FarmSetu Supply Chain Stack
The story so far
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
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.
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.
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.
We are keen to speak with like-minded software and hardware companies providing agri and wider enterprise solutions.