Facilitating Sustainable Rice Production
over FarmERP Platform in Vietnam
FarmERP helps a leading AgriFoods brand to incorporate sustainable rice farming practices among its stakeholders and suit standard parameters set by a Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP). FarmERP equipped over 1000 smallholder farmer partners of the company with its high-tech farm management platform with partially customized features to enhance their sustainable farming processes and mitigate the carbon footprint of Vietnam’s rice production industry.
Introduction
Vietnam is a country with gargantuan competitive advantage in the field of rice production, where more than 80% of its arable land is under rice cultivation. The country is leading as the top exporter of rice, as it recorded the production of over 28 million tons of rice in 2015. However, rice farmers in the country are not only vulnerabile to the impacts of climate change, but are also contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, posing danger to the environment as well as people.
The leading Agrifood group collaborated with FarmERP to support sustainable rice production practices in Vietnam through our best-in-industry IT-based farm management tool. The company wants to incorporate the sustainable agriculture standards set by Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) in order to implement its pro-environment approach in Vietnam’s rice production industry.
FarmERP has always aligned its strategies to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. Through FarmERP’s next-generation farm management software platform, the leading Agrifood group is aiming to monitor their progress of incorporating SRP standards in rice production in Vietnam.
Challenge
- Manual Processes Followed for Field data keeping : Before the implementation of FarmERP’s farm management software, all the important data related to farming activities was collected through manual processes. In the digital era, maintaining accuracy in data entry is absolutely vital in order to ensure appropriate decision making. However, manual data entry by farmers made it difficult to monitor the progress of sustainable rice cultivation.
- Data Collected in Hardbound Registers and Excel Sheets: Due to low awareness and unavailability of tech-driven tools of data collection and acquisition, most of the information was stored either in hardcopy or excel sheets. This made a significant impact on the speed as well as accuracy of compilation of data, which ultimately hampered the success rate of sustainable farming practices.
- Scattered Data across Various Sources: As a result of various sources of incoming data, the project stakeholders could not analyze and process the information in a way that could help the business achieve its sustainability goals. Scattered data also resulted in repetition of information, which again takes a toll on efficiency and productivity of operations. Because of unavailability of real time data, farmers were not able to get just in time advice. Whereas project officers could not monitor real-time progress, which consequently created many roadblocks in its aim of incorporating SRP standard in Vietnam’s rice cultivation operations.
Approach
Our team of experts and executives surveyed and studied the geographical and climatic conditions, as well as rice production practices followed in Vietnam.
- During our field visit, we realised an important factor that could be a significant barrier in implementing our IT-based tool for sustainable rice production in Vietnam, i.e. the language. Thereby, we decided to translate FarmERP’s agriculture management platform in Vietnamese and make it available on both web and mobile platforms.
- We analyzed SRP’s standards for sustainable rice cultivation and compared those with features included in FarmERP’s farm management software to better analyze the gaps between expectations and existing tools that the software offered. Based on this gap analysis, we modified FarmERP to realize ‘Internal Control System’ to support farmers in implementing the SRP Standard, measuring results, and identifying measures for continuous improvement.
- We started working with over 1000 smallholder farmers who are partners of two leading AgriFoods companies helping them to grow rice sustainably with the help of our farm management platform.
- The next step was to train the staff including field supervisors and some farmers, to efficiently use all the features included in FarmERP’s agriculture management tool and track their growth towards sustainable rice cultivation.
Benefits
FarmERP did focus on SRP Standard which comprises 41 requirements structured under eight themes. We also found ways to enable ICS over our farm management platform.
On implementing this next-generation, IT-driven farm management tool, the client could –
- Ensure real-time monitoring of sustainable rice cultivation activities across all fields
- Get timely advisory and insightful recommendations on bolstering the progress of meeting the necessary requirements as per SRP standard
- Avail detailed deviation reports and meticulously tracked progress on sustainable rice cultivation for each and every farmer
- Leverage FarmERP’s extensive dashboard that shows village-wise SRP progress, enabling decision makers to modify their strategies to attain expected results
- Have complete control over sustainable rice cultivation practices followed across various villages through a single farm management software
- Scale up sustainable rice production activities in Vietnam and partner with more stakeholders under this project
Let’s Connect
FarmERP is the very super-brain you need to improve your agribusiness in terms of productivity as well as profitability. We offer best-in-industry farm management support for agribusinesses ranging from farms & plantations contract farmers, exporters & packhouses, to governing bodies and financial institutions.