Jharkhand-based agri-tech firm KissanPro on Wednesday said it has has signed a pact with Dubai-based Barakat Vegetables & Fruit Co to help farmers market their produce in Middle East countries. KissanPro provides crop advisory to over 20,000 farmers in Jharkhand and also supplies inputs and marketing services to around 5,000 farmers in Ranchi, Hazaribagh and Bokaro districts, its co-founder and CEO Ravindra Dasoundhi said.
He said the company has tied up with many institutional buyers and importers to help farmers market their agri produces. It plans to enter more such tie-ups. KissanPro has inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Barakat Vegetables & Fruit Co, Dubai, UAE, to facilitate market access to as far as the Middle East for their agricultural produces. Barakat Vegetables import fresh produce from over 30 countries but the share of fresh produce imported from India is merely four per cent, the company said in a statement.
“We provide guarantee to both buyers and farmers. Both farmers and buyers benefit in pricing because of elimination of middlemen and commission agent in supply chain,” Dasoundhi said. “Directly linking our farms to international buyers is one of the core areas we are working on and multiple such agreements are under the process of getting signed,” he added. The company also invests in value addition infrastructure closer to the farm gate, thereby creating more employment opportunities in the sector, he added.
KissanPro encourages farmers to make a shift to the ‘sell before harvest’ model rather than the current practice of ‘harvest and sell’. The start-up encourages farmers to do a demand-based crop planning and grow more commercial crops to earn more. KissanPro offers a full-stack solution to farmers where a qualified agronomist with the help of artificial intelligence-based agronomy tool provides complete crop advisory, and the objective is to maximise yield.
The start-up, with the help of remote sensing tools, is also working on offering remote access of farms to institutional buyers, growing exclusively for them, so as to bring full transparency and give accurate idea about their farms.
