Digital and the Smallholder Farmer
Farming is risky no matter where you are, but for the hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers around the world, the burden of financial risk is borne by small operations, small margins, and too little cushion.
What’s more, as access to knowledge, tools, and inputs remains a constant challenge, for smallholder farmers connectivity to markets and buyers once harvest time has arrived and once produce needs to be sold and transported to the consumer is even more critical in supporting their livelihoods.
Farmer Voice survey results from this year consistently show that a majority of smallholder farmers in India (85% of respondents) say they would benefit from and plan to adopt digital technologies, while today only 8% of respondents have adopted these tools.
Digital solutions can bridge gaps in both market and input access, support capacity building and community, and enable adoption of regenerative agricultural practices that support land health and productivity, as well as systemic solutions that efficiently integrate disparate technologies.
And yet, farmers will not embrace digital technologies without first understanding their benefits. To smallholder farmers, the risks are just too high. But digital technologies are key to tracking trends, measuring effects, mitigating harm, and showcasing value. I recently sat down with Aashish Mehra with Markets&Markets for an episode of their Disruption Dialogues podcast, where we discussed a couple of interesting examples of how we at Bayer are thinking about demonstrating value when it comes to using digital to help the adoption of new approaches to farming:
Obviously, we are not referring to integrated systems for smallholders, those that are common in large-scale farming and that will involve, for example, large equipment owned by individual growers or cooperatives.
For smallholders seeing is believing. They need to see the value of adopting digital solutions, or more sustainable and regenerative practices for that matter. So as we think about digital in smallholder geographies, the solutions we offer need to address specific needs while being scalable. We need to take a more flexible, cooperative, and partnership-focused approach.
The two examples I cited in this podcast – our trials in white fly infestation of capsicum plants and our direct-seeded rice system – integrate digital components into larger systems that would not be successful or even possible without that digital part.
In our pilot with Indian growers on white fly infestations, which are the primary vector for viral infection of hot pepper plants, sensors were the beginning of our ability to unlock a better understanding of the emergence and migration of insect populations on capsicum fields (tracking).
Sensors gathered the data that allowed us to generate models predicting peak insect emergence before infestation (measuring), paving the way for using drones as a service to apply precise crop protection products more sustainably and effectively (showcasing effectiveness).
Digital is also a key component of our direct seeded rice system, where we have detailed advisory capabilities to help farmers adopt more sustainable practices, but also mitigate risks like by helping them identify weeds and use the right crop protection products and practices, both available on their smartphone through our own FarmRise platform. Similar to the white fly infestation example but more fundamental, a system like this represents one of those big changes that can be difficult for farmers to adopt without the confidence that digital approaches can build.
We are at an exciting inflection point in ag innovation, and one of the best things we can do to help smallholders increase productivity, farm income and ultimately improve their livelihoods is to ensure that they see the value in adopting the new, over and above the value (and immense risk) in sticking with the traditional.
