How Your Contract Farming Company Can Flourish Into a Profitable Business
Contract farming or outgrower management ventures have been a critical differentiator in the advancement of modern agriculture. The significant progress of contract farming in recent years is indicative of the remarkable growth in the potential of smallholder farmers. Outgrower management companies are playing their part in revolutionising agriculture by upskilling farmers and providing them with better crop prices. By taking a few more essential measures, these organisations can successfully transform and grow into thriving businesses.
With a tech-driven farm management platform, contract farming companies can simplify the administrative burden associated with multiple farmers and farm locations. Efficiently managing the farm inputs can also help you have better control over and optimise the farm operations.
Conducting knowledge and skills transfer sessions is important to help smallholders employ effective practices on their farms. By precisely handling the crop procurement process, contract farming companies can even evaluate if the procured crops meet the desired quality standards. Following are a few solutions that your contract farming company can cash in on to excel and bring more profits for your business.
Streamline Administration With a Digital ERP Platform
Administering multiple farmers and taking care of the contractual agreements can be quite arduous. Contract farming companies need to ensure that the legal frameworks involved in these partnerships are accurate and error-free. This is necessary so as to avoid any misunderstandings or manipulation by the partner farmers.
Contract farming businesses need to first begin with registering farmers and creating a complete portfolio of their information. This involves collecting details pertaining to their farms, plot size, crop type, and plot history. Instead, you can adhere to agriculture ERP software platforms in order to automate these tedious procedures.
Digital ERP platforms can help in seamlessly creating, updating and managing the contracts based on farmer profiles. Maintaining a record of inputs and credits provided as well as keeping track of crops procured can also be simplified with this ERP software. This can reduce critical administrative burdens and enable contract farming companies to focus on their core objectives.
Manage Inputs Precisely With Next-gen Farm Management Platform
Identifying the requirement of inputs for a specific farm is an important factor that contract farming companies need to accurately deal with. This is pertinent so as to provide farmers with good quality inputs that are affordable and available in sufficient quantities. However, with multiple crops and farmers to handle, input management can be a massive concern for contract farming businesses.
A highly efficient farm management platform can be helpful in managing the inputs for farms across multiple locations. This can ensure the availability of adequate inputs at a farm to successfully meet the specified quality and quantity of crop production.
After partnering with a farmer, outgrower management companies can estimate the seed and fertilizer requirements for every farm location precisely. Similarly, the need for spraying equipment, irrigation pumps, and other farm machinery can also be determined. Post these estimations, inputs in adequate quantities can be supplied to the farmer to expedite the production process.
Transfer Technical and Managerial Skills to Smallholder Farmers
In today’s dynamic agricultural landscape, adapting to modern solutions has become imperative for every stakeholder involved in agriculture. However, lack of appropriate technical and managerial skills deprives most smallholder farmers of these effective solutions. Consequently, smallholder farmers end up relying on inadequate information or knowledge, which ultimately affects the quality of their crop outcomes.
Outgrower management companies can provide smallholders with essential skills to upscale their agricultural efforts. They can offer informative training programs to educate smallholders about the fundamentals of efficient technology use. Similarly, contract farming businesses can also impart crucial knowledge to ensure that farmers are well-versed in farm management.
The transfer of skills can augur well for farm planning, crop scheduling, harvest management, farm activity recording, and other farm management operations. This can play a pivotal role in enabling smallholders to enhance their farm operations. Introducing farmers to ERP software and farm management apps can also bridge the gap between farmers and technology, thereby scaling up agricultural productivity effectively.
Optimise Crop Procurement Procedures for Better Business Outcomes
The rising competitive pressures are compelling outgrower management businesses to streamline the crop procurement operations post production. This is important so as to find out if the specified amount of crop produce is actually received from the partner farmers. It also helps in assessing the standard of the produce and determining if it meets the quality standards as per the agreement.
Optimising crop procurement processes can enable contract farming companies to record all pertinent information about crops that have been procured. This includes details about the crop’s weight, quality standards, quantity as well as prices.
A well-defined procurement process can reinforce the potential of outgrower management businesses by helping them to accurately assess various parameters of procured crops. This can further assist contract farming businesses to evaluate farmer profiles and provide necessary suggestions to improve their farming practices. Thus, an optimised crop procurement process can help contract farming companies to foster synergies with the partner farmers for better business outcomes.
Many agribusinesses today grapple to deal with their contract farming projects. FarmERP’s contract farming pack helps ease their concerns by seamlessly managing farm procurement, production, harvest, and post-production. Know how you can gain control over your agri-supply chains and grow into a profit-generating contract farming company. Talk to us at FarmERP in order to learn more about the key offerings of our contract farming pack.