Digitalisation of FPCs – Techpowering Agriculture to Strengthen Farmer Potential
Farmer producer companies (FPCs) play a crucial role in enabling farmers to be more organized and effectively strengthen their bargaining power. However, without digitalisation of FPCs, enhancing the potential and profits of small farmers can be a massive challenge. With adequate technical support, FPCs can break down barriers in the provision of efficient farm management services. Digitalisation of FPCs is thus, extremely necessary to bolster the socio-economic status of farmers.
The absence of optimal infrastructure and lack of technical expertise are inhibiting farmer producer companies and farmer producer orgnaizations from supporting the farm management efforts of smallholders. This can also introduce discrepancies or inaccuracies in providing access to credit for farmers. Without effective digital solutions, FPCs might also struggle to enhance the credibility of farmers for better global opportunities.
Digitalisation of FPCs can play a vital role in improving farmers’ market opportunities and provide competitive prices for their produce. It can assist FPCs in ensuring the financial stability of farmers’ business with easier access to financial services. The intervention of advanced technologies can also help FPCs and FPOs in enhancing the post-harvest management capabilities of farmers.
Supporting FPC Functions With Optimal Management Expertise
FPCs play a major role in enhancing crop productivity and profitability for farmers with cost-effective farm management techniques. However, with rising climate change events and higher production costs, ensuring productivity growth in a sustainable manner is becoming extremely challenging. Lack of adequate management expertise is depriving FPCs of a professional perspective and ultimately affecting their outcomes.
The incorporation of efficient technologies has helped FPCs in solving challenges related to market linkages, credit accessibility, and input management. Digitalisation of FPCs can provide farmers with advanced farm planning and management techniques to ensure self-sustainability and profitability. It can help in providing farmers with adequate farming knowledge and also make them aware of the right crop protection practices.
Advanced technology solutions can strengthen the capabilities of FPCs in managing farm functions and improving procurement, logistics, and price negotiations for farmers. It can also pave the way for the better management of man and machinery along with effective quality control measures. Digitalisation of FPCs can thus help FPCs in ensuring more sustainable and productive farm management for the farmers.
Boost Farm Finance Functions with Effective Tech-integration
One of the significant needs of smallholder farmers today is to have better access to credit in order to improve their income. However, without proper financial support, managing operational costs, and ensuring optimal farm maintenance can be a huge challenge for farmers. Inadequate and delayed credit access can deprive farmers of good quality inputs and in turn, affect their crop productivity.
The digitalisation of FPCs can make accessing credit and other financial services related to risk mitigation a lot simpler for farmers. Leveraging digital solutions can help FPCs in making data-driven lending decisions to optimise their offerings for the smallholders. Optimal technological intervention can also ensure that the delivery of credit to the farmers is faster and hassle-free.
With digitalisation of FPCs, keeping track of farm costs, analysing farmers’ expenses and other agri accounting operations can become more efficient. This can help them provide farmers with sufficient credit to fulfill all their needs. This way, digitalisation of FPCs can overcome the barriers of providing financial services to smallholders and ensure better market opportunities for them.
Promote Climate-smart Agriculture With Powerful Digital Solutions
With high-dependence on climatic conditions, farming can be an extremely risky affair. Inadequate rainfall could lead to huge losses for farmers. Droughts or insufficient rains can increase the cost of irrigation. Whereas, above-normal monsoons could lead to a rise in the costs of inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, as well as farm equipment.
With digitalisation, FPCs can provide farmers with accurate weather forecasts to carry out climate-smart agricultural practices. IoT-based tools can help FPCs in providing accurate farm-specific advisory services to farmers for more informed farm management. This can empower farmers to apply fertilizers and chemicals in the most appropriate quantities and exactly when required.
Efficient digital modules can also help FPCs in enabling the sharing of farm equipment for the farmers. This will not only act as an effective remedy against climate uncertainties but also reduce farmers’ input costs considerably. This way, digitalisation of FPCs can help farmers in practicing climate-smart agriculture and ensure more fruitful harvests for them.
Ensure Resilient Post-harvest Supply Chains with Traceability
As food supply chains are becoming more complex and global in scope, the significance of traceability is also growing rapidly. The growing food safety concerns have made it essential to maintain a proper value chain ranging from production to consumption. It has also highlighted the need for a robust system to respond promptly in the event of recalls.
Digitalisation of FPCs can ensure complete traceability across the supply chain to reduce any wastage or avoid food safety lapses. This helps FPCs in enabling farmers to remotely track their produce from farm to shelf. It also provisions the monitoring of various post-harvest processes such as grading, cleaning, sorting, and packaging. With these benefits, farmers are empowered to provide safe and good-quality agriproducts to consumers which ultimately generates higher profits for them.
Digitalisation of FPCs can help farmers to label every agriproduct with a unique QR code. This can help their consumers to trace back the entire journey of the agriproduct including farmer details and crop cultivation processes. This helps farmers in gaining the confidence of consumers and thereby, ensures better market opportunities and prices for their produce.
FarmERP’s farm management system has been taking sincere efforts to enhance the potential of FPCs and FPOs. By aiding the digitalisation of FPCs, we have helped in ensuring more profitable and productive business frameworks for them. Contact us to know more about how our agritech solutions can help you in delivering maximum value by improving the global opportunities of smallholder farmers.