Diffusion of Innovations framework’, we focussed on  ‘innovator’ and ‘early adopter’ farmers. In the rural Indian socio-cultural milieu, these farmers are often opinion-makers. Many ‘follower farmers’ decide their actions based on what these opinion makers do.

These ‘opinion maker’ farmers demonstrate the following pattern:

1. Have some sort of education in agriculture

2. Have spent years experimenting, trying new ideas, failing and then improving

3. Are tech-savvy people comfortable with using the Internet

4. Take a data-driven, objective approach to decision-making rather than a gut feeling

5. Have a propensity to treat upfront expenses as longer-term investments

6. Are willing to sacrifice immediate savings for long-term sustainability

The Digital Packages

Before getting farmers to use technology, we decided to show them the big picture. Educating farmers about the technology, its usage and the outcomes thus became a core task for our team. We were mindful to not overwhelm the farmers with an ‘information deluge’ lest they resist. Farmers by nature are action-oriented and we had to be careful about offering the right portions of knowledge for farmers to consume on the go.

We evolved ‘smart farming digital crop packages’ in partnership with agri-enterprises and the subject matter experts we work with to inculcate a culture of ‘learning and doing’.

Farmers and other users of the app can consume these short-duration, skill-based training courses at their leisure. To reinforce learning, users cannot skip any part of the course. Nor can they ‘fast forward’ their way through the course. At the end of each part, a small optional assessment is provided to enable quick revision of the studied concepts. 

Our carefully curated and proven subject matter experts retain sustainability at the core of our digital crop packages. For example, Dr Ankush Chormule, a sugarcane expert, starts his course with a comprehensive focus on soil. His agronomic practices have yielded over a hundred tonnes of sugarcane per acre while caring for the soil and the natural environment.

The message is clear: Get farmers and the supply chain to focus on the optimum utilisation of available resources by preventing excess or shortage of inputs like water and agrochemicals, implement the best practices that the subject matter experts have shared and focus on the longer-term than the immediate term.

But this isn’t enough.

We want to ensure that farmers are immediately implementing whatever they learn in their fields. Hence, our digital packages also include the necessary digital tools to help farmers record their crop data, operations and observations, check weather conditions and access real-time market intelligence. These packages set us apart from our market contemporaries and helped our farmers ‘walk the talk’.

What do farmers get in our Smart Farming Digital Packages?

Knowledge: Latest crop-specific knowledge and technical information through an intuitive mobile app

Communication: Two-way communication with the subject matter expert/agronomist

Weather: Seven-day weather forecast for the farmers’ plot locations.

Courses: Skill-based, short-duration training from cultivation and tillage to high-yield harvest delivered in a practical, easy-to-grasp language.

Advice: In-season agronomic, procurement and market advice in audio, video and text formats from recognised experts  

Tracking: Overview of the entire field, geotagging of plots, recording operations and observations of crop growth progress from planting to harvest, problems and observations possible. 

Profit and Loss: A broad plot-level profit and loss statement accounting for production costs and income information.

Agrochemical Literacy: Complete digital information and availability of appropriate fertilisers and crop protection products for various crops.

Trading: Connect with the agri-enterprise for supplying quality produce, delivery, settlement and digital record of the trade.

Traceability: Complete QR code-based digital traceability of seeds and saplings used for planting.

Steps to Sustainability

It’s easy to mistake the SetuFarm app for yet another ‘book of records’ software. It is anything but that. It is the gateway to our ‘Supply Chain-360° ecosystem’. We want to educate, enlighten and empower (necessarily in that order) farmers and other users with carefully curated products and services. Once onboard, the user needn’t look elsewhere for the full spectrum of his/her farming needs.

We follow a six-step model to encourage regenerative farming practices:

1. Data: From no data to highly structured geo-tagged and time-stamped data

2. Localisation: Using data to trigger localised, near real-time in-season agronomy advice

3. Patterns: Mapping patterns and trends through splicing time series to understand seasonality and the relationship between various data points

4. Benchmarks: Evolving sustainability benchmarks in line with global client expectations

5. Delta: Monitoring for variances, causality and correlation involving multiple data points 

6. Guidance: Course correction to farmers through intensive training, advisory and plot visits

While we do not begin with sustainability as the end goal, we have embedded the steps above in our processes such that sustainability is de rigueur in our technology platform. This approach is also laying the foundation to evolve a real-time data-driven ESG dashboard.

Executing at Scale

To implement these digital crop packages at scale, we turned to our anchor customer - Sahyadri Farms based in Nashik, Maharashtra, India. This is a farmers collective having over 18,000 smallholder member farmers owning over 30,000 acres of land and exporting fresh produce to over 42 countries. 

Fresh from their fundraising from blue chip impact investors like Proparco, Incofin, FMO and Korbys, Sahyadri Farms has set in motion an ambitious sustainability programme covering a hundred per cent of their farmers and land under cultivation.

Sahyadri’s discerning end-consumers, just as its bulk buyers, care a lot about the origins of their fresh produce and whether it is grown with sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices. They pay a premium for sustainably sourced produce. Besides accounting for Global GAP compliance, we will soon start embedding the sixteen sustainable agriculture practices [SAP] within our platform.

Therefore it becomes all the more important to track farmer activities throughout the value chain. The data thus collected helps build a referenceable data repository at the farmer level and even at the plot level. This repository sets the scene for introducing sustainability based on the prevalent state of each individual plot.

Our Customer Success team together with Sahyadri’s team, maximises its outreach to farmers and educates them about the SetuFarm app at village-level meetings where farmers congregate to learn about the app. We encourage the self-service approach where farmers learn by doing. Our team guides farmers wherever they face onboarding or activation problems.

We regularly follow up with farmers to remind them about recording data, check whether their app is working fine, update to the latest version and learn what their unarticulated needs are. This consolidated feedback is shared directly with the product managers who evolve mandates for our software engineering team.

Habit Formation

At the heart of our efforts is a constant push to encourage farmers to use the SetuFarm app daily. Through numerous farmer outreaches, our team strives to inculcate a conscious behavioural change in farmers. We want farmers to check the app at a minimum of three critical moments daily viz. first thing in the morning, around lunch and finally at the close of business.

It is therefore imperative that our app becomes the ‘single source of truth’ for farmers. With sustained data recording by farmers and increasing usage, we get high-quality, validated, geo-tagged and time-stamped data. The more data points a farmer records, the sharper our offering gets. In effect, the app fine-tunes its guidance based on the farmers’ direct and indirect inputs. We diligently capture each farmer’s usage patterns to know the duration and quality of their interaction. Accordingly, we focus on areas where the app usage has gone down or needs attention.

As an additional incentive, the more farmers use the app features, the more loyalty points they earn. These points can be redeemed for tangible in-app purchases. All these efforts help us nudge the farmers towards building a habit which in turn helps drive agronomic practices eventually yielding sustainability.

Seeing Beyond

Sustainability isn’t a sprint but a marathon. It calls for intense upfront efforts and investments whereas visible results are seen only over time. Scalable sustainability has to be introduced at the very beginning of an agri-enterprise’s business plan. Para-dropping the sustainability function is neither feasible nor advisable. 

So far we have onboarded five thousand farmers and have a mandate from our agri-enterprise clients to onboard 15,000 more in the next 6 to 8 months in a complex agricultural market like India.

We are now seeking partners to realise our vision of delivering data-driven sustainability at scale. We would love to work with partners experienced in funding and guiding large-scale sustainability projects in emerging economies.

To sum up, we’re looking for partners who agree that ‘what’s good for the environment is good for the agri-business’.

We hope you found this post useful. FarmSetu is the ideal technology platform to execute large-scale agricultural sustainability opportunities in emerging markets like India. Talk to us to know more. 

Onion production, globally, is just above 100 million tonnes. China is the largest producer, followed by India and the USA. Between them, these three countries, produce half of the world’s onions.

In the crop year 2021-22, India produced approximately 31 million tons of Onion cultivated on approximately 1.6 million hectares of land generating a farm gate value of about ₹375 billion (around $4.7 billion). Roughly, 42 per cent of that production was in Maharashtra, followed by Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat and Bihar (Source: National Horticulture Board, India).

In India, onion is also one of the “three sensitives” - onion, tomato and potato cumulatively command 2.2 per cent weight in India’s consumer price index (CPI) basket.

A bout of inclement weather leading to acute shortages or even a glut situation often results in a string of alarmist news consequently generating heavy volatility in both food inflation and headline inflation numbers in India. This in turn directly impacts consumer confidence and market sentiment leading to uncertainties for farmers and creating political liabilities. This pattern rings true across many emerging economies in South Asia and West Asia.

Onion is an eye watering’ly tricky crop because farmers suffer from three wild swings and three big shortages:

1. Three wild swings: Policy, Pricing, Weather and;

2. Three big shortages: Labour, Knowledge, Awareness

Apart from the sufferings mentioned above, the farmers incur huge losses every season due to “distribution of counterfeit seeds in the market by unscrupulous seed companies”.

A young Indian agri-entrepreneur, Rahul Jadhav, CEO of Rahee Natural Seeds decided to address this issue using technology. His seed business, originally started by his father in the early 1990s, is focused on the research, development, production, processing, and marketing of onion seeds for Indian farmers. They serve more than 15,000 farmers across 10 states in India.

In Q4-2022, Rahee Seeds signed a commercial agreement with FarmSetu Technologies to digitalise their operations and provide full transparency and traceability in Onion seeds using FarmSetu Supply Chain Stack.

Each and every seed box distributed in the market by the company from June-2023 will have a QR code showing the provenance of the seed and the detailed information on practices followed to cultivate that seed.

The Journey

The journey to create a fully traceable seed box through a QR code wasn’t that easy. The FarmSetu team started with essential digital building blocks needed for an enterprise, like a corporate website, business emails, and enterprise data/file store.

Once the basic setup was done, both teams moved to onboard the farmers and geotag their seed plots. While this was progressing, the FarmSetu team initiated staff training alongside a review of Rahee’s operational processes.

Extensive field visits were carried out by Rahee Seeds’ team to train farmers, provide them with advice and collect data on field operations and observations throughout the season. This data has been used in the traceability reports.

Before harvesting, QC tests were conducted on the samples drawn from different plots. The seed procurement process was followed by cleaning, grading, packing and more QC tests. Finally, the team created unique batch codes and mapped the seed plots to those batch codes to show full traceability.

FarmSetu Supply Chain Stack

Building Knowledge and Awareness

Farmer training has been a critical part of this season. The core idea of the training programme was to build awareness and improve their skills, thus, addressing the “two shortages” listed above - Knowledge and Awareness.

Through FarmSetu’s mobile app, farmers receive curated actionable and knowledge-based content. This content is delivered by subject matter experts with long experience and is available in content formats like text, audio and video.

The advisory articles are supplemented with short, practical, skills-based digital training sessions through the app. These courses are designed and curated by recognised subject matter experts having proven and in-depth domain knowledge of agriculture.

A Higher Purpose

Traceability is not the end in itself. The larger picture is to bring predictability to agriculture through traceability. With traceability, farmers can buy onion seeds with confidence.

With tailor-made knowledge and awareness programmes, a package of practices, accurate weather-based alerts and timely calls to action, FarmSetu inculcates best cultivation practices in farmers. This helps them harvest more yield of high-quality onions which commands premium prices in the market. Supply-side certainty also helps end-consumers with stabilised prices.

Traceability » Predictability » Stability » Sustainability

With better revenue and more profits in hand, farmers ultimately achieve financial sustainability even as our technology helps them achieve environmental sustainability. This higher purpose ultimately guides us.

If you also are keen to understand how we add value to farmers or how we can transform your agri-enterprise, please get in touch with us now:

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Our soils are deteriorating, weather patterns are changing, water and other natural resources are becoming scarcer. With current practices, can we farm for the next decade, 50, 100 years? What changes do we need to make to continue farming for the next 100 years and beyond?

This isn’t a rhetorical question but rather an existential one!

Farmers have to feed the growing population, care for the environment and make farming profitable - all at the same time.

The key question is: are farmers equipped to take this challenge?

Sugarcane is grown in about 110 countries spread across 28 million hectares of land and helps produce 86% of the world’s sugar. The major sugarcane-growing countries are Brazil, India, China, Thailand and Pakistan. The crop’s cultivation and processing provide a livelihood to over 100 million people, primarily in emerging economies.

Sugarcane is a major cash crop of the planet but it is also a long-duration and input-intensive crop.

Whichever way you look at it, in the global and Indian contexts, sugarcane is too big a crop to ignore. Thus, given the size and scale of sugarcane cultivation and its need for intensive inputs, this key cash crop will be at the forefront of tackling and mitigating the effects of climate change.

Admittedly, there is a lot at stake!

Indian Sugar Industry and Sugarcane Farming Challenges

The sugar industry and sugarcane farmers in India face the following challenges:

• Excessive use of agrochemical products - crop nutrition and crop protection

• Excessive water and fertiliser use - causing soils to degrade

• Price inflation of agri-input products and services

  • Excessive farm-level marketing campaigns by agri-input companies

• Increased labour cost (which is still rising)

• Lack of availability of genuine, authentic and quality seedlings/seed material

• Lack of timely and accurate guidance on crop cultivation from experts

• All of the above challenges result in spiralling costs of cultivation

• Sugarcane prices: Frequent and ad-hoc government interventions like price controls, export bans and ceilings to keep inflation in check and no long-term policy lead to high fluctuations in the sugar market

• Over-dependence of the crop on sugar manufacturing - There’s a need to innovate new products using sugarcane as the raw material and also find newer applications for the many byproducts generated from sugar manufacturing. Think ethanol, paper and pulp, alcohol, power generation etc.

To address these challenges, we believe, there is an immediate need to:

• Upskill the farmers through continuous learning and skills development programmes

• Provide farmers with timely and accurate advisory on:

  • Variety-wise package of practices (PoP)

  • Land preparation, crop nutrition and in-season operations management

• Use digital technology platforms to:

  • Establish a two-way communication channel with farmers

  • Collect data, offer hyper-local advisory and optimise operational practices

  • Establish a crop metric system covering both financial and environmental sustainability

  • Set the cost of cultivation within a specified budget for the season

• Bring sugar factories and allied businesses on the said digital platforms to remove friction in harvest planning, procurement, payments and farm credit

Introducing India’s First Smart Sugarcane Farming Digital Programme

This digital programme is offered through Android and iOS mobile apps. After purchasing the subscription, the farmers can self-onboard and create their plots or seek the help of Gannamaster or FarmSetu’s Customer Success team to do so.

Once on-boarded, they can access the following ‘launchpads’ in their app:

1. SetuFarm: Set plot-level budgets, create operations from land preparation to harvesting, track expenses, monitor the activity timeline, make crop observations with pictures, seek agronomic advice, follow the PoP set by Gannamaster’s agronomists, get weather forecast and current, live weather data, integrate weather stations (hardware-dependent) and use the decision support system.

2. SetuAdvice: Access in-depth, research-based and curated content by subject matter experts having long experience. The content is available in text, audio, and video formats and is tailored to the farmers’ location and crop variety.

3. SetuSchool: Watch short, practical, skills-based training programmes offered as a series of short videos. These courses are designed and created by Dr Ankush Chormule, CEO of Gannamaster.

4. SetuCare: To make farmers agro-chemical literate, SetuCare provides vetted and regularly updated agrochemical product information, crop-specific recommended dosages, pre-harvest intervals (PHI), maximum residue level (MRL), safety and handling information, product comparisons and product searches by active ingredients.

5. SetuNetwork: Access the complete, end-to-end journey of the sugarcane seedlings purchased from Gannamaster’s Nursery.

Most importantly, this programme will allow Gannamaster’s team to provide customised, localised agronomic advisory to individual farmers based on their location, variety, crop growth stage, weather and soil type.

Know More About The Programme

Here is Dr Ankush Chormule introducing the digital programme to the farmers:

Currently, this video is available only in the Marathi language as the programme is targeted towards Sugarcane farmers in Maharashtra, India.

We intend to launch multilingual versions of this programme covering different Indian languages shortly. At present, we are focussing only on Marathi as the language of instruction of the programme.

About FarmSetu Supply Chain Stack

If you are keen to understand how we add value to farmers or how we could help digitise your agri-enterprise, please get in touch with us:

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Om Gayatri Group is proud to announce that it has signed a comprehensive, long-term and strategic technology-led business transformation deal with FarmSetu Technologies.

Om Gayatri Group’s vision is to develop sustainable and transparent value chains for fruit and vegetable crops. As the Group realigns its focus on selling to premium retail customers and provides end-to-end supply chain solutions to its farmers, technology is going to be the key driver behind this transformation.

As a part of this agreement, FarmSetu will provide its technology and business stack to Om Gayatri Group to help its farmers grow better, provide in-season agronomic advisory, improve quality, digitise trading, bring agro-chemical awareness, enhance skills, and provide supply chain transparency to its domestic and international customers.

Commenting on the development, Madhukar Bhau Gavali, Chairman of Om Gayatri Group commented:

"What began as a far-sighted but small effort has now become a growth-focussed agri-conglomerate with clear global ambitions. We realised that global scale can only be achieved by working with like-minded partners. We are glad that FarmSetu offers us everything we were looking for in a partner - technology, mindset and a global network. That's why we are better together."

Dr Sachin Shende, Founder and CEO of FarmSetu remarked,

"We are privileged to be growth and transformation partners to Om Gayatri Group. It isn't often that you come across a business with rock-solid fundamentals, management hungry for meaningful growth and a team with shared values. We are glad we see all these qualities in abundant measure in Om Gayatri Group. It will be an exciting journey as we script the next big, global success together with Om Gayatri Group."

The Board constitution at an early stage and up to Series A is an often less thought-about matter. I don’t think this is because the Founders do not care about it. The hands-on Entrepreneur is in execute mode all the time and makes board matters secondary to the problem he/she is working on.

This delusional “notion” of pushing aside Board matters invariably leads to “systemic” boardroom politics more likely to be led by “low IQ” investors revelling and regaling in cheap power politics than actually creating genuine value. Such Board members who are merely “barking” gibberish in Board meetings can’t and won’t deliver results that really count.

Sometime last year, as if on cue, this tweet grabbed my attention:

I will take a “billion dollars” out of that tweet because it is a distraction from the fact. It does not matter what absolute value you put on it. And I don’t think Garry Tan meant it that way either.

To me it is an existential question - the venture can die and this is one of the reasons, if not the only reason, for the venture's destruction.

I have seen this theme floating around a number of times. However, the question is, what are the things the startup Founder/CEO should look for? What are the signals? When you do realise they are happening, how do you deal with them, both, at an organisational level and at a personal level?

The sequence of events will change from venture to venture. I will not generalise this, however, I will try and lay out a broader framework for the signs to look for, how to handle them and how to deal with these shocks at a personal level.

I believe in Charlie Munger’s “Inversion principle”. In that spirit, let’s see what NOT to do.

Politics and Business are two separate things. Politics in Business creates toxicity, destroys culture and eventually the venture itself.

When you notice it happening within your organisation, deal with it swiftly and decisively.

The organisational culture is defined by the Founder/Founding Team. Their words and most importantly their actions in day-to-day conduct do matter.

However, in spite of the best intentions and best efforts, seeds of toxic politics can be sown in the Boardroom. Biases start creeping in. This is what I call “Board-induced Toxicity”. This article focusses on it and how this can result in the destruction of shareholder value.

Who Should be on the Board?

First and foremost, the Board position is not a badge of honour or a trophy to display for an individual. One is on the Board to help the company grow and not the other way around.

Important questions: What does the company need at any given stage? Where are the “wisdom” gaps at a Board level or within the Senior team? How is the company going to benefit from having that individual on the Board?

Wisdom is not the product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

- Albert Einstein

Beware: The needs will change as the company grows. So you will have to move your Board members and at some stage, if it helps the company.

How Many Board Members?

There is no fixed rule but broadly (and assuming you have investor(s) ):

• Founder or someone representing the founding team

• One representing the investors

• One independent - completely independent - with good market/customer understanding.

• A solid person, with an industry network chairing the Board. A good Chairperson will maintain the board's discipline, ensure good governance and help maintain healthy, constructive relations between the Board members.

Beware: Of people creeping via the “Board Observer” role. To me, Board Observers are neither in nor out. They get to attend the board meetings and of course, anyone who attends meetings will have something to say. So I am not a big fan of Observer roles. Better don’t have them unless the Founder/CEO sees a “real value” in having them.

Who Should Attend the Board Meetings?

Strictly, only the Board members. Structure your Shareholder Agreement accordingly - this should cover the Board Observer role mentioned above.

Occasionally, you can invite Senior member(s) of your team but keep that limited only to a specific presentation or a discussion.

Routinely, Senior members of the team should not be there for the entire duration of the meeting and should not tune into the board conversation. The simple reason: some of them are smart enough to work out which way the wind is blowing and they will use that information for their “personal” gain.

Founding Team Dynamics

Often, startups have a founding team. Solo founders are not accepted by some Accelerator/Incubator programmes and these programmes encourage them to pair up or form a founding team.

I do not disagree with having a founding team as it is good for the venture. It takes a village to build the company and in that spirit different skill sets and backgrounds will definitely help the venture. However, the chemistry and the dynamics within a founding team are critical factors determining a venture’s success.

These dynamics matter a lot when things get tough.

Let’s be honest, there are plenty of lows when you are building an enterprise.

What matters is the founding team’s willingness to stick together, be able to have constructive and meaningful conversations, persevere and come out stronger when the going is tough.

What matters is their ability to keep any personal differences, egos aside and be able to have an unbiased conversation.

What matters is their ability to take decisions in the best interest of the company (employees, customers, shareholders).

Often these low points are where the differences start creeping in and the voices get louder.

It is important that the founding team does a reality check, every once in a while, on their competencies and the “skills” they bring to the table. Check what is each member’s track record on delivering/generating value. At a certain stage, one of the founders might feel more “important” than others and that feeling will surely change his/her behaviour in a wrong way.

The venture might have grown since its early days so do check that each member of the Founding team is “competent” enough for a particular stage the venture is at.

The dangerous sign to watch here is, if such a co-founder is incompetent and starts getting cocky. Deal with this swiftly, decisively and immediately.

This is likely to happen if such a co-founder is badly advised and/or influenced by the Board or has no ability to think independently.

Board Communication

I recommend following a simple 3-step filter for all board-related matters:

VERIFY: Trust the Board but verify all board communications at every stage and before and after every board meeting. Someone might “have your back” but don’t allow that someone to “stab you in your back”.

CLARIFY: If the Board communications are at variance from your understanding, always communicate in writing to not only clarify your understanding but also seek clarifications from the board.

NULLIFY: If any proposed Board decision goes against the first principles or standards you have set for yourself and is certainly not within any ethical and/or moral framework, move aggressively and swiftly to nullify such decisions.

Along with the aforementioned filter, having a strong Chairperson will help navigate this kind of difficult “founding team” and “communication” challenges. This is where the Board discussions matter. Having transparent, constructive discussions is vital to finding the way forward.

As a rule, the main Founder/CEO should coordinate the discussions between the Board members with the help of the Chairperson. Watch out if there are “back-door” conversations happening between the board members/investors and such a co-founder and/or senior team. Once revealed, these should be addressed swiftly. Call them out. Do not wait for the situation to unfold.

In any case, such back-door conversations should not be happening. Board members or investors must not do this. That is an essential and non-negotiable condition for a good Board culture.

This is the time the founding team should assess, why did they come together and start the venture in the first place? What are those original principles? Which of those are not to be compromised?

Paid Consultants in Senior Roles

To put it simply when you have paid consultants in top executive roles there is an asymmetry in the risk they are taking and the Founders have taken. If they are paid 100% of their market “day rate” then they do not have their skin in the game.

These Consultants often arrive when the funding round is closed and your VCs will talk about “inexperience” in the team and the need to hire senior people - which is absolutely the right stand. However, what matters is how you fill those roles and who you do bring in.

Also, the company might not be at the right stage to have a full-time senior role. For example, CFO is one such role where the person before Series A might not be needed on a full-time basis. This is when you hire consultants on a part-time basis and pay them their day rate to do the job.

Having the “wrong type” of paid consultants in your Senior Team can cause significant damage to the company. Any Senior Team member who is not 100% aligned, vested and committed to the “core values and the vision” of the company should not be in the team.

Beware of consultants who come with a big swagger and bring a “have-done-this-before” attitude.

I will recommend consultant payments to be in the form of an “on success” fee or on achieving certain milestones and/or a substantial portion should be tied to the stock options. This way they have “proper” skin in the game, and they are taking some “risk” in the venture.

Few of my recommendations for the Senior Team:

• Avoid “too many cooks” - might happen when you hire for “future growth”

• Blind men and the elephant syndrome (I have written more on this in the post here)

  • Pseudo experts: These are “half-baked” ones so identify them and get rid of them immediately or cut their role accordingly. These pseudo-experts should not be part of the strategy discussion.

  • Pseudo-analysis: Pseudo-experts often create or present pseudo-analysis. They can often manipulate the data to prove their own point. So watch out for such biased opinions presented on manipulated data.

  • Some knowledge but no “wisdom”: Steer clear of them or cut their role accordingly. Again, such persons should not be part of the strategy discussion.

• Watch out for the pockets of “sub-cultures” your senior team members are creating. When this happens, deal decisively and swiftly. In a demanding environment, often the “lazy” ones find side alleys out and create a sub-culture which suits them.

The Senior Team must:

• Have the same level of passion, integrity, drive and hunger as you have.

• Be willing to go through the highs and lows of venture building.

• Be capable enough to operate in a demanding, chaotic and uncertain environment.

Founder/CEO: When it is Difficult, How to Deal at a Personal Level?

No easy answers here, unfortunately.

Venture building is a “series of back-to-back marathons” and not a sprint. So avoid draining your batteries completely and do not run on flat for a long time.

Easy to give advice: Eat well, sleep well, and exercise regularly. In reality, it is hard to achieve this consistently over a longer period of time.

This is where “forming deliberate habits” is important. Also important is to get rid of those bad habits. Take baby steps to build good habits and take an incremental approach - focus on the aggregation of marginal gains (Credit: Atomic Habits).

Personally, I have found, having a good “routine” helps. This routine consists of:

• Morning routine: Start with Yoga/meditation or some form of physical exercise. Keep roughly an hour for yourself after you wake up and before you start your work day.

• Eat healthy, eat light. Practice intermittent fasting.

• Have enough sleep: Be consistent with your sleeping times.

• Walk/run 3-4 times a week. Personally, I prefer walks to runs. I think walking is the most underrated exercise. Those long walks will help clear your head and bring a level of clarity.

• Make writing a habit: Make pen and paper your friends. It does not matter if you journal/write every day or scribble down your thoughts randomly. Some form of writing is important than the mode of writing or the frequency.

• Having good advisor(s) is game-changing. Have someone with whom you can discuss or bounce off ideas. Ideally, the Chairperson on your Board will help you navigate plenty of company challenges. However, having someone outside the Board, Investors and the Company will give you the perspective you need.

However clichéd, this advice is borne more out of my experience.

A start-up takes a lot not only out of you as a person but also out of your family. Unbeknownst to you, your family is also making plenty of sacrifices every single day. Getting used to always seeing you busy; working extra hours; not being around at seemingly normal times; not having holidays for years or when they’re planned, postponing or shortening them; or running a tight financial ship at home are only some of these sacrifices.

After all that, in spite of your best efforts, when things go horribly wrong, it is extremely hard to deal with such a “series of lows” at a personal level. Not having a proper framework to deal with such situations can break the person down.

Remember, entrepreneurship isn’t a James Bond film where a Founder can only be “shaken and not stirred”. Your family’s measured but defining response will ensure that any resultant material blowback (if at all) is tackled successfully.

To summarise, a surprising number of startups die due to wrong Board/Investor dynamics. Losing your venture is a terrible thing to happen to a Founder. So do not underestimate the importance of having the right Board/Investors. The money you raise comes at a cost. Be aware of these costs and decide for yourself whether or not you are willing to pay that cost. What are you willing to compromise and what are you not willing to compromise?

In the same way, the constitution of the Senior Team (including the Founding team) is a deciding factor in the success of any startup. Choose your partners/senior leadership team carefully.

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. 

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

- Steve Jobs

It has been just over a year since FarmSetu started developing its full-stack agrifood platform.

Over these months, we built the platform, did multiple iterations to our core launchpads and started the commercial rollout in Q4-2022. So far, four agribusinesses and their farmers have been on-boarded and have started using the platform actively.

Many others are actively asking us to deploy our platform at their enterprises given the positive word-of-mouth we’ve built.

State of Play

FarmSetu's USP is its innovative software platform that, coupled with its business services, provides a unique blend of people, processes, and technology to transform agribusinesses like farmer producer companies (FPCs), processors, traders, agri-input suppliers, produce/commodity exporters into high growth businesses.

Our ambition is to provide “total digital connectivity” across the agrifood supply chain and provide a robust “business process layer” through our consulting practice to support the growth oriented agribusinesses.

Total Digital Connectivity: The Tech Stack

The software platform is built on the primary thesis of connecting agribusinesses with their farmers and providing total, end-to-end digital connectivity across the agrifood supply chain.

The Tech Stack covers:

• Basic enterprise tools required by the agribusinesses like corporate websites and emails, cloud data storage, document management and enterprise software systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), helpdesk systems, payroll systems and digital marketing tools. We have partnered with some leading players within this area to offer out-of-box solutions.

• Our own full-stack agrifood supply chain management platform

The full-stack agrifood platform is divided into two parts - a single farmer-facing app and a set of business-facing tools:

The end-to-end digital connectivity enables seamless two-way communication between the agri-business and its farmers for:

• Agronomic advice - recording farm level data and providing recommendations, a package of practices (PoP) and for providing targeted short articles, videos, and audio notes for farmers

• Managing farm operations and procurement - rolling out the procurement plan, monitoring the crops throughout the season, identifying risks early on and managing quality

• Training and up-skilling farmers - providing farmers with short, practical, skills-based training programmes, monitoring their training progress and providing feedback

• Managing compliances - KYC, for various assurance schemes, supermarket certifications

• Agri-input marketplace - providing complete transparency on the agrochemical products with best practices, pricing transparency, allowing farmers to purchase products and integrating with their inventory/farm operations

• Trading tools for businesses - this covers both in-market and on-farm trade, providing complete trading and pricing transparency to farmers

As a technology provider we do not buy or sell the produce or agricultural inputs. Those activities are done by our clients who are the supply chain owners and operators.

Our technology enables these agribusinesses to manage and scale their operations efficiently and help their farmers to:

• Improve margins by reducing the agri-input costs - the huge increase in the cost of production is a massive problem for farmers and draining agricultural productivity. The farmer facing, SetuFarm app helps farmers to reduce their costs by:

  • Providing localised agronomic advice directly from their agronomist and decision support tools

  • Helping track their field operations, expenses, and revenues and generate plot level and farm level profit and loss (P&L) numbers

  • Providing localised, detailed and genuine information on agro-chemical products, thus, improving their agro-chemical literacy

  • Helping make wise agri-input purchase decisions

• Improving quality - through better agronomic advice, by helping them improve their crop management practices and allowing them to follow the standard PoP schedule provided by expert agronomists

• By helping them to grow the produce “at spec”, provide assured pricing and access to market the produce through agri-businesses with all trading history recorded for future use

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Business Process Layer: The Business Stack

While the DNA of FarmSetu is rooted in technology, we were clear that technology has to solve agribusiness challenges. With increasing requests from our anchor customers to offer them business advisory besides technology, we launched our “Business Stack”. 

While the technology stack focuses on the agrifood supply chain, the business stack helps these enterprises professionalise their business operations, digitalise their online communications, refine their overall business strategy and better target future opportunities. 

Many small and mid-sized but growth-oriented agri-enterprises have yet to experience the full flavour of technology-led business scaling. We offer pre-packaged services to our customers depending on their enterprise size, focus markets, learning curve and overall business strategy.  

These agri-enterprises were more than happy to experience this “twin-engined” approach. While our Tech Stack got implemented and the clients’ teams were trained by our Customer Success team, the Business Stack, implemented simultaneously, started showing immediately visible results on the ground.

Implementing the Business Stack was as much a revelation to our clients as it was a new learning to us.

What Next?

Agritech platforms have benefited from the many systemic and structural digitisation projects of the government. Direct benefit transfers, online payment of MSP and subsidies and last-mile service delivery via mobile apps have helped build the tech learning curve of farmers and the owners/operators of the agribusinesses.

Having experienced these benefits first-hand and consistently over time, farmers today are more receptive and open to agritech platforms than they were a decade ago.

Keep watching this space for more exciting initiatives as we go about offering exponential value to agribusinesses and farmers block by block. We’ve only just begun.

Our Ecosystem Initiatives

In 2022, we launched a number of different initiatives to develop the digital agri-tech ecosystem in India. Below are our three key initiatives:

SetuCareers

Our clients are the leading agribusinesses with significant growth potential in rural India. They need people with different skill sets to work with their business in a rural setting. SetuCareers showcases these rewarding career opportunities with visionary Indian agriculture businesses.

More About SetuCareers

SetuMeet

Product development companies thrive and grow in a healthy tech ecosystem. We felt, there is a need in agritech to create a “product development” mindset and create a culture of craftsmanship and technical excellence in the agricultural sector. SetuMeet events is aiming to build a community of like-minded people from product development companies to exchange knowledge and ideas.

More About SetuMeet

SetuSchool (GDP)

We believe the Indian education system is falling short of creating the right talent for building innovative products in the agricultural sector. This is why we created SetuSchool: School of AgriTech (SoA) to provide short, practical, vocational training courses to create specific skills needed for the agri-tech sector.

More About SetuSchool (GDP)

We are keen to speak with like-minded software and hardware companies providing agri and wider enterprise solutions.

Partnership Opportunities

Since 2015, we have been recruiting fresh graduates and training and mentoring these young minds into well-rounded and skilled professionals. Some of these professionals stayed back and continued working with us; while some of them are now well-placed in other startups and large tech companies.

This rich experience led us to some undeniable patterns, which is why we decided to use it to create SetuSchool: School of AgriTech (SoA).

As our first initiative, we are launching today a formal Graduate Development Programme (GDP) under SetuSchool.

Why SetuSchool?

We realised that the Indian education system is woefully inadequate for creating the right talent for building innovative products in the agricultural sector - or any other technology-oriented sector. 

Moreover, the system does not help students to develop an “applied orientation” and craftsmanship to solve real-world problems in the agrifood supply chain. Often, we see students enthusiastically solve problems on the blackboard (or the whiteboard!) but struggle to replicate their success “on the field”, i.e., in the real world.

Product development companies thrive and grow in a healthy tech ecosystem

Easy access to top technical talent is a sign of a healthy tech ecosystem. Not having access to this talent is currently a serious constraint for the innovation and growth of the software product industry.

And just how do we build this talent? By inculcating the "think product” mindset in our young graduates.

As this LinkedIn post surmises, the “think product” mindset is a multi-disciplinary amalgamation of curiosity, creativity, craftsman-like detailing, artist-like visualisation, end-user empathy, pattern reading and even first-person research.

(Leonardo da Vinci’s “Flying Machine” illustration from his notebook.)

Much like the celebrated polymath Leonardo da Vinci, we need to inculcate and institutionalise this multi-disciplinary thinking in our young graduates. This is the cornerstone of SetuSchool’s ambition and aspiration.

SetuSchool will provide short, practical (even tactical), vocational training courses to create specific skills needed for FarmSetu Technologies, Vesatogo Innovations, and the broader agri-industry. Whilst this is our first step, our mandate is to develop well-rounded agri-technology professionals ready to take the “inception-to-completion” approach from Day One.  

What Will SetuSchool Do?

SetuSchool aims to build talent and capacity in the agritech domain by encouraging young students to apply their skills to solve real-world and fundamental agricultural problems. Most importantly, this programme will create opportunities for such talent to acquire life skills and find a higher purpose in life. 

As a first step, we are creating a “Graduate Development Programme (GDP)” under SetuSchool. 

The GDP aims to take recent graduates and diploma holders with the “right” mindset to inculcate product development principles in them and create the next generation of “thinkers, creators and builders”.

What is GDP?

GDP is a full-time, 6-week-long programme conducted on-site at our Nashik office. The first 2 weeks of the programme will be dedicated to a common foundation track, the next 3 weeks will be specialised tracks and the last week will feature a hands-on project. 

This intense 6-week programme offers a unique opportunity to learn from an experienced team in the agritech sector. The programme has a lot of on-the-field learning opportunities. The focus is not just on theory but also high on applied skills. 

The participants will have the opportunity to gain industrial training while simultaneously building technology skills. This will be their opportunity to get out of the classroom and come face-to-face with the real world.

At the end of the programme, we will roll out offers to select candidates to join the FarmSetu and Vesatogo teams on a full-time basis immediately.

More About GDP and Application Process

About FarmSetu

FarmSetu provides technology solutions to agribusinesses and their farmers in the supply chain to reduce their costs and improve their margins. Our technology enables them to manage and scale their operations efficiently. We help our users and customers make informed decisions thereby evolving resilient, predictable, and sustainable agri-food supply chains. Explore www.farmsetu.co to learn more.

GDP is a joint initiative of FarmSetu and Vesatogo.

SetuFarm is the first product to be launched in our full-stack agrifood supply chain management platform. This platform will provide an end-to-end digital solution for the agrifood supply chain with tools for on-farm crop management, digital marketplace, supply chain management and embedded agri-fintech services.

The SetuFarm app is built for on-farm data collection and decision making. This would primarily be used by farmers, agronomists and field officers.

After a few months of product roadmap planning and hiring, we started our product development in December 2021 with a small but sharply focused engineering team. We set ourselves an ambitious target to release the first commercial version of our mobile and web app in April 2022. Adhering to time-tested principles like purpose, focus, lean, continuous shipping and extreme agile methodologies, within just five months, we are excited to launch our app this week.

The SetuFarm app is built for users to avail of multiple services like on-farm weather and operations advisory, pest and disease forecasts, fresh produce supply chain traceability, trading and financial products.

With SetuFarm's digital tools, farmers and other stakeholders in the supply chain can access timely and actionable information to make informed decisions and achieve better returns.

Partner with FarmSetu

While we continue to invest significantly in product innovation and refinement, here’s what our app’s first version looks like:

Features

Advisory: Stay updated with best practices and in-season agronomy related information from top agronomists. The content from the experts is available in multiple formats - video, audio and text. We are super excited to partner with a number of thought leaders in the agri-food sector to provide this content.

Farm: Manage your plots, crops, and varieties, add crop-specific observations and record activities carried out on the plots. You can create and update any data pertaining to your farm at any time. You can also view plot specific timelines.

Weather Data: Mitigate weather-related risks, and plan farm operations and activities better by receiving timely and accurate current and forecast weather updates.

FarmSetu is built to be an ecosystem. We welcome agri-IoT companies dealing in sensors, automated weather stations and satellite imagery to integrate their hardware and/or data feeds within our platform and partner with us via innovative business models.

Profile: Manage your public profile, and team and remain updated with your trading partners. 

Trade: Access the most up-to-date market rates and price trends.

Finance: Smartly manage your finances with plot-level income, expenses and the profit & loss account. 

Our product roadmap is limited only by our imagination! Having said that, we also continue to invest significant time, resources and efforts in educating our customers on how to extract maximum value out of the SetuFarm app.

We have extended our “Farmer First and Foremost” approach to our product development. Even as we empower our users with the latest tools, we’re also mindful of their learning curve. Our Customer Success and Product Management teams are working overtime to understand our users’ commonplace needs, map their interaction behaviour with our app and also understand their unarticulated needs.

We are seeing an increasing interest from agri-enterprises in our full-stack approach to problem-solving. With food security and agri-food supply chain dynamics taking centre stage, full-stack agri-food platforms like FarmSetu are fast becoming indispensable for seamless global operations. Let us consider a recent scenario unfolding.

Global Food Supply Chain Risks

Until recently, Ukraine was the world's sixth-largest wheat producer and exporter. With the Russo-Ukrainian war raging by the day, wheat exports from Ukraine have reduced to a trickle. This has led to serious price fluctuations amidst supply disruptions in the global commodity market.

With the hope of quelling the supply uncertainty and food inflation (and benefiting from the ensuing windfall), India aims to export a record 10 million tonnes (MT) of wheat worth around $4 billion in 2022-23. Interestingly, another report from April highlights how a searing heatwave in India has impacted wheat yields. With the twin effects of war and climate change playing to their fullest, the global wheat supply chain is more vulnerable today. 

While we have illustrated the impact involving countries and the global marketplace, the effect on agri-enterprises engaged in the trade is more ominous and pronounced.

So, just how does an agri-food platform like FarmSetu benefit agri-enterprises in such situations? At a broad level, it starts with digitalisation. The intent is to capture automatically and accurately, such data points as would help the decision-makers analyse better, act faster and project more accurately. With time-stamped and geo-tagged data sets, the depth of analysis is unparalleled.

We integrate diverse data sets like crop operations and observations, historical, actual and forecast weather, pest and disease monitors, yield forecasts, market rates, lab tests and quality assessments.

The resultant “immediately actionable insights” help farmers, growers, traders and exporters de-risk their operations which directly impact their bottom line. This offers greater opportunities to course-correct in a volatile environment.

In an increasingly VUCA world, total avoidance of unmitigated risk might not happen. The best strategy, therefore, is to hedge one’s bets by continuous de-risking to minimise the downside. This is where FarmSetu can help mitigate climate and associated business risks for your agri-enterprise.

Talk to us today to deploy our technology solutions.

Have a functionality or app feature in mind? Please share your requirements with us using this contact form or click below to explore a partnership.

Partner with FarmSetu

Much of my focus over the last 6 months has been on hiring. I have spent an insane number of hours chatting with candidates. During these discussions, candidates often asked me what is the FarmSetu team culture like?

As a team, we make sure the product gets shipped, it solves the users' pain and provides an awesome user experience.

This requires a level of team work, dedication, discipline, and technical skills.

At the same time, we are open, transparent and fun to be around.

There is something about this team picture, it made me smile, it captures our team spirit nicely.

Since Oct 2021, we had roughly 375 applicants and from that, we rolled out about 20 offers. I believe the first 25-30 hires are extremely important for the company and its culture. Without that cultural foundation, no company can survive, grow and thrive. The topic of “People & Culture” is covered in detail in my previous post.

“The team will often remember the journey they go through together to achieve the milestones set for them.”

So, how do I describe who we are and what we stand for? As an agrifood software product company, we take the "farmer first" approach, always. The farmer is the centre of our universe. Whatever we do will add a net positive value to the farmer first, and aggregately to the broader supply chain next.

We have made sure that our team is closer to our end-users and they get regular feedback on our product from them.

This is why we have only a few “100% remote” roles. Apart from that, a small number of the team works in a “hybrid” mode, i.e., they are supposed to spend at least a week in a given month with the rest of the team and our end users. While most of the team works from our office in Nashik, India.

Our user environment is messy and the team needs to experience it first-hand in order to create solutions.

I also believe that there is a certain level of chemistry and bonding that is created by spending time together as a team. People often underestimate the power of “learning by osmosis” - you can soak in the knowledge by sitting with the team, asking questions, and having those conversations over tea/coffee/lunch.

As a team we enjoy what we do, have fun and take pride in our work. We are obsessed with delivering value to our stakeholders.

We are thinkers, creators and builders. 

We are transparent, diligent, hardworking and continuously demonstrate rigour and discipline in whatever we do.

At FarmSetu, we have “Three Sacrosanct Cs”. In short, no one messes up with these Cs:

• Culture

• Customer

• Code, meaning our Product

If you share our passion for technology and our vision for global sustainability in agrifood production then please drop us a note using this contact form or check our open roles:

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About FarmSetu

FarmSetu is a “full-stack agrifood platform” for smallholder farmers providing an end to end digital solution with tools for crop management, supply chain management, digital marketplaces, embedded fintech services, traceability and sustainable agriculture.

We are building the platform in close partnership with the awesome team at Vesatogo.

Welcome to the first edition of August 2021 of The Future of AgriFood Supply Chain.

This newsletter is for the professionals working in the agrifood sector. In these articles, we look at different technologies, emerging and established, taking a deeper look at the implementation, dispelling myths, providing real-world use cases and an independent, unfiltered view on return on investment (RoI) on technology. 

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What Do You Think of Blockchain?

This is the question I get asked in roughly half of my conversations with the agrifood industry leaders. In the age of soundbites and buzzwords, Blockchain gets tossed around a lot so I decided to write about it. 

It also emerged, what business leaders were looking for, by asking that one question, is answers to following questions:

• What is Blockchain?

• Does my business need it? If yes, why?

• What will be the return on investment? 

I will answer above questions in the sections below and hopefully provide some clarity on the subject. 

Before you begin, I suggest you read this article on Web 3.0: Powering Innovation in the AgriFood Supply Chain to help clear some concepts used in this article. 

What is Blockchain?

In order to understand what Blockchain is, we need to understand what Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is. 

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) 

“ DLT refers to the protocols and supporting infrastructure that allow computers in different locations to propose and validate transactions and update records in a synchronised way across a network.”

BIS Quarterly Review, September 2017

Let’s try and break this down. 

• First and foremost, it is a “protocol”, i.e., set of rules and guidelines for transmitting the data. 

• Secondly, it is an  “infrastructure”, i.e., to store the data. 

• Lastly, it is “decentralised”, i.e., without a centralised authority to validate and update the records. 

In short, DLT is a synchronised, decentralised, persistent data store for processing and sharing the data.  

If you would like to know more about DLT then please head to the DLT Systems: A Conceptual Framework published by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the Judge Business School. 

Now we know what DLT is so let’s go ahead and understand what Blockchain is. 

Blockchain

Blockchain is one type of DLT. The other types of DLT are: Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and a Hybrid type. 

A blockchain is a decentralised, shared database with entries that must be confirmed and encrypted. Each entry or a transaction is stored on a block.

Blocks have a certain storage capacity.

When the storage capacity of the block is filled, it is chained to the previously filled block, forming a chain of data known as the blockchain.

To facilitate this, the technology uses cryptographic signatures called a hash. 

A hash or a digital fingerprint is a unique cryptographic value containing characters and numbers generated through a complex computational algorithm. Each block in the blockchain contains the hash value that validated the transaction before it followed by its own hash value.

Hashes confirm transactions on the blockchain.

The schematic below describes the sequence of events that takes place to confirm the transaction on a blockchain:

Types of Blockchain

The blockchain platform types are differentiated through the access rights and the rights to read and write to the ledger. 

The different types are:

• Public: The public blockchain platforms are also called permissionless because no permission from a central authority is needed to participate in the network. The network is open for participation to everyone and everyone can access the transaction data, validate them, and participate in the consensus process (more on the consensus methods below).

• Private: The private blockchain platforms are mainly used by enterprises and one needs an approval and authorisation from the central authority to participate in the network. The consensus remains with the central authority and it also coordinates the permissioned access and validation of transactions. 

• Consortium: This type of blockchain is like a private network with the difference that the network is controlled by a group of entities having equal rights. The consortium network promotes collaboration rather than competition and allows these entities to share the risk and reduce the cost. 

Consensus Methods

As described earlier, blockchain is a decentralised system and in the absence of a central authority, the decisions are arrived at through a common agreement or consensus. 

This consensus mechanism ensures all nodes on a network are synchronised and the  transactions recorded on the block are legitimate. 

There are a number of different methods or mechanisms to achieve this consensus. Below are some of the methods used: 

• Proof of Work (PoW)

• Proof of Stake (PoS)

• Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS)

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)

• Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT)

• Proof of Activity

• Proof of Authority (PoA)

• Proof of History (PoH)

• Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET)

Blockchain Generations

First Generation

The first generation blockchain technology began with Bitcoin. It was designed mainly to process the financial transactions (peer-to-peer) using PoW and to maintain the time stamped records. 

• Bitcoin

Second Generation

The second generation blockchains have wider functionality like Smart Contracts, Distributed Apps (dApps) and are primarily used to facilitate management of the digital assets. The blockchains in this generation are like a platform hosting application ecosystem. 

• Ethereum

• BAT

• Neo

Third Generation

The first and second generation blockchains have issues like scalability and are computationally expensive. The third generation blockchains resolve these by providing higher scalability, higher speed of transactions and consuming less energy. Besides, they also provide interoperability across different blockchain platforms. 

• Cardano

• Solana

• Nano

• IOTA

• Polkadot

Blockchain Applications in the AgriFood Supply Chain

The blockchain applications in the agrifood sector can be grouped under following:

• Traceability

• Efficiency in the supply chain

• Payments

• Crop insurance

There are number of companies who are using blockchain to track the fresh produce or food products from their store back to their origin in a few minutes. By far, the end-to-end traceability, in a tamper-evident environment, is most widely cited use case for the blockchain technology.

Although this level of traceability can be provided by any other software system, provided it collects the data, showing in a tamper-evident environment to provide confidence to consumers is blockchain’s USP.

The schematic below shows how blockchain can capture different transactions in the supply chain. Over time it will become an essential component of the enterprise’s software architecture.

Agrotrust with Sahyadri Farms in India, has done extensive work in implementing blockchain technology for traceability and providing end to end transparency of their fresh produce to the consumers. What I like about this solution is the financial transparency which they provide to the farmers. Farmers receive near real-time updates about revenue, wastage and selling price of their produce.

AgroTrust platform also provides safe food certifications to the consumers who buy produce from Sahyadri Farms’s affiliated stores. Consumers get farmer’s information, food journey and safety, and price distribution via a QR code scan which is attached to the pack.

Another example is AgriDigital in Australia and United States. They are transforming grain supply chains by providing tracking of grain as it moves from their fields, to bins, and eventually on to the buyers.

Some of the other areas where blockchain technology is used in the sector:

• Digital identity: creating a digital identity for growers, farms and fields with data privacy and control with growers. In this category, BanQu has partnered with AB InBev to provide supply chain solution to their farmers in Uganda and Zambia. The project has helped AB InBev to connect with their local farmers providing them visibility in the supply chain.

• Payments and financing: agri-food supply chain is a multi-trillion industry and currently payments are often decoupled from the delivery of the produce or a commodity, often taking weeks to arrive. This could be changed by real-time payments using smart contracts. The transaction costs will be lower as well. In a same way, trade financing options in both developed and emerging economies will improve through some of the innovations happening in decentralised finance (DeFi) and also in centralised finance (CeFi) space like open banking API.

• Smart contract based crop insurance: Parametric crop insurance with automated pay-offs when certain weather conditions occur will transform the crop insurance and insurance markets in general. Arbol in United States is providing smart contract based insurance solutions to protect farmers from excess or insufficient rainfall, snow and crop losses.

• Traceability using NFTs: Non-fungible Tokens, a.k.a., NFTs, will allow to create unique tokens attached to a farm, field and/or even a particular tree in an orchard or a particular livestock. Retailers, consumers demand traceability of the produce and through the smart use of NFTs this can be provided for fresh produce, combinable commodity as well as livestock.

• Sustainability, net zero, carbon footprint dashboards: There is no question that we need to change the way we grow the food and the way we supply it to the end consumers. This means we have to move to regenerative farming, make farms more biodiverse, learn to look after soils, optimise agri-inputs, and make the growers all over the world financially independent by providing them access to knowledges, skills and education. This also means that the data needs to be captured, measured and the supply chains are monitored. The blockchain technology will allow to capture the data in a tamper-evident environment and provide full validity and visibility of such data. This will allow supply chain players to create and share the sustainability and carbon footprint dashboards in an impartial way. This information will be readily available to consumers by simply scanning the QR code or a bar code on the product or the fresh produce pack.

RoI

“ Despite the increasing attention that blockchain is receiving, there is still limited scientific research about its economic effects on firms and supply chains. Some scientific literature categorises blockchain as a disruptive technology, others as institutional technology, or it is being declared as foundational or even as general-purpose technology (GPT) that has the potential to fundamentally change economies and societies, creating a new type of economy. “

Kramer et al., sum this up nicely in their February 2021 paper titled Blockchain and Its Impacts on Agri-Food Supply Chain Network Management.

Blockchain technology is still in its early days. The companies involved are still learning about it and still getting a better understanding of its economic benefits.

Over time, I feel this will become one of the building blocks of the enterprise technology - just like relational/non-relational databases are a building block for any enterprise. The agrifood companies and farmers will start using it without knowing they are using blockchain to complete certain transactions. In order for this to happen, I feel that the consortium blockchain model will have to evolve and offer the solution to number of different players in the industry.

The industry will start seeing the RoI with implementation of smart contract based payments and crop insurance solutions. These transactions will also help us create the sustainability and carbon footprint dashboards in order for the supply chain to operate efficiently.

Conclusions

The main driver for the blockchain adoption so far in the agrifood sector is supply chain transparency, traceability and information on food safety. The technology needs to be matured further for the wide scale adoption in the industry. In particular, I am looking at the consortium led and/or public blockchain solutions evolving to provide scalable, secure, cost effective platform to the entire industry.

Currently, there is no specific implementation of the blockchain which is leading the way or has created a network effect so far. The third generation blockchain solutions have a clear advantage. In my opinion, a consortium led solution with lower transaction costs and high interoperability across different blockchain implementations and ability to combine on-chain/off-chain data will drive up the adoption in the market.

In order to have a blockchain enabled solution and get returns the enterprises still need integrated software systems through which data can be moved seamlessly and used across the systems where it is needed. This plumbing system for the seamless data flow across the organisation and outside is an essential condition for the successful implementation of any blockchain technology.

If you have enjoyed this article then please follow @SachinAShende on Twitter and support our efforts on making the agri-food supply chains Efficient, Transparent and Sustainable by sharing this article.

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In this article we will take a look at the business analytics tooling also known as business intelligence (BI) tooling from agri-food supply chain perspective.

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Before we begin, BI has a long history and it means different things to different people depending on their age, experience, sector they work in, and skillsets. To clear that understanding, Tableau has a good article on what BI is.

What are Business Analytics Platforms? 

Business analytics platforms, sometimes known as business intelligence (BI) platforms, are platforms that provide a tool set for businesses to absorb, organise, discover, and analyse data to reveal actionable insights that can help improve decision-making and inform business strategy.

These tools are supposed to have five key elements:

1. Data preparation

2. Data modelling

3. Data blending

4. Data visualisation

5. Insights delivery

The primary purpose of these systems is to enable non-IT users (or business users or the domain experts) with a set of tools which will help them to understand the day to day performance of the business and help make data driven decisions with minimal IT or software engineering work. 

The business users can use these tools to generate reports, dashboards and visualisations. These platforms help business users understand the connections and trends between multiple datasets and get the holistic view of the business. They can be used in the daily/weekly/monthly team or management meetings to make business decisions.

The dashboards are like your head torch when you are climbing the mountain in the dark. For example, the dashboard below shows the  “crop activity and progress” across the supply chain. The Procurement Manager can use this to plan the crop procurement activities and track the progress.

The key thing to note here is the steps listed above, from 1 to 5, is the journey businesses have to go through. Without a proper data capturing, preparation, blending mechanism, one cannot have standardised dashboards and metrics to monitor the business performance.

We often see business leaders who want to go to step 5 without going through the previous steps of the infrastructure and data preparation exercise which are critical to the success of the project. 

Landscape for BI and Analytics Tools

Source: Gartner (February 2021)

From the image above we can see there are a lot of players in this space and few have really done a great job and are leading in satisfying the end users business needs. Helping the stakeholders (data scientist, business analyst, business users) visualise and make data driven decisions thus helping businesses to understand the intricacies of their supply chain, connections and seasonal trends. 

These tools have definitely benefited larger enterprises in tackling the day to day performance challenges of their business, however, the enterprises especially in the agrifood supply chain are still facing challenges.

These challenges are primarily because of the disconnected and siloed data capturing systems built or implemented over time. Without having a unified enterprise data architecture the insights delivery is impossible. 

Based on our experience, the following few BI software solutions standout for their performance, visualisation, ease of use and user experience:

• Sisense

• Google Looker

• Microsoft PowerBI

• Kibana

• Tableau

• TIBCO software

• Oracle Analytics

• QLIK

Although, these tools provide flexibility and allow business users to create “self-serviced dashboards”, the total license cost per annum can be exorbitantly high depending on what features are being used and the number of user licenses requested. This is where proper planning and doing a cost analysis before hand would come handy.

Challenges in The AgriFood Supply Chain

Even though it is one of the oldest trades, the agrifood supply chain is still catching up with digital technology. The challenges one has to consider when using the BI tools in the agrifood supply chain are: 

1. Contextuality

2. Heterogeneity

3. Fuzziness

Contextuality

Agricultural production depends on so many factors: weather, cultivar, soil, cultivation practices, pest and disease infection, supply and demand. Some of these factors are controlled by humans while some are beyond human control. Thus, when looking at the data collected through various systems, for e.g., weather stations or agricultural inputs, crop observation and quality samples, one has to use a holistic approach before drawing any conclusions based on the trend single or part combination of data represents. In order to do so procurement managers, agronomists, technical and commercial managers need to collaborate effectively and efficiently using the relevant tools.

Heterogeneity

The upstream and downstream of the agrifood supply is using the tech which collects and handles data in a non-standardised way, often appropriate to the nature of the data they are dealing with. Thus, data is captured in both structured as well as unstructured fashion. 

Due to the heterogeneity of the data collected, it often requires technology experts' support to perform the necessary steps pertaining to data handling (preparation) to get it in a shape/form alongside business users. Once data is prepared the business users can start using it in the next steps of data handling (modelling, blending) based on the requirements. 

Fuzziness

Lot of data collected in the agri-food supply is fuzzy, i.e., not precise. Most data collected will also be described in range rather than precise numbers or measured qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Thus, transforming qualitative data into quantitative datasets pose another challenge. The rules, regulations and standards are different in different countries making it further challenging to handle these datasets. We also need to integrate automated and remote data collections solutions for consistency in data recording and timely monitoring of crops in the field/store. 

Data Architecture 

Every agrifood business leader we have spoken to has an ambition to enable their team to make data driven decisions. However, very few realise the groundwork needed for a well functioning system which will allow users to glean insights or the work needed to take those insights to the business users in their operational setting.

The first step in laying the right foundation is to break all of the organisational data silos and allow the data to flow seamlessly. This does not need a fancy technology or does not mean investing huge sums of money upfront - what this means is working smartly, in an agile way, asking your software vendors to comply with certain interoperability standards, getting access to their APIs and glueing the systems together to create that unified data architecture for the business. 

The diagram below shows how the organisation’s data architecture should look like: 

Key Questions

Every enterprise in the AgriFood supply chain is trying to answer following typical performance questions:

• How is the crop/commodity doing in the field/store?

• Do we have risks in fulfilling the customer contracts?

• Do we have right quality of the produce being grown to meet customer specifications?

• Who are my best growers? How are growers in my supply chain performing?

• Are all my growers compliant across all of the supply chain standards? Are they following right protocols?

• Do I need to buy on the open market this season?

• What is the RoI per field or per grower or per store?

• How can I mitigate the supply chain risks?

Some examples of the typical dashboards used in the supply chain:

RoI and Benefits

Most of the proprietary BI software platforms are costly without seeing the return on investment for 9-12 months in the traditional standardised business setups.

However, agrifood supply is not the same as traditional business setups for the above mentioned reasons. The commodities traded through agrifood supply chain take a full growing season to grow. The growing season can vary from 6-12 months depending on  the commodity being produced. Enterprises will have to build visibility throughout the growing season, i.e.,  from seeds going into the ground till they reach to the consumers plate.

In the agrifood supply no growing season will be identical owing to the crop rotation, weather and other factors in the agriculture. Thus, data modelling and building the understanding of the trends will take a few growing seasons. Thus the real return on investments won’t start unless a couple of growing seasons, i.e., at least 24 months. This seems like a long time. However, careful planning and good preparation work in data plumbing can help enterprises realise that RoI quicker.

Conclusion

Using the BI tools in the agri-food supply chain is not as straightforward as the traditional business owing to the non-standardisation and complexity mentioned above. In order to get the true picture to generate valuable and actionable insights we need to build an ecosystem (integration of software services) through which data can be integrated, shared seamlessly and used across the systems where it is needed. This plumbing system for the seamless data flow across the organisation and outside is an essential condition for the delivery of the insights. This requires a careful planning and a clear thought process from the business leaders.

If you enjoyed this article, please follow @SachinAShende on Twitter and support our efforts on making the agri-food supply chains Efficient, Transparent and Sustainable by sharing this article.

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In this article we will take a look at the implementation of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in agrifood supply chains.

“Agrifood chains are the linked events in the agricultural production of food – the process being a chain of events from production to processing, trading, distribution and consumption. Literally “from field to fork”. “

Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)

AgriFood supply chains are the most complex and non-standardised of all supply chains. The digitalisation in the agrifood sector has only just started. There are a number of actors in the supply chain performing different roles. For example, farmers or growers also called Primary Producers, agri-input manufacturers, suppliers, aggregators, intermediaries and traders, wholesalers, retailers and food processors, and finally the consumers.

Farmers are at the upstream end of the supply chain who produce the food and consumers are at the downstream end who consume the food either directly in a fresh form or in a processed form. The simplified version of the supply chain is as shown below:

Digital technologies have the potential to drive innovation in the agrifood sector and contribute towards a more efficient, productive, resilient, sustainable and transparent food system. There are a host of digital tools used in the agrifood supply chains like farm management and precision agriculture systems, software tools collecting data from farms using sensors (also called Internet of Things or IoT), satellite image processing tools, logistics planning, e-commerce and market places, financial technologies (Fintech) like trade financing, payment system, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) like Blockchains and ERP systems. 

This article is focussed on the implementation of ERP systems, its challenges, success factors and the benefits. Although the ERP systems are implemented by a processor, retailer or aggregator, farmers are benefited from this because they handle the purchasing, invoicing, inventory and the logistics planning of the supply chain.  

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What is ERP? 

“ERP is a kind of software system that helps you run your entire business, including processes in finance, manufacturing, supply chain, services, procurement, and more.“

SAP

Image Source: Oracle Netsuite

The key benefits of the ERP system are: higher productivity, improved planning, better forecasting, automation through integration with other systems, access to analytics and reporting, better regulatory compliance, better customer service, increased reliability and robustness in the business processes. 

We will take a look at the ERP implementation in the Fresh Produce companies as a use case within the agrifood sector. Fresh produce sector supplies the produce which you see in the Fruit and Veg aisles in the supermarket. The sector also supplies the produce needed for processing, for example, potatoes for crisping or chipping. 

Commonly Used ERP Systems in the Fresh Produce Sector 

Fresh Produce has some unique features that often a standard ERP system will not have, hence why several companies have developed produce specific systems. Some of these specific features are:

• Taking whole crop and splitting it into different sizes, qualities at different prices;

• Weight loss due to respiration of a product in store;

• Varieties, quality, formats, grades;

• Consignment profitability - the ability to add actual costs and income to a specific LOT and generate a profit statement; and 

• Grower returns. 

There are several Fresh Produce ERP software providers.  Which one to implement is dependent on your company circumstances, your operations and what you want to achieve. Here are a few of the most widely used ones. 

• Affinitus

• Aptean (Linkfresh)

• Columbus

• JD Edwards

• Keelings Knowledge

• Prophet

• SI Food Software

Implementation Challenges and Changes Needed in the Organisation

Implementing ERP is not about installing a piece of software, it is about working in a different way. It is as much about the culture as it is about the software.  Success requires commitment and a willingness to use the ERP and leave the spreadsheets behind.

Following are the important considerations before embarking on the implementation journey:

Foundation: A successful implementation depends on putting in good foundations. These foundations in a business are clear understanding why a system is needed,  understanding your operating practices, what things are essential and what can be changed and finally having a fully engaged leadership behind the project makes a big difference. Also, defining what success looks like and getting your vendor to agree to it. 

Preparedness: Is your business ready for a system? Does it have defined ways of doing things? Are they followed?  Whilst an ERP implementation can be used as a route to improving adherence to processes and practices it is always less risky and more successful if they are working well beforehand. If you currently have a spreadsheet and paper system in place, if paperwork is always completed on time and in full then you have good foundations, if not then spend time getting this working before adding technology. ERP will amplify good and bad practices.

Team: ERP is not a finance or an IT system, it is a business system used by all functions, ensuring that you have a cross functional team involved from the beginning.  At this stage designate a project manager. This needs to be someone’s focus and not part of the day job. If internal resources are tight then bring in external support.

Operations: Take time to understand what you want and how you operate now.  Things also to consider here are cloud deployment versus on premise installation. How good and reliable is your internet connection?  What type of licensing structure are you looking for - per named individual or set number of users? Traceability at pallet level or case level? What are your must haves and your nice to haves? Often some external facilitation in these processes can help the team define more clearly what is needed. 

Selection: Take your time with selection of the ERP provider, this is not a one time purchase but a long term partnership. Few important considerations here:

• How do different proposals compare against your requirements? Have you mapped the features from each system against your “must haves”?

• What are the levels of support different vendors provide? What does your business need?  

• How much does the system cost? What are the extras? How much is the running cost? 

• Reputation in the market? Do you have any references?  

• System roadmap? 

• Levels of investment?  

• Does the system provide Application Programming Interface (API) access?

• What skill sets do they need in the team? What is the level of training?

Implementation: The successful implementation of a system once known will be aided by:

• Good communication internally and with external stakeholders;

• Training and support;

• At go live, stop using the old system and focus on the new. Be prepared for a few weeks of disruption. When it gets difficult don’t allow people to go back to how it was, give them the support to learn how to use the system;

• Focus on getting stock right at the beginning, can you buy it, pack it, dispatch it and invoice it? Until this is correct then everything else will not be;

• Ensure every user can get the information they need from the system to do their job well. Make sure the solution has the required level of reporting from day one; 

• Don’t assume that information out of the system is wrong. Investigate, you may only now be seeing the truth;

• As business leaders, use the system yourselves, only accept reports and information that have come out of the system. Don’t accept anything from the old; and

• Have in place good super users (admins) and good training resources so that all new starters can learn well. 

Finally, the most important one, celebrate each success. Share milestones and wins with all stakeholders. 

RoI and Benefits

The most important benefit of ERP is better management information throughout the business. Some examples:

• Improved stock management;

• Improved production scheduling;

• Giveaway and pack out;

• Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) profitability;

• Supplier performance; and 

• Labour costs.

Depending on your starting point, ERP will save on administrative costs. As the data capture is live at the point of task execution, there is no dual entry and no paperwork. Where work gets done does change and so some functions will see increased staffing whilst others will see big reductions.

The majority of RoI will be gained from better decision making based on better information. More the system is used, the better this information is and more gains can be made.

ERP in any manufacturing or packing business is one of the cornerstones of digital transformation. In an increasingly digital world, high quality data is essential to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation and will allow people to make better, more informed decisions faster than competitors. 

Conclusions

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and digital world, business and its people need the tools and the information to meet customer demands, innovate and remain relevant. 

ERP, like other technologies, is essential in this world. Successful ERP implementations are about working collaboratively across organisations and selecting the right tool for the job now and in the future.

This process of selection and implementation applies to all technologies.  As technology becomes increasingly disruptive in the fresh produce sector, helping your people embrace it and learn how to select the right technologies for you to gain value becomes essential.  

If you enjoyed this article, please follow @SachinAShende on Twitter and support our efforts on making the agri-food supply chains Efficient, Transparent and Sustainable by sharing this article.

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A big shout out to Jonathan Tole for co-authoring this article with me this week.

About Jonathan Tole Consulting

Jonathan Tole Consulting is an Agrifood Consultancy. Jonathan’s mission is to help unlock the potential of the Agri-food industry through its people and helping companies use technology better.  

With significant knowledge of the fresh produce sector, experience in change management and an understanding of technology,  he provides a valuable resource for companies in the sector.  

Recent projects include - customer strategy work, ERP selection and project management, remote / hybrid working, selection and implementation of technologies to support specific business goals. 

For more information visit www.jonathantole.com or call +44 1223 616339. 

“It is not the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it is the pebble in your shoe.”

Muhammad Ali

What is it about entrepreneurship that people risk everything in their life to start a venture? What is it that they can see which others cannot? From my own experience it is a deep down belief in something and a strong conviction that you can launch a product or a service which will change the status quo. 

Entrepreneurs are passionate about the cause and are willing to go through the pain, sacrifices, failures, and be relentless and persistent to bring the idea to fruition. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, money is not a primary motive for an entrepreneur to take those risks. Money is on the list, however I believe, money is an incidental thing which happens to a well-run, successful venture. 

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Welcome to the first newsletter of this month. In this article, I will share with you some real learnings, learnt in a hard way, from building and scaling the AgriTech startup. These are written from the perspective of the Co-Founder and the CEO of the company. Ultimately, whatever happens in the company is the CEO’s responsibility and the buck stops with him/her.

Although the article says “AgriTech”, the lessons can be applicable to any other sector, however, some of the lessons are specific to Business to Business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. 

Digital AgriTech is still new and what we are seeing now is the Second Generation of the companies in the market. Below is a quick overview of the evolution of the digital AgriTech and a few companies in each cohort.

Please note that the year boundaries are approximate and this is not an exhaustive list of the companies in each period. These companies are a few examples showing the evolution and maturity in the sector. 

In the Vintage period and during the first half of the First Generation, there was a big emphasis on the Farm Management Systems (FMS) and Precision Agriculture. The second half of the First Generation and the early Second Generation companies moved towards creating different Point Solutions (IoT, image analysis, AI/ML, financial solution) and marketplaces. They definitely seem to have learnt from the startups ahead of them in the First Generation. It is interesting to see that some of the marketplace companies which entered in the agriculture sector moved out of the traditional e-commerce sector as they got crowded or squeezed out. 

This article is compiled based on the number of talks I gave at the Accelerate Cambridge Programme at the Entrepreneurship Centre, Cambridge Judge Business School over the last few years. The talks titled “Unknown Unknowns” covered the learnings under following categories:

Team & Culture; Product; Sales; and Finance.

Due to the amount of the content to cover, I will cover only Team & Culture; and Product in this article.

Team & Culture

It takes a village to build the company. By far this is the most important category and my major learnings are in this category. Ideas are important but even more important is clean execution. That will not happen without a great team and the culture which supports the team. The team and the culture go hand in hand and feed into each other - it is a lethal combination. 

• Team building, the sequence: It is interesting to see how SaaS companies start and evolve. That evolution depends on the founder(s) background(s). At KisanHub, we started with an engineering team, then hired for customer success, sales, product management and marketing, in that order. In hindsight, we should have hired a product manager early on. Ok, we made another mistake there, instead of getting a product manager we hired a VP-Product and tasked that person to build the product function. This doesn’t mean there was no one who played the role of a Product Manager, in the first few years that responsibility went to myself and a couple of other people in our engineering team. We should have also prioritised the marketing function early on. Ideally, with the founder backgrounds, and with the product we were building, the sequence should have been - engineering, product management, customer success, and sales+marketing. 

• Senior leadership: The scaling of B2B SaaS companies happens in stages rather than in a one straight transition. There are so many moving parts one needs to get right. When we raised a decent round we tried to scale prematurely. Hiring “senior” people too soon and promoting a few early hires to the senior roles who did not have necessary operational experience was a mistake. Watch out for what I call “Blind men and the elephant syndrome” - pseudo experts who have some knowledge, who bring no “wisdom” to the table and who act like consultants can kill your business. Your senior team should have the same level of ambition, passion, integrity and be willing to go through the highs and lows of venture building with you.

  

  Every time you hire a senior, experienced person, that person comes with a certain baggage. Please make sure that the on-boarding of the senior team members happens in a structured way and they get enough time to understand the culture and processes of your company. Unlearning something is a part of learning. The on-boarding process is needed for any employee, however, I would like to emphasise the added importance attached to the senior team. Watch out for the “pockets of sub-cultures'' which might develop within your company under the leadership of such senior team members. If this happens, acknowledge it, go back to on-boarding and/or addressing it swiftly. Also, be aware of the new senior team members who will start changing the processes as soon as they join the company. It is perfectly ok to change something but only when they have had enough time to understand the business, culture, clients and the product. Just to change something because “this was not how it was done at my old company” is not acceptable. Your senior team (and rest of the team), should be capable of operating in a demanding, chaotic and uncertain environment. Finally, As Jim Collins says in his book Good to Great, make sure you have a right person on the bus and make sure that the right person is sitting in the right seat.

• Founders and the team - look after yourself: Early on Hanadi Jabado (then at the Judge Business School) mentioned to me that “building an enterprise is like running a marathon and not a sprint”. That is so true. At that time, I didn’t quite understand the gravity of that statement. However, I do now. The landscape changes everyday, you go through one wave and immediately after that, even before you have a chance to breathe, you see the next oncoming wave already. It is relentless. The only way you can go through this is “regular work and rest cycles”. You need to slow down every once in a while, think, refresh and get back to work with a fresh mindset. Please take breaks and allow yourself to recharge those batteries - in fact, I will say avoid draining your batteries completely and do not run on flat for a long time. As every once in a while you could do with that spare capacity to tackle unforeseen events. Having a proper routine and regular exercise helps. Personally, I found regular walks, yoga, and meditation useful.  

• Board: Investors are not your friends. They play an important role and your job is to deliver value to your clients through your product and create value for your employees and investors. Typically, early stage startup boards consist of investors and founders. That is not good enough. Having an independent, non executive director (NED) and/or Chairperson is essential for an effective, efficient functioning of the board. The founder, CEO needs someone to go to before/after Board meetings for advice, bounce ideas off and to prepare for the strategy sessions with the Board. NED will play a crucial role in all of this. In addition to that, NED can also play an important role in resolving any differences between the board members and/or founding team when they happen. I also feel that the Board member (or Investor) communication with your senior team (including your co-founder(s)) needs to be routed via you, the CEO. No exceptions. In the Boards where there is no Chairperson, the CEO has to drive the Board conversation and manage the communication assertively.

• Communication: I know some founders think that writing emails is “communicating” with your team. It is not. The team dynamics changes completely when the team size goes past circa 10. Founders/CEOs need to make that extra effort to communicate regularly and let everyone know what is happening. You owe your team that clarity. Our team was split between Cambridge, UK and Pune, India so we had that extra responsibility in providing clarity to all team members across both offices. Also, be aware of the cultural differences when you have people working in different parts of the world - it does not come very naturally for some people to ask questions in the team meetings, especially, when they are not in the same room. So, it is your (and other people managers) responsibility to seek that feedback consciously. Weekly “All Hands” meetings and senior team meetings are a good place to start. This can be supplemented by routine 1-2-1s with your reporting lines. In turn, other senior leaders and people in managerial roles can cascade the 1-2-1s. Team outings, senior team day outs, strategy days help too. There is a certain advantage of going away from the office (working from home now) environment to spend quality time discussing not just tactical stuff but also the strategy. However, do plan such events carefully, set clear objectives and goals and send any preparation material well ahead of the time so the team can come prepared.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” 

Mark Twain

Product

It is often not the lack of ideas which will kill your product but too many ideas will. KisanHub’s product had multiple pivots. It was a pure platform play rather than a point solution. Typical to the First Generation AgriTech company, we started with “book of records (BoR)” for farmers at the upstream end of the supply chain and providing the users with “insights” based on the BoR. Soon after that, through our early enterprise clients, the product started connecting farmers with their Producer Groups (or Aggregators) in the supply chain and finally it became a “farm to factory gate” supply chain software solution providing insights on suppliers, quantity and quality of the produce.

While we were building the supply chain platform, we also built a “trials management” platform for the research organisations to manage their field trials. This was built on the same foundation as the supply chain management platform. However, the target user group was different so effectively we had two product teams, two different sales processes and the same with customer success. On top of it, the team was split between Cambridge and Pune so it was like running multiple startups in one. The result of that was relentless activity going on for a number of years.

In my opinion, the best software developers are the ones who are not just good at software but they are also the domain/industry experts. Being a domain expert gives them that extra edge and they can add so much value to the product. This is why the products built by the teams at a cross section of technology and other fields (like finance, music etc.) stand apart. The people who have created them understand the user so much better. Being a First Generation company in the AgriTech sector, we had a slim chance of finding a software developer or a product person with a good understanding of the agri-food supply chain and farming. It took us lot longer to hire a new person on the team.

To summarise the lessons:

• As mentioned above, we should have got a product manager early on.

• We were working on too many ideas/experiments to see what works and what doesn’t.

• The result of this was that the team was working hard and the resources were spread too thinly. We were not able to iterate quickly to enhance the functionality which was used regularly and also improve the performance bottlenecks as they were appearing.

• Felt like racing against the time, all the time.

• As the usage went up, as the new users were added, the data volume started going up and this had a negative impact on the user experience because of those performance bottlenecks. (Note: adding a new user meant that we had their data on farm, fields, crops, operations, weather (actual and forecast), satellite imageries etc.)

• Be aware of the “gravity pull” from your early customers - your early customers are the cornerstone of the company and they always have a special place. The company relies on them for the user feedback and to understand the challenges, problems and friction in the system. Typically at that stage, there aren’t enough resources to gather the user data at a scale, to analyse and prioritise the features. In this situation, your early customers are your go to place and there is a chance that you might be solving problems specific to a customer rather than for the industry. Be mindful of that.

• The “time to value” was high due to the seasonality of the crops. The user had to go through the whole season and wait until harvesting to see the value offered by the product. This was true for a number of different product features we had. In addition to this, due to the complexity and non-standardisation in the supply chain, we were not breaking the data silos fast enough to remove the friction completely. This meant our end users were still using multiple systems.

There is plenty written on Product development by a number of highly experienced people and I am not going to repeat that here. Having said that, I do recommend this meta-thread on Product Management:

Evolution of the product happens in so many baby steps. One also needs to remember that things do take time in spite of the structured, deliberate, logical approach in executing the strategy. In product development, going from an idea to a minimum viable product (MVP) to achieve a product market fit (PMF) is a very different journey. In fact, after spending almost a decade in AgriTech, I am not sure if the definition of PMF in AgriTech is the same as other sectors.

I sincerely hope you find this article useful in whatever venture you are building. I would love to hear from you. Please send any feedback by filling in the contact form on this page or through Twitter and spread the word by sharing this article.

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“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Steve Jobs

“Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organisation, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organisations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW)

Early Days - Web 1.0

It was 1997, I was studying for my masters programme at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. Those days, I got into writing web pages. The web pages were handcrafted in HTML using an editor like vi and then files copied over to the institute’s web server using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). These were passive, read-only, static pages, i.e., any changes to the content were done by modifying the HTML files directly.

Those were also the days of AltaVista, Netscape Navigator, a text based browser (yes, you heard it right!) called Lynx and an email client called Pine. Those were the days of Web 1.0, the first stage of the evolution of the WWW. 

Second Stage

Then came Web 2.0, the era of dynamic web pages (a read, write interactive web) which is the second stage of the WWW evolution. The tech industry was just coming out of the dot com bubble and heady years of browser wars. The world of social media was emerging and this time around I was studying for my PhD programme at Loughborough University, UK.

I remember writing a dynamic website for the International Students Association and a couple of other web applications - one was for our departmental research group to order groceries for the shared kitchen and split expenses. It was the time PHP and MySQL ruled the web and LAMP stack was a de facto standard of a dynamic website. New web applications like Blogging, Social Networking, RSS feeds, and a whole host of user interactivity tools were being launched.

We were getting used to remembering user logins/passwords for multiple sites, using shopping sites like Amazon, eBay and Google was becoming a part of our daily life. The launch of smartphones and mobile apps in 2007 truly accelerated the Web 2.0 adoption making the internet a massive app store.  Crucially, we also learnt how to interoperate across different web applications using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Web 2.0 is powered by the advances in mobile, social and cloud technology. 

However, Web 2.0 also took us to a centralised computing infrastructure model where few large tech companies control the power and have an ability to monetise the personal data at a massive scale.

And Now…

While the Web 2.0 wave continues, we are now being ushered into the third generation of internet services called Web 3.0 (or Web3) or an Intelligent Web. Initially, Web 3.0 was thought to be a Semantic Web, a term coined by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Although, Semantic Web did not take off, Web 3.0 takes us to a more autonomous, intelligent, and open internet as originally envisioned by Sir Tim.

Web 3.0 is about decentralisation, peer-to-peer networks, edge computing, semantic web, connected devices, and Machine Learning (ML)/Artificial Intelligence (AI). Deloitte calls Web 3.0 as a Spatial Web. I believe, it will undo the big centralisation of computing infrastructure and the data which happened in Web 2.0.

Dr Gavin Wood, Founder of Web3 Foundation and the Director of Parity Technologies defines Web 3.0 neatly in a few points as below. I recommend you see his conference presentation on “The Journey to Web3” .

• Web3 is an extensible framework for creating massively multi-user, economically strong applications - extensible overarching software framework in which software can run and interact with other pieces of software allowing large number of users to join in. These economically strong applications will allow users to transact value or create agreements between them.

• Web3 is a reliable, robust means of helping your applications to stay useful in adverse conditions - adverse conditions could be technological, environmental, or political conditions in which the application still does something when the conditions deteriorate.

• Web3 helps you prove yourself, your identity, your intention - for example, in an economic interaction between two users we trust the central authority with the trust certificates, HTTPS and take that the data as legitimate. This is a one directional, centralised way of doing things which will change in Web 3.0.

• Web3 is open, extensible and future-proof - it is not a closed shop, it is an open group of protocols which will allow developers to pick and choose the lower level of development tools.

• Web3 is a new way of architecting web applications - as a human being, we naturally think in a centralised way. Web 3.0 is a way of taking tools and solving problems in a decentralised way.

• Web3 helps remove the divide between users and service providers - in the current model of web, we have two different groups of people, the one who provides the service and the other who consumes the service and pays for it. In Web 3.0, there is no such distinction. The users become service providers and the service providers become users. The value capture will happen through a clear, agile and a bi-directional incentivisation frameworks, delivering an efficient and inclusive service market. A good example of this is Brave browser.

The Web 3.0 Stack

Thus, the building blocks of Web 3.0 are Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) like Blockchain, distributed data infrastructure, edge computing, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), further augmented by advanced networking (5G), geolocation technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) and sensors. 

Web3 will help us operate in an open, trustless and permissionless networks.

• Open: built from open source software, built by an open and accessible community of developers and executed in full view of the world;

• Trustless: meaning the network itself allows participants to interact publicly or privately without a trusted third party; and

• Permissionless: meaning both users and suppliers, can participate without authorisation from a governing body.

“The ultimate outcome of these new open, trustless and permissionless networks is the possibility to coordinate & incentivise the long tail of work, service, data and content providers that are the disenfranchised backdrop to many of the worlds most acute challenges such as health, food, finance and sustainability.”

Fabric Ventures

How Will Web 3.0 Impact Innovation in Agri-Food Supply Chain?

My previous article describes the agri-food supply chain and the data challenges it faces. To summarise, there are a number of actors in the supply chain - farmers or growers, agri-input manufacturers/suppliers, aggregators/intermediaries, retailers/food processors and consumers in the supply chain. Farmers are at the upstream end of the supply chain who produce the food and consumers are at the downstream end who consume the food either directly in a fresh form or in a processed form.

The simplified version of the supply chain is as below:

The Web3 stack can be a big enabler for:

• Breaking the siloed data in the supply chain;

• Interoperability; and

• Extracting insights from the data and delivering it to the relevant users in the supply chain.

Below are some of the specific Web3 technologies that will drive innovation in the agri-food sector:

• Decentralised data networks and distributed computing: 1Point5 team have been working on different aspects of the agricultural software for eight years now and network connectivity and questions on data ownership remains a challenge in both developed and emerging economies. Data I/O from the farms, packhouses, and remote hardware devices remains a bottleneck. I am particularly excited about distributed data/computing architecture using blockchains and decentralised applications (dApps) running on the blockchain. For example, Dfinity’s Internet Computer, a distributed public computing network and a smart contracts infrastructure will be game changing. This will re-define the way we build web applications. Today’s complex web stack will potentially be replaced with the Internet Computer. Most importantly, it will allow blazingly fast apps to be deployed closer to the user and let them not degrade the way they do in the centralised architecture. In addition to this, farmers can be a part of the data economy by trading their data. What if an aggregator/retailer buys a tonne of Potatoes and all of the data associated with that tonne of Potatoes by paying a separate price for it?

• InterPlanetary File System (IPFS): IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data (check IPFS 101). IPFS has a decentralised data model that allows aggregation, synchronisation, and distribution of massive amounts of data. Its content-addressed architecture provides verifiability of the data. This is a perfect use case for storing, moving, analysing and decision making using large satellite imageries and weather datasets.

• Smart contracts: Smart contract is a piece of code which runs on a blockchain (decentralised and distributed) when pre-determined conditions are met. These transactions are automatically run without any human involvement. Further, they are transparent, trackable and irreversible. This can be used for crop insurance payouts - for example, the smart contract could have rules based on temperature, rainfall, wind speed etc and when certain conditions are met, the payout could be triggered automatically to the grower. The same can happen when the produce or commodity is delivered. The intake Quality Control (QC) checks can log the quality parameters of the produce, the total weight and based on that the payment can be triggered automatically using smart contracts.

• Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): When I heard of NFT first, I thought this is another fad. However, after researching and thinking on it, I don’t think it is. Basically, non-fungible means something unique, something you can’t replicate or replace it with another. And a token is something which has a value. In short, this is a digital asset which is unique and not interchangeable. A field or a plot where a particular crop is grown in a particular season is unique. Let’s say if that crop was Grape then the punnet of grapes packed from a particular field is unique - grown in that field (unique), harvested at a certain time, transported by a certain truck/ship etc. So each field and/or punnet of grape can have a digital twin, a.k.a., a NFT which is attached to it - the only one in the entire world. This way the traceability and provenance is full proof. Most importantly if this was a combinable crop like Wheat or Oats, traceability becomes difficult as the grains are co-mingled in the final product. This problem can be addressed by creating a “synthetic NFT”. For example, a synthetic NFT constructed from the Wheat which came from two different fields which in turn have their own NFT.

And some of the key areas where these technologies will be used:

• Digital identity: creating a digital identity for growers, farms and fields with data privacy and control with growers.

• Payments and financing: agri-food supply chain is a multi-trillion industry and currently payments are often decoupled from the delivery of the produce or a commodity, often taking weeks to arrive. This could be changed by real-time payments using smart contracts. The transaction costs will be lower as well. In a same way, trade financing options in both developed and emerging economies will improve through some of the innovations happening in decentralised finance (DeFi) and also in centralised finance (CeFi) space like open banking API. I also think the launch of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) will accelerate that innovation further.

• Crop insurance using smart contracts: as mentioned above, parametric crop insurance with automated pay-offs when certain conditions are met will transform the crop insurance and insurance markets in general.

• Traceability using NFTs: NFTs will allow to create unique tokens attached to a farm, field and/or even a particular tree in an orchard or a particular livestock. Retailers, consumers demand traceability of the produce and through the smart use of NFTs this can be provided for fresh produce, combinable commodity as well as livestock.

• Sustainability, net zero, carbon footprint dashboards: There is no question that we need to change the way we grow the food and the way we supply it to the end consumers. This means we have to move to regenerative farming, make farms more biodiverse, learn to look after soils, optimise agri-inputs, and make the growers all over the world financially independent by providing them access to knowledges, skills and education. This also means that the data needs to be captured, measured and the supply chains are monitored. The distributed ledger technology will allow to capture the data in a tamperproof environment and provide full validity and visibility of such data. This will allow supply chain players to create and share the sustainability and carbon footprint dashboards in an impartial way. This information will be readily available to consumers by simply scanning the QR code or a bar code on the product or the fresh produce pack.

Concluding Thoughts

At 1Point5, we believe tomorrow’s food supply chains have to be efficient, transparent and sustainable. Web 3.0 technologies will play a crucial role in building the digital infrastructure to support this vision and make the supply chains more resilient.

There are few companies who have started implementing some of these technologies. For example, Agrichain, Agridigital, Arbol, BanQu, Dimuto, Ripe and Sahyadri Farms to name a few.

If you enjoyed this article, please follow @SachinAShende and support our efforts on making the agri-food supply chain sustainable by sharing this article.

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I am a big fan of Max MacGillivray and love the work he is doing at Beanstalk Global. Beanstalk’s mission is closely aligned with 1Point5’s and that binds us together. I always come away inspired after chatting with him.

One morning, while we were having a Zoom call, this idea came up to do a live chat on agri-tech solutions in the fresh produce sector. Max mentioned that there is so much happening in the agri-tech space so we need to discuss on different solutions and challenge ourselves on the benefits new tech is bringing to the industry.

The idea was to give the audience a steer on how the industry is using these software/hardware solutions, return on investment (RoI), game changing trends, grower engagement, what will be the role of consumers and how will they benefit from these innovations in the market. I wasn’t sure initially, however, the idea was fascinating. I am glad that this went live on LinkedIn on 18th May 2021.

It is a hour long video so I have divided the content on the timeline below:

• First 6 minutes: Introduction and is the industry changing fast enough?

• 6 to 15 minutes: Game changing trends in the sector.

• 17 to 23 minutes: Will new tech have a positive impact on the margins? Specific discussion on vertical farms.

• 24 to 30 minutes: How is agri-tech organised?

• 31 to 35 minutes: Competition, where is it coming from, how are the traditional players going to compete with the likes of InFarm?

• 35 to 39 minutes: Has digital agri-tech delivered?

• 40 to 46 minutes: What about grower engagement?

• 46 to 49 minutes: The role of consumers?

• 49 to 51 minutes: Who would benefit from traceability? How would consumers benefit from the technology?

• 51 minutes onwards: What does tomorrow’s supply chain look like?

Credit: Beanstalk Global for the video

If you enjoyed this video, please follow @SachinAShende and support our efforts on making the agri-food supply chain sustainable by subscribing “The Future of Agri-Food Supply Chain” newsletter:

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About Beanstalk Global:

Beanstalk has more than 20 years of involvement in the international Fresh food sector. Their main purpose is to promote, and encourage the consumption and education of the global fresh produce sectors to create good.  The bulk of Beanstalk’s profits are reinvested to create that success to promote fresh produce and the benefits of assisting to arrest climate change by adopting more fresh produce consumption.

In this article I will cover the data and decision making challenges faced by the businesses in the agri-food supply chain. Typically, these businesses are the farming enterprises, aggregators/intermediaries, and retailers/food processors in the supply chain. Farmers are at the upstream end of the supply chain who produce the food and we consumers are at the downstream end who consume the food either directly in a fresh form or in a processed form. There are other usages of the crops as well but for the sake of simplicity I am not covering it here. 

Let’s take a step back and look at our world. The climate change is real and food production systems have an impact on the environment. We at 1Point5, believe the world's food supply must become sustainable and sustainability encompasses both efficient use of natural resources and financial viability of the system. We also believe digital tools provide access to the information helping businesses take informed decisions and giving them the power to achieve sustainability goals.

Many businesses in the agri-food industry recognise the potential of data as a competitive advantage, driving innovation and generating business value. We also think that the businesses who are able to harness the opportunities that come with the digital transformation will be the winners of the future. 

However, many businesses struggle to extract true value from their data because:

• the data are often siloed; 

• the data is in different formats and unconnected across disparate systems; and

• The concept of “interoperability” across multiple software systems in agriculture is non-existent. 

The lack of end to end data integration across multiple systems, makes effective analysis from such data sources time consuming and expensive. 

In addition to the challenges in data analysis, the major retailers in the UK/Europe are committing to the Net Zero standard. The businesses having a software and data tooling will be in a position to show the carbon footprint of the supply chain transparently - to growers, retailers as well as the consumers. Others who do not have such tooling are going to struggle with it. 

So, what are the examples of the data silos. Let’s take a farmer use case - they typically use following:

• A farm recording software like Gatekeeper or MuddyBoots in the UK;

• Some software system provided by their tractor and/or combine manufacturer like JDLink;

• Weather forecasts or the weather station/sensor data feed like Davis or Pessl;

• Satellite or drone images and associated crop parameters;

• Precision Ag or decision support tools for yield prediction, pest and disease management like NIAB CUF model, Crop4Sight;

• On-line marketplace or a platform to market their produce;

• Financial/accounting data like Xero, QuickBooks; and

• Banking/fintech apps.

The enterprises in the supply chain have a dual challenge of data “integration” and “aggregation” across all of their farmers (suppliers). They typically have:

• On-farm data, aggregated from farm recording software systems for each of their supplier and their fields;

• Monitoring of their supply chain and risks - many a times this exists on paper or in Excel;

• Short term/medium/long term weather forecasts and historical weather datasets; 

• Financial and operational data from ERP systems like SAP, Oracle Financials or MS NAV;

• Quality data (in-field sampling as well as intake QC) - some of this can reside in the ERP system;

• Inventories - both field and store;

• Demand data from retailers/processors used to plan the loads or finalise contracts;

• Trading platform; 

• Logistics and transportation; and 

• BI tools - having access to business role specific Dashboards to take better, informed decisions. 

Agriculture is vast, heterogeneous and digitising the entire agri-food supply chain is a no mean task. These enterprises are still spending lot of time collecting this data using pen/paper and/or Excel, thus, making the procurement and grower management process administratively burdensome.

This article is purely to put out these challenges and emphasise the importance of a data integration so that enterprises can take informed decisions based on the data. 

In the summer of 1997, while I was a final year undergraduate student, I wrote an article for the college magazine. The scanned version of that article is at the end of this article.   

The vision for something like “KisanHub” was there since the publication of that article. To me it was my first attempt (and I was not the only one by the way) to showcase what the future of agriculture with computing looks like. However, at that time I realised that I was not qualified enough to execute on that vision. At the same time, the computing infrastructure and web was not evolved then (remember the early days of Client-Server applications and ASPs?). It took another 16 years for me to feel confident enough that this can be achieved. 

Thus, started the KisanHub journey in early 2013. 

There was a reason for naming the platform KisanHub - from day one, I thought this is the UK-India product. It was about creating a software product by bringing the best from both countries. It was about utilising agronomy, supply chain knowledge in the UK and couple that with the software talent in India. The real development of the business started when I met Giles at the Judge Business School’s Accelerate programme. 

In the last seven years, we have achieved a lot and at the same time there remains so much more to achieve. With this team, I have taken the company where I could and as the company is entering the scale up stage, I feel it needs a fresh, energetic leader who can take it to the next level.

The Decision

Having thought about this deeply over the last month or so and after discussing with the Board, I have stepped down as the CEO of KisanHub and stepped out of the company completely.

I am gung ho about KisanHub’s future, its vision, strategy and the market size it is addressing. With an experienced Senior team in place and a solid Board behind it, I feel the company is in good place and I am fully confident that the company will achieve new heights. I will continue to remain on the KisanHub Board as an Observer and be an ambassador for the company from outside.

I am proud of the team we have built. To me KisanHub’s differentiating factor is its people - I cannot thank the team enough for all the hard work they have put in building this company. I would like to thank the investors, both individual and institutional, who have backed the company from its early days. Our clients have played a big role in the development and this article will be incomplete if I do not thank them. Without their support KisanHub wouldn’t have been where it is today. 

Finally, I would like to thank the Senior team and the Board for helping me to transition out of my role in an orderly and painless way. The company has a bright future and I am sure it will flourish under the new leadership. 

Interested to hear more from me on agri-tech, digital transformation, enterprise software and startups?

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Welcome to The Future of Agri-Food Supply Chain by me, Sachin Shende. I am a technology entrepreneur, start-up advisor on a mission to optimise the agri-food supply chain and make it sustainable using digital tools.

I co-founded and built the agri-tech startup, KisanHub. In April 2021, I started 1Point5 Technologies, a strategic consulting firm and a software solution provider to:

• Help businesses accelerate the digital transformation; 

• Help businesses improve efficiency; and 

• Make the food supply chains fully transparent and sustainable.

I have learnt things by doing and listening to other talented entrepreneurs. Have a well rounded experience in building and scaling a start-up. My previous background is in software engineering and have conceptualised and built complex software platforms, spent a number of years in data engineering, and software products. Have built technology and business teams, raised money from institutional and high net worth investors,  developed/managed commercial relationships and sales.

I understand the complexities of the technology implementation, data silos in the agri-food supply chains, software-hardware integration and challenges in using the data to surface insights for the decision making process to improve business margins. 

Have made tons of mistakes in scaling the technology startup. I hope to share those valuable lessons here with other like minded people.

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