Entry Points

We are looking for an entry point where an initial group of farmers contributes their data and sees some relatively quick and tangible value from doing so. Ideally, this encourages farmers to share more data and invite peers to join the network.

More data in the network will attract other stakeholders which makes the network more valuable for its farmer contributors/owners and encourages further adoption (new users who are in turn sharing more data), thus putting the flywheel in motion.

This diagram is a nice conceptual frame for what we want to see happen.

Open

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So what are some potential entry points?

We can put together a simple framework to help us prioritize between the ideas below. Some considerations:

• Ability and cost to collect credible / accurate data at scale

• Utility of the data to others. If we aim to help farmers monetize this information, it eventually needs to be valued by stakeholders with a willingness / ability to pay. We could consider a farmer as subscriber model but that introduce high barriers to entry so useful to think about this. Eg, market intel reports to offtake buyers and input companies.

• Alignment with an existing commitments

• Scale up Kisan Diary Enterprise which is used by ~26 FPOs and ~18,000 farmers (Nov 30, see latest stats here). Current focus is farmer group productivity / transparency by helping FPOs aggregate information about their members and coordinate with them on input purchases and offtake marketing. This data can be shared with prospective buyers and leveraged serve as the rails for additional member services like payments, voting, disseminating advisories, etc.

  • In general, we should leverage our NRLM / SRML partnerships to access FPOs as it seems they are increasingly mobilizing SHGs in producer groups (ie, its not just NABARD and SFAC). Initiatives like FDRVC (Tata Trusts and NRLM) and APMAS Vision 2030 are super aligned and don’t have an explicit focus on data ownership which potentially gives us a good entry point and differentiated value prop.

• In FRAME, we will be working with VRPs to build basic farmer diaries (focus on agronomic practices and plot location / size). Launch an inter-group competition with a cash prize for farmers that most comprehensively populate their wallet (or that have the highest adoption rate of practices).

• Leverage Coco data to understand what crops farmers are growing and what practices they are following (or have exposure to). Enable farmers to “opt-in” to share this data and receive targeted advisory messages in exchange. Use this as a hook to build diaries of agronomic practices.

• Revisit Kisan Diary and either invest in marketing the existing solution (digital ledger) or extend to adjacencies like crowdsourced offtake prices at local mandis or input price / performance comparisons.

• Input price and performance benchmarking

• Aggregate core data (ID, land record, crops grown, etc.) to avail of government welfare programs (PM Kisan, PMFBY). Think an on-ramp a service like Haqdarshak

• In EMircha, farmers are getting quality reports from AgNext; this report could be stored in their data wallet and advisories could be tailored based on the assessment. Video content that addresses various aspects of the quality grade (eg, your color was B grade and that can be addressed through different storage techniques) can be shared with farmers and basic profile + yield information could be shared (with farmer consent) with various e-commerce portals (private and government) to aid in market access.

• An online community focused on a specific topic (soil health or water management) that aggregates a bunch of resources and eventually decision support tools on the topic, encourages sharing from technical experts and farmers about how to practically adopt relevant practices. Look to analogs like OpenTEAM in the US and to some extent WeFarm (but with a more concentrated focus).