Post 1 draft

This is the first in a series of blog posts about Digital Green’s work to support Digital Farmer Networks. We are sharing our journey in the spirit of engaging with collaborators and critics who will help sharpen our thinking so that we can better achieve our mission to empower smallholder farmers.

In this post we will set context and introduce the idea of Digital Farmer Networks.

Context

Increasing digitization and datafication is a reality of our world. While this trend offers tremendous promise for agriculture and food system efficiency, recent history points to serious pitfalls including exclusion of vulnerable populations, returns to scale which drive concentration of power and wealth, and widening inequality.

The question Digital Green has been grappling with is how can we position smallholder farmers to thrive as markets become increasingly open and digitized and where climate change heightens volatility in an already risky domain. There are a few key things we believe:

• Leverage the power of aggregation: While small plots can be quite productive and sustainable, diseconomies of scale create significant challenges when it comes to of accessing inputs, markets, and credit. Cooperatives have a rich history of success in agriculture globally and there is tremendous momentum behind the Farmer Producer Organization push in India (though still lots more to do!). We plan to increasingly focus our efforts on working with groups of farmers working together to overcome their individual structural challenges.

• Decentralization and Open Access: Centralized platforms accrue lots of power, function as gatekeepers and in times of stress, as evidenced during the pandemic, lack resilience and thereby heighten risk. Digital Green does not want to become such a gatekeeper ourselves and thus the all the code we write and and content we create is open and freely available as Digital Public Goods and we are exploring the potential of Web3 technologies to further enshrine this important tenant.

• Build local capacity: Our work over the past decade plus with front-line extension workers has validated that when equipped with context appropriate tools and training, communities can mobilize in amazing ways. It is solutions which emerge from local problem solvers who are responsive to local context that are ultimately sustainable.

DFN…What is that?

The world we would like to see and contribute towards building is one where farmer organizations have the tools, capacity and agency to generate and manage their own data and leverage it to benefit their members.

We describe this vision as Digital Farmer Networks, or “DFN”

This paradigm stands in contrast to the current paradigm where a few large agribusiness and technology companies are poised to dominate.

To arrive at such place, farmer organizations need a lot of support.

Digital Green hopes to play some small role in providing this support and recognizes that we are one among a coalition of partners including central, state and local governments, established agribusiness companies and startups, NGOs and capital providers; from philanthropic donors to multi-laterals to local banks.

How do we get started?

Farmer organizations are typically fledgling enterprises facing pressing issues like accessing quality inputs and marketing their produce. Seemingly abstract and theoretical concepts like data ownership and sovereignty are not top of mind. But that doesn’t mean they are not important!

To build some momentum towards realizing the DFN vision, its essential to address the urgent issues facing farmer organizations while building the foundation to achieve that longer-term outcome.

Over the past year Digital Green has worked closely with farmer organizations at various levels of maturity and across geographies and commodities to understand their ambitions and challenges. There are a number of recurring and thorny headline challenges: poor market connectivity, low productivity, lack of finance for procuring quality inputs or making investments, lack of professional management experience.

Farmer organizations need to see examples where digitization and data sharing deliver relatively quick and impactful responses to these critical challenges in order to build momentum and mindshare among farmer members.

In our next post, we will share an emerging hypothesis for an “entry point” which we believe can deliver on this ambition.