Information Age Agriculture

Though I may have become a part of today’s services sector boom, my roots are in farming. Agriculture has been the main profession of my family hailing from a one of economically backward regions of India, Udgir, in Latur district. My exposure to a life of an average farmer came from my stay in Udgir during my high schooling. I have seen extreme variances in the lifestyle of a farmer and other professions in rural Maharashtra. I have seen farmers sell their crops at pennies and depend on loan sharks for survival. Ironically the economically poor strata of the society forms the major voting bank for various political parties, but has never gained any benefit from the political process. My quest to find the root cause continues with my exposure to the big picture and to experts from this area. Here I have tried formulating a solution for our farmers. This is a conceptual draft and would need a very detailed analysis on every aspect before even thinking of an implementation plan.

Farming as an industry in highly populous developing nations is very fragmented and disorganized making it the most inefficient industry in these nations. This business idea is primarily for but not limited to the part of world with farmers owning very small pieces of land (preventing them from enjoying the benefits of economies of scale) and developing an information network among the farmers connecting them to the marketplace. Initial capital will be required to establish an infrastructure and create information based services for farmers to assist them in decision making related to operating a farm and selling their produce to the market.

This is a service that will help the farmers to form small cells based on geographic location and have a network of such cells across the region. This network will have an access to the important market information and will provide the farmers with important services that will help them in deciding on what to produce and how much to produce with useful forecasts developed by the system thus maintaining the supply and demand balance for the farming sector. The service will also attempt to eliminate the need of a middleman in the transaction and thus providing an economic benefit to the producers and consumers. The service will be highly scalable and can be easily integrated with other services and information that is helpful to the farmers. The service can also be extended to the derivatives market providing the farmers a protection from the downslide of the prices.

The main customers will be farmers across the region, creating their own marketplace. The Service will be web based with free access to the basic set and will be nominally charged for additional services. Advertisements will be major source of revenue. The website will have free material on educating farmers with latest techniques of farming. The website will have an extension service for livestock management as well. The greatest benefit farmers will gain is easy access to market and being able to keep the supply and demand in balance thus avoiding the currently usual surplus or deficit of a produce, creating huge loss to the farmers and consumers.

Much of the information used to build the system will be collected from the local universities and the related government agencies. The information will be intelligently tackled using a web based application framework. This market has constantly been a neglected market for long due to factors like initial investment, power of middleman and low marginal profits. The information age specifically the web based solution provides an excellent answer to this problem and thus one who takes the lead will have advantage. Once the brand name has been established it would be tough for the competitors to cut through this business model. Association and ties with the non-profit organizations in the region to promote the system would also be a key in capturing a greater market share.

Information sources will be the main suppliers for this business. The suppliers here are the related government agencies and the universities. The information required is mostly public information and in case any licensed information is required it will not be difficult to get given the nature of the service. The farmers will be encouraged to form cells and own a computer to access the services in case individual ownership of computers is not possible. Ties with computer manufacturers will be helpful in customizing the computers to the requirements of the farming industry.

The main cost will be developing the system and collecting the data from the different sources. The system will be developed in different stages of increasing scope. Initially limited services will be made available and as revenue starts building additional services will be developed and provided, keeping into consideration the overall profitability of the project. Given a world wide market in developing countries like Chine, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, India and other nations the break-even should be achieved at a good pace.

Small farmers have been one of most neglected business class. The system is not limited to small scale farmers but it will immensely improve the economic conditions of these farmers giving them access to the capital through intelligent decisions using information, and thus raising the standard of living of this class of society. This would be a capitalist approach toward improving the living conditions of this class of people that forms a huge proportion of the developing nations.

My ultimate goal is to achieve a seamless integration of information about the entire world reducing the inefficiencies due to fragmented access or no access to information that can be used to make intelligent decisions. This project is part of this goal in to provide direct economic benefit to one of poorer classes of the society.