“India needs smart farming and better crop management to develop sustainable agriculture”.
Focus Agritech had an opportunity to interact with Ms. Garima who is the CEO of AgroCorp India. She has 14 + years of experience at commodity trading, supply chain management and risk management. In her current role at Agrocorp India she is providing strategic direction to build a long-term sustainable business, and ensuring Indian origination and operations efficiently. Ms. Garima Jain is an Alumni of prestigious B School- Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT, New Delhi) and has completed senior leadership program from Harvard Business School.
Focus Agritech:
The current pandemic and lock down has put lots of stress on agriculture industries and their supply chain networks. How has AgroCorp India dealt with this unforeseen challenge and managed business continuity and smooth operations?
Ms. Garima Jain- AgroCorp India:
Covid # 19 has been an unprecedented situation. We in Agrocorp India have ensured tremendous discipline, proactiveness and courage to fight this pandemic. We strongly encouraged our team in India to work from home. We have a highly distributed workforce in India spread across five different parts of the country.
We actively took steps to ensure that the business continuity plan is in place. We established a support system for our team at homes to ensure all employees can work from home in the best and most effective manner. For any necessary and urgent field work, the team was given due advisory and travel instructions to ensure their and their families safety.
Focus Agritech:
The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020 seeks to give farmers the right to enter into a pre-agreed price contract with agribusiness firms for the sale of future farming produce. What are your views on the new legislation and what is the perceived impact on businesses like AgroCorp India?
Ms. Garima Jain- AgroCorp India:
It is a very good step to provide an open marketing platform to everyone. Farmers get an opportunity to freely trade in the market and sell to anyone thereby helping them achieve better remuneration in a fair and transparent manner. For corporates, it gives them an opportunity to integrate Indian agricultural production with world markets to ensure farmers get fair prices for their produce.
Further, it is a win-win situation for everyone; Corporates can enter into contracts at their estimated price using various pricing models even before the harvest. For farmers, it will transfer their risk of market unpredictability to secured returns.
Focus Agritech:
With an open market concept getting introduced with the Farmers Bill, what do you think needs to be done at ground level and institutional level for facilitating the information flow, delivery and transaction settlement?
Ms. Garima Jain- AgroCorp India:
With open market concept fundamentally the biggest change is, that now a trade transaction can be conducted in any area as against previous limitation of a specified area. So any place of production, collection or aggregation can be treated as a trading place. Therefore, farmers should have facilities and access to good roads, logistics of scale and real time information to be able to take advantage of this bill. Unless logistics and infrastructure can support this bill, it will be difficult to get the true merit of the bill.
Going forward, for any successful business between any two counter parties, contract sanctity must be maintained. We need a system wherein any issue is resolved quickly. As of now there is a provision of three-level dispute settlement mechanism: the Conciliation board, Sub-Divisional Magistrate and Appellate Authority. The Ordinance permits the electronic trading of scheduled farmers’ produce hence such transaction platforms should be made easily accessible through electronic devices and internet with ease of use.
Focus Agritech:
We have learnt that Agrocorp has completed a cross-continent commodity trade transaction of wheat from North America to Southeast Asia using a block chain platform. What are your plans to execute end-to-end digital trade executions, digitizing the document and trade execution process for AgroCorp in India using the new age technologies?
Ms. Garima Jain- AgroCorp India:
The blockchain platform provides a repeatable framework for end-to-end digital trade executions, digitizing the document and trade execution process. Traditional trading processes take up to a month due to transit time and documents flow time. With blockchain this can be significantly reduced thereby implying tremendous saving time and therefore money.
Our parent company Agrocorp International has already done successfully and we in Agrocorp India are very excited to extend this platform in India.
Focus Agritech:
What are some of the good uses cases for technology intervention in the Agriculture commodity trading & processing sector, as per you?
Ms. Garima Jain- AgroCorp India:
India needs smart farming and crop management to develop sustainable agriculture for which we need to get into Precision agriculture involving drones, sensors, data compilation, environmental controls, farm management software, smart packaging, some steps can be taken like :
– Use of smart agriculture sensors to monitor the state of crops which will help farmers determine exactly how many pesticides and fertilizers they must use to reach optimal efficiency
– AI can help foreseeing weather conditions and be able to proactively deal with weather uncertainty as monsoon plays a key role and bring tremendous variability
– Use of agricultural drones in smart farming. Also known as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), drones are better equipped than airplanes and satellites to collect agricultural data
– Use of technology in determination of planting crops, fighting pests and infections, agriculture spraying, crop monitoring, etc.
– Monitoring and controlling crop irrigation systems via smartphone
Focus Agritech:
There are more than 450+ Agritech startups that have come up in the last 4-5 years in India? What is the potential and growth that you see for them and are you working with few of them at ground level?
Ms. Garima Jain
The rise of start-ups in India didn’t happen overnight, but slowly, over a gradual period. I see tremendous potential in start-ups in India , as we are a young country with 65% of population falling under the age bracket of 25 to 35 years who are ready to experiment, ready to fail and keep trying. Structurally, there is tremendous opportunity in Agriculture sector as there is a gap at every step of the value chain for e.g.
- In soil management – to determine how much fertilisers to apply
- Yield management – we are at the moment working at best estimates
- scientific methods to estimate production of various crops
- Grading of various produce
- Storage – more infrastructure and logistics around it
Through innovation and scalable technology, startups can generate impactful solutions, and thereby act as vehicles for socio-economic development and transformation.
Focus Agritech:
We understand the pivotal role that you are playing at AgroCorp India. We would be interested to hear from you, some of your priorities and key initiatives that you intend to implement while being at the helm of India operations.
Ms. Garima Jain- AgroCorp India:
Agrocorp has firmly established itself as one of the leading players in the global pulses and we consider this as very valuable given the growing importance of pulses in global nutrition. This becomes even more important in India wherein we want to focus on providing a nutrient rich diet to the mass population.
During COVID-19 times, Agrocorp India team worked very hard to launch safe, hygienic, packed with no hand touch, premium dals under our brand name Sansar. Sansar has currently 5 dals chana, tur, moong, urad, masoor. Sansar dals are available at Le Marche, Spencers, Walmart , Amazon and Flipkart.
Vote of Thanks !
Focus Agritech would like to thank Ms. Garima Jain for sharing her rich and vast experience across multiple facets of agriculture commodity trading. We see tremendous growth for AgroCorp India under her able leadership and wish her the very best for all her future endeavors. We would continue to support her efforts and vision to bring ‘Transformation in Indian agriculture through Digitization’.
Read the next interview in our Thought Leadership Series
Vinay Anand- Co Founder Arjate Farms talks about Farm as a Service Model
