In India Agriculture is $370 billon sector with an export of $39 billion worth of agricultural products in 2013, hence the 7th largest agriculture exporter. World has around 50,000 edible plants and among them only 3 of them is staple food i.e. wheat, rice and maize. India has diversity of cultivated plants that includes banana, bean, chick-pea, citrus, cucumber, eggplant, mango, mustard, rice, sugar cane. Rice and /wheat being the staple food of India it takes on an average of 5 months to produce from raw to finished goods with required diverse temperature. India is the world’s largest producer of many fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, jute and world’s major food staples as per 2010 FAO world agriculture statistics. This has paved a way for many agro start-ups in the country.
Entrepreneurs in agro start-ups can bring in change
From the time back in Indus valley civilization era we are into agriculture and even before that into some parts of South India. India is the second largest country word wide in farm output and still it’s the broadest economy sector in overall socio-economic fabric of India. Despite these many achievements 5,657 farmers committed suicide in 2014, According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) which clearly means still there is need to improve productivity and take millions out of poverty though technology and to achieve this there are many entrepreneurs looking out offices in countryside to bring a change.
Agro start-ups have unique solutions for supporting cultivation
A huge number of investors are just ignorant towards agriculture where start-up boom helps farmer as well as the investors to pay attention towards agriculture. A farmer Balu Mhaske, in Yevati village of Maharashtra, has been growing marigold flowers in his 10 acres from past 15 years, Balu said he used to sell 1 kg flowers for Rs. 20 After he got solar-powered cold-storage unit to keep his flowers he started selling the same flowers for Rupees 100 during Diwali times. This unit has been developed by an agro start-up which helps farmers and transform their lives and India’s agriculture system.
Aim is to increase the revenue with farmers
The initial stage of agriculture based start-up is to gain trust of the farmers, especially the small farmers as it includes demos but when the benefits are known to all, it becomes easy. The major factors impacting are water, manpower and electricity where technology act as a great help. Ycook, an agro start-up, sells processed food and trains farmers to grow and handle the post-harvest. One of the product grown is American Sweet Corn which has its shelf-life of 12 months without preservatives, Gayathri Swahar co-founder of Ycook says this has reduced the post-harvest cost by 30%. She also added their mission is to let each farmer make a revenue of 1 lakh per acre annually. The main focus is to lower the cost thereby increasing the revenue.
Star-ups have started gaining investors’ attention
Another major area of concern is climatic condition. Flybird Agri Innovations, Bangalore based agricultural start-up places sensors in the soil to measure the moisture content so that it can help during the drought situations as a result to optimise irrigation. Flybird Agri got funds from Dell Foundation and also supported by Villgro a social enterprise incubator.
Funding is the area of major concern towards the sector as the investors are negligent towards it and majority don’t understand agriculture. In 2015, the funding was declined to $56 million in 2015 from $123 million in 2014 as per the data from Tracxn which is the activity tracking platform of start-ups. In the year 2015 up to $6 billion was invested in tech start-ups but among agro start-ups only 20 of them raised money which is less than even 1% of total. The major concern for a country like India could be that there are not many start-ups in the agriculture industry however, with more growth of start-up industry, there will be more innovations targeted towards agriculture.