Top 5 Agritech Startups empowering Indian farmers
28 April 2022, New Delhi: Over the last 50 years, the agriculture industry has undergone significant changes. Farm equipment has grown in size, speed, and productivity as a result of technological advancements, allowing for more efficient cultivation of land.
Seed, irrigation, and fertilizers have all improved with research & technology over time, allowing farmers to enhance harvests. Agriculture is now in the midst of yet another transformation, with data and connection at its core. Artificial intelligence, analytics, linked sensors, and other developing technologies have the potential to boost yields, enhance water and other input efficiency, and improve sustainability and resilience in crop and animal husbandry.
Here are a few companies that are making a difference.
- Aqgromalin
Aqgromalin is one of the fastest-growing farm diversification companies that aims to supplement the income of small landholding farmers through ready to implement micro-farms. Backed by technology, the full-stack company offers innovative growth ideas to farmers in the areas of – Agriculture, Aquaculture, Animal Husbandry, and Insect farming. The company adopts a conventional approach that goes beyond the traditional agriculture infrastructure to make the practices affordable and accessible to farmers.
Aqgromalin integrates new-age technologies like Artificial Intelligence and IoT to help the farmers sustain in a multifunctional economy and strict market reforms. Its ready to implement micro-farms can be started in addition to the existing operations in the crop, with minimum space and labor requirement. The micro-farm can be managed by the farmers’ family that adds to household income. Through the micro-farm set-up, a few farmers have recorded an increase by 100 % in their income.
- Samhitha
Samhitha Crop Care Clinics is pioneering the precision farming advisory in India, aiming to empower farmers to adopt sustainable practices to improve crop production and farmer’s profitability. Incepted in 2021, the start-up envisions to help farmers grow more and grow healthy produce through sustainable practices. By harnessing a hybrid framework of data, digital, and crop expertise, Samhitha ensures the intensification of crop production and productivity. The team of Crop Doctors provide precision advisory at the individual tree level by connecting data points captured from digital-tagged trees, aerial scans using drones, wireless sensors, and regular field monitoring.
The AgriTech start-up has a one-of-a-kind Digital Tree Health Audit System (DTHAS) that deploys home-made telemetry devices on the fields to capture soil moisture, temperature and pH, weather and wind speed and direction. Their robust team of field assistants also capture information about pests and diseases for each tree in the farm through regular field visits. The information captured from below the ground, on the ground, and above the ground gets centrally processed, where expert agronomists analyze the trends and holistic data to provide recommendations to the farmers. A data-driven audit helps Crop Doctors to give the farmers precision advisory for each tree on Samhitha’s Citron mobile app.
- Fasal
Fasal, founded by Shailendra Tiwari and Ananda Verma, aids farmers with its AI-powered platform, which collects data on growing conditions in real time from on-farm sensors and sends farm-specific, crop-specific warnings to farmers via mobile in their local languages. Fasal is a company that thrives on new ideas. They’re also working to make precision agriculture more accessible.
- DeHaat
DeHaat is one of the fastest-growing Agritech start-ups in India, offering end-to-end solutions and services to farmers. They currently have 265,000 farmers in their service network in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha, with a goal of serving five million farmers by 2024. Farmers can get a one-stop shop for information on what crops to plant, how to grow them, and where to sell them all under one roof at a reasonable price.
- Crofarm
Crofarm is a farm-to-business supply chain startup launched in 2016 by former Grofers executives. Crofarm procures fresh fruits and vegetables directly from farmers and distributes them to both online and offline shops. Currently, their network includes over 5,000 merchants and 10,000 farmers. Crofarm makes its buying decisions using an AI-based demand prediction system that analyses previous data. The technology also assists in inventory tracking by shelf life, which provides an alarm when a product is approaching its expiration date. Crofarm also employs WhatsApp-based CRM tools to manage consumer relations.
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