Farming 100 Years and Beyond: Sugarcane

India's First Smart Digital Programme for Sugarcane Farming

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?

A sugarcane field in the rich black soils of the Krishna River basin (Maharashtra, India)

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

To address this need, Gannamaster Agro Industries and FarmSetu Technologies, jointly launched India’s first complete digital programme for sugarcane farmers.

This end-to-end digital programme is implemented using FarmSetu’s Supply Chain Stack.

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.

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.

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: