Innovator Spotlight: FarmERP-Shaping the Future of Digital Agriculture & Agribusinesses

Agriculture industry has always been the center of the global economy. In 2014, the industry alone accounted for more than one-third share in the global gross-domestic product (GDP). In 2018, food companies and agribusinesses across the globe formed an agriculture industry that valued over US$ 3.3 trillion, and in the coming years, it is expected to balloon dramatically.

IT engineers, Sanjay Borkar and Santosh Shinde incepted FarmERP, and became trailblazers in the AgriTech industry. FarmERP is a next-generation farm management information system (FMIS) that is a combination of extensive experience in the field of technology and  business management, which makes it a competent tool to ready agribusinesses for the future.

The ultimate mission for FarmERP is to help farmers realize their value and demand, and transform them into successful farm owners, by blending the concepts of ‘upstream and downstream’ business streams digitally for them. FarmERP has embarked upon the journey to making the agriculture industry a digitally, economically, and environmentally stronger space for businesses.

Through its high-tech features, FarmERP has helped leading agribusinesses in racing to capture value from technological innovation and gain a competitive advantage in the world of ‘Farm-to-Plate’ management of agricultural produce.

Techpowering Agriculture to become an ‘Intelligent’ Industry

Though various technologies have already converged with many industrial areas, the agriculture industry is still following traditional farming practices in most operations. Today's agriculture largely lags behind in employing sophisticated technologies such as  ERP, Farm management solutions, IoT devices, robotics, and satellite imageries.

With FarmERP, this picture has begun to change as it introduces an innovative concept to give a push to agribusinesses in transforming the agricultural landscape over a single digital platform by integrating it with AI and ML based algorithms and precision agriculture systems. The ultimate mission for FarmERP is not only to enable agribusinesses to be more efficient, profitable, safer, and more sustainable, but also connect the missing dots in digital agricultural supply chains for the potential rise in food demand as the global population is set to reach the 9.7 billion mark by 2050.

The Four Pillars of FarmERP’s Success in the AgTech Industry

Along with its features for business management, FarmERP also offers high-tech modules, which are integrated with next-gen technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, for agribusinesses to excel in four focus areas of modern farming.

1. Sustainable Agriculture - FarmERP helps in reducing the carbon footprint of agribusinesses and optimize the consumption of natural resources such as water, soil, etc. It helps farmers bolster productivity without degrading the environment.

2. Climate Resilience - FarmERP assists agribusinesses to reduce their dependence on uncertain climatic conditions. By offering intelligent climate-related insights, FarmERP has been doing its bit in making farming a climate resilient activity.

3. Food Safety - FarmERP facilitates agribusinesses to keep their quality of produce top-notch with its advanced, high-tech features for quality control. While it ensures that the quality is maintained throughout post-production, FarmERP also helps agribusinesses reduce their food wastage significantly.

4. Traceability – FarmERP highlights the importance of traceability of agricultural products, and with its next-generation technology, it ensures complete transparency vis-a-vis source of produce, farming practices and packaging processes.

How India's Food and Agri Corporates can capitalize on Smart Farming

FarmERP aims to assist all stakeholders in the global agriculture industry with its innovative farm management system to manage their entire business infrastructure digitally. Especially during the pandemic of COVID-19, when the world is going through a situation that is unprecedented, FarmERP provides a robust agriculture management system that can empower food and agri corporates in the country to manage their entire agricultural supply chain digitally.

In order to succeed in the world of ‘modern farming’, food corporates and agribusinesses in the country will have to primarily transform traditional business practices with technology. FarmERP’s single sign-on ERP platform and high-tech farm management system ensures that all the business operations are optimized. It’s ‘smart’ farming features offer intelligent analytics for optimizing various resources - man, machinery, and material - and enable data-driven decision making for better business productivity.

FarmERP suggests, India’s good and agri corporate firms need to ensure that they make complete use of next-generation farm management platforms to manage forward and backward linkage to facilitate trade relationships between the target customers. Along with its smart features that support the market linkage model of any enterprise, FarmERP enables agribusinesses to integrate smart devices with its farm management platform to ensure the complete uberisation of all business units.

Applying Technology in Modern Farming Businesses to Lead them to Agriculture 5.0

Irrespective of the size of their business, FarmERP has assisted all the stakeholders that are the part of the global agricultural supply chain in their digital transformation. Agribusinesses with the farm land ranging from 5 acres to over 75,000 acres have successfully undergone a tectonic shift in their operations with the help of FarmERP’s farm management platform.

Till date, FarmERP has partnered with diverse stakeholders including farmers, contract farming companies, farmer producer companies (FPCs), farmer producer organizations (FPOs), funding agencies, financial institutions, insurance companies, research & development institutions, trade bodies, as well as governmental organizations. FarmERP has been an integral part of the success stories of many agribusinesses over the years, and now they are leveraging FarmERP’s intellectual assets to enable an individual farmer to become a partner in profits.

FarmERP’s collaboration with a reputed Life Sciences company in drought-prone regions of Maharashtra, India is an interesting case study. FarmERP’s high-tech farm management platform not only enables farmers to overcome their vulnerability due to unfavourable conditions and boost crop yields, but also bolster the production of residue-free crops and ensure Farm-to-Fork traceability. FarmERP - as FarmERP as a technology partner in this project - helped over 50,000 poor, small area farmers to almost double their productivity and turn this into multiplied profits in 2 years.

FarmERP has also partnered with a global AgriFoods giant to transform its rice production operations in Vietnam, where more than 80% of its arable land is under rice cultivation. FarmERP offered its state-of-the-art technology platform to the leading agribusiness to implement sustainable rice production operations among more than 1000 farmer partners throughout the country. FarmERP did not only offer its farm management platform to ensure that all the sustainable rice production standards were followed, but it also ensured efficient use of the tool by all farmers by offering its version in Vietnamese.

In another interesting partnership with a 10000 Ha multi-cropping corporate farming company from Azerbaijan, FarmERP enabled the firm to get real-time resource estimations and manage seasonal agronomic practices through a tech-driven planning approach. FarmERP facilitated the company not only in managing the entire agriculture supply chain digitally but also helped in cutting inventory costs significantly by accurately tracking pre- and post-production processes.

FarmERP strongly believes that with the positive use of advanced technologies including AI, ML, Blockchain, and Internet of Agricultural Things, agribusinesses can easily transform their operations digitally, leading towards the rise of Agriculture 5.0.

Mr. Sanjay Borkar and Mr. Santosh Shinde: Know the Founders of Farm ERP

In the beginning, when Sanjay Borkar, the CEO & Co-founder of Shivrai Technologies and Santosh Shinde, the COO & Co-founder were fresh computer engineering graduates, it occurred to them that they could make a huge difference to the agricultural sector and how it was being practiced. This push towards AgriTech is rooted heavily in their agricultural backgrounds.

In the age where the lack of digitization was apparent, these budding entrepreneurs faced various challenges along the way. In 2001, they received a breakthrough and since then, they have been restructuring the age-old norms of the oldest and most noble profession - agriculture and farming with the most advanced technologies.

Mr. Borkar has always been an enthusiastic entrepreneur at heart, and his vision for the future has enabled him to co-found FarmERP. Driven by passion and diligence, Mr. Borkar aims not only to strengthen FarmERP’s position on the global platform but also to bolster the spread of sustainable agriculture practices across the world.

Mr. Shinde brings to FarmERP an extensive experience of working in the field of operations and technology. With his expertise in managing technology projects covering various business verticals, he strongly plays the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO) at FarmERP.

Both the founders unite the entire team of FarmERP with a strong belief contributing towards strengthening agriculture to counteract roadblocks, including various sustainability challenges our earth faces. New senior members have joined the team as VP Delivery and VP, Sales & Marketing. Together, the Team FarmERP pledges to empower the industry with a technology that can assist businesses in transforming the space sustainably. It began with just a dream two decades ago, and now it has transformed into a service that caters to 13+ sub verticals of agribusinesses across 25 countries in the world.