The agricultural industry significantly contributes to the country’s GDP and has been on a constant upsurge. Amidst the evolution of the agriculture sector, the country is also witnessing the rise in the number of agritech startups that are deploying their innovative offerings to help the farmers in the best possible way. Agritech firms, via their developments, are aiding the underlined farmers and providing solutions to overcome India’s agricultural difficulties.
India’s agritech firms have been in the forefront of disrupting and transforming the industry at all stages of the value chain. This includes combining farm inputs with physical infrastructure for greater price certainty, conducting predictive analysis to improve yields, enabling farm management and precision agriculture, eliminating inefficiencies in supply change, and assisting farmers in obtaining credit and crop insurance.
Here are some Agritech startups that are accelerating growth of Agriculture in India
Samhitha Crop Care clinics
Samhitha Crop Care Clinics is pioneering the precision farming advisory in India, aiming to empower farmers to adopt sustainable practices to improve crop production and farmer’s profitability. Incepted in 2021 by Jagan Chitiprolu, Dr. Shyamsudar Reddy, and Kalyan Enjamoori, the start-up envisions to help farmers grow more and grow healthy produce through a unique blend of data, technology, and crop expertise. By harnessing a hybrid framework of data, digital, and crop expertise, Samhitha ensures the intensification of crop production and productivity. The team of Crop Doctors provide precision advisory at the individual tree level by connecting data points captured from digitally-tagged trees, aerial scans using drones, telemetry devices, and regular field monitoring.
The AgriTech start-up has a one-of-a-kind Digital Tree Health Audit System (DTHAS) that deploys home-made telemetry devices on the fields to capture soil moisture, temperature and pH, weather and wind speed and direction. Their robust team of field assistants also capture information about pests and diseases for each tree in the farm through regular field visits. The information captured from below the ground, on the ground, and above the ground gets centrally processed, where expert agronomists analyze the trends and holistic data to provide recommendations to the farmers. A data-driven audit helps Crop Doctors to give the farmers precision advisory for each tree on Samhitha’s Citron mobile app.
Fasal
Fasal, founded by Shailendra Tiwari and Ananda Verma, aids farmers with its AI-powered platform, which collects data on growing conditions in real time from on-farm sensors and sends farm-specific, crop-specific warnings to farmers via mobile in their local languages. Fasal is a company that thrives on new ideas. They’re also working to make precision agriculture more accessible.
DeHaat
DeHaat is one of the fastest-growing Agritech start-ups in India, offering end-to-end solutions and services to farmers. They currently have 265,000 farmers in their service network in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha, with a goal of serving five million farmers by 2024. Farmers can get a one-stop shop for information on what crops to plant, how to grow them, and where to sell them all under one roof at a reasonable price.
Crofarm
Crofarm is a farm-to-business supply chain startup launched in 2016 by former Grofers executives. Crofarm procures fresh fruits and vegetables directly from farmers and distributes them to both online and offline shops. Currently, their network includes over 5,000 merchants and 10,000 farmers. Crofarm makes its buying decisions using an AI-based demand prediction system that analyses previous data. The technology also assists in inventory tracking by shelf life, which provides an alarm when a product is approaching its expiration date. Crofarm also employs WhatsApp-based CRM tools to manage consumer relations.
