What is a Farmer Producer Organization (FPO) ?
Farm Collectives have long served as a way to improve the joint bargaining power of small holder, marginal farmers and producers. Many farm cooperatives societies have existed in India under the Mutually Aided Cooperative Society Act (MACS) of 1995. To further enhance the collective framework the Govt. of India initiated the Farmer Producer Organization (FPO) policy in 2013 for registration of FPOs under the Companies Act. To quote from the Policy Guideline : “Collectivization of producers, especially small and marginal farmers, into producer organisations has emerged as one of the most effective pathways to address the many challenges of agriculture but most importantly, improved access to investments,technology and inputs and markets. Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture,Govt. of India has identified farmer producer organisation registered under the special provisions of the Companies Act, 1956 as the most appropriate institutional form around which to mobilize farmers and build their capacity to collectively leverage their production and marketing strength.”
Why do we believe in FPO Digitization ?
Most Farmer Producer Organizations (FPO) are relatively new companies and tend to operate using manual processes and methods. Day to day operations of the FPOs require co-ordination between the shareholder farmers, supporting institutions and other ecosystem actors like buyers, suppliers and logistics operators. The speed of operations and successful scale up of an FPO are heavily impacted by the number of people it can hire to manage all the daily co-ordination, office and field operations. Typical FPOs are limited to operate with usually two or three dedicated employees to minimize the cost of operations. Further manual record keeping and maintaining multiple record books increase the chances of error and makes reconciliation across business transactions difficult. This makes the case for simple digital tools for FPOs which can help improve the operational efficiency of the FPO workforce and also aide in digitally tracking all business transactions in a easy and secure manner.
How do we help in FPO Digitization ?
We offer a Mobile first Farmer Producer Organization (FPO) operations digital stack product with an extremely simple user interface and powered by technology enablers like cloud, blockchain, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. We call this product the VarunaChain.
VarunaChain offers following capabilities :
- Shareholder data management
- Inputs Stock and Sales tracking
- Shareholder Crops and Outputs Sales tracking
- FPO Business and operational metrics dashboards
VarunaChain is offered on a Pay as you go software as a service (SaaS) model. This means your organisation such as Farmer Producer Organizations, Producer Organizations and Co-operative Groups needs low capital investment to streamline their operations.
VarunaChain ensures the FPO operations are tracked in real time and various analytics driven dashboards are available to share across with value chain partners to achieve supply chain efficiency, predictability and speed of operation.
Contact us to signup, ask for a demo or just start a conversation.
Samudra Network 