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HomePosts Tagged "Fasal"
Agrotech, Company News, Investments

The company aims to expand and diversify its B2B brand, Fasal Fresh, procuring sustainably grown, fully traceable, and high-quality produce from its extensive network of growers covering 75,000+ acres of Farmland enabled by Fasal’s IoT-crop intelligence technology

TDK Corporation announced that TDK Ventures, Inc. has invested in India’s full-stack agriculture pioneer Fasal, in an INR 100cr round co-led by British International Investments to foster its innovative full-stack horticulture optimisation solution and bring it to market. Fasal’s solution has already been proven to improve crop yield and reduce operational costs at an affordable price to the individual farmer. This financing round provides further ammunition to Fasal in its mission to transform the Indian agriculture industry with its full-stack platform anchored on top of its patented IoT-crop intelligence technology and expand further to Southeast Asia markets.

Since the commercialisation of its technology, Fasal has worked with horticulture farmers spanning more than 75,000+ acres growing crops like grapes, pomegranates, bananas, apples, chilli, cardamom, etc. by enabling them to grow more and grow better with its patented IoT-crop intelligence technology. Fasal’s farmers have reduced irrigation water consumption by 82.8 billion litres, pesticide reduction by 127,426 kgs, curbed GHG emissions by 54,965 MT, and increased their yields and quality by up to 30 per cent with the help of technology. Fasal has gone deeper into the value chain by building technology to predict the exact harvesting time, yield, and tentative quality and is utilising this intelligence to bring this sustainably grown, traceable, and high-quality produce to the consumers via its B2B brand ‘Fasal Fresh’.

The company highlights that its technology platform has a traceable supply of over half a billion USD worth of produce, connecting seamlessly with demand across various consumption markets in the supply chain, ensuring 10x more efficient procurement thereby reducing wastages significantly. This technology platform empowers the company to synchronise supply with the most appropriate demand directly at the farm gate before the harvest itself.

The company aims to expand and diversify

Company News, Finance, Horticulture, India, Start ups

Through this financing solution, farmers can access collateral-free loans up to Rs three lakhs.

Bengaluru based Fasal, India’s leading horticulture-first, full-stack Agri-tech company, announced its partnership with State Bank of India (SBI), aimed to provide farmers with easy access to capital. The partnership will help solve cash-flow constraints during key cycles in farming by providing quick, easy, and collateral-free loans at very competitive rates. This ties into Fasal’s larger objective of solving the many challenges across the entire horticulture value chain, thereby paving the way for India’s horticultural transformation.

In the 2023 budget, the government announced raising the agriculture credit target by 11 per cent to Rs20 lakh crore for FY24. The launch of Fasal’s latest financing solution echoes the government’s focused efforts toward increasing financial support for farmers across the country. Through this financing solution, farmers can access collateral-free loans up to three lakhs. The goal is to enable farmers to effectively fund and manage urgent and immediate agri-input needs and adopt Fasal’s technology solution to make their farming precise and predictable. These loans will be disbursed under the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) scheme, well known for its lowest interest rate within the farmer credit support system. This latest offering from Fasal will be initially available in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh and later expand to other regions. Alternatively, if the farmer has already exhausted his/her KCC limit, SBI will enable these financing solutions through other Agri schemes.

Talking about the collaboration, Shantanu Pendsey, CGM, Agriculture Business Unit (ABU), State Bank of India, Corporate Centre, said, “We are pleased to partner with Fasal, a frontrunner in providing innovative solutions to the horticulture community. Through this collaborative effort, we will be able to reach out to more farmers across India and offer them timely as well as easy access to financial support. We look forward to working with the Fasal team to financially empower farmers in India.”

Commenting on the partnership, Shailendra Tiwari, Founder of Fasal, said, “Access to quick, easy and low-cost financial support to farmers, as well as horticulturists, will be key as we work to make horticulture a main focus in the country. With SBI’s support and their extensive nationwide network in rural areas, we are confident that we can positively impact farmers by providing better access to credit and consequently, bring precision farming to a lot more farmers.”

Through this financing solution, farmers can access

Agrotech, India, IT, Opinions, Supply Chain

 By Ananda Verma, Founder, Fasal

The Indian agriculture sector is facing various challenges such as land fragmentation, climate change, declining soil fertility, low productivity, limited access to markets, high input costs and more. Open-source technology can be a game-changer in dealing with these issues and the government has already started setting up the foundation.

According to a report by Allied Market Research, the global precision agriculture market size was valued at $6,457 million in 2020 and is projected to reach $23,056 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 13.4 per cent from 2020 to 2030. Incorporating technology into agriculture has no doubt been transformative empirically but has also enabled farmers to easily connect with other farmers, researchers, and industry professionals for knowledge-sharing and promoting collaborative work within the industry. As the saying goes, “Many hands make light work” and agritech has been a key catalyst in facilitating this shift.

What is open-source technology?

Within the tech ecosystem, there is a specific approach to software development called open source which has been taking root in the agriculture sector lately. It refers to any software or technology whose source code is made available to the public, allowing anyone to view, use, modify, and distribute it freely. It typically involves a collaborative and transparent development process, with a community of developers working together to improve and maintain the technology.

Open source can be used for a wide range of applications, from software development tools and operating systems to databases and web frameworks. It is often favoured by developers and organisations because of its flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and community-driven development model. We are already surrounded by open-source tech and most likely use them in our daily lives. WordPress is a perfect example and is an open-source content management system used to create websites and blogs. The classification extends to tools like Python, MySQL, Git and many more.

Opening up doors in agriculture

Open-source technology is playing a significant role in revolutionising agriculture by providing farmers with access to new tools, data, and knowledge, and enabling them to make more informed decisions about their farming practices. The interoperability and openness that come with the territory make it very valuable to many stakeholders in the agriculture supply chain.

Within the agritech segment, hardware is as important as the supporting software. Open-source hardware is a growing field, with developers and farmers collaborating to create low-cost, easy-to-use sensors, drones, and other farming tools that can be customised to meet specific needs. It is enabling farmers to collect data on crop and soil conditions, monitor weather patterns, and optimise irrigation and fertilisation, among other things.

Parallely, open-source software is being used to develop a wide range of applications for agriculture, including crop-modelling, yield-forecasting, farm-management software etc. This type of software enables farmers to optimise their farming practices, reduce waste, and increase efficiency.

As part of any agritech solution, data plays a significant role in providing actionable insights to farmers. Open data initiatives are providing farmers with access to large amounts of data on weather patterns, soil conditions, crop yields, and more. This data can be used to inform decisions about planting and harvesting and to improve overall farm-management practices. The Open Data Kit is a popular example of an open-source tool used for data collection in agriculture.

To read more click on : https://agrospectrumindia.com/e-magazine

 By Ananda Verma, Founder, FasalThe Indian agriculture

Company News, Horticulture, India, Start ups

Fasal Fresh simplifies procurement by bringing end-to-end traceability & demand-specific sourcing directly from their precision farm network to buyers.

Bengaluru based Fasal, India’s earliest sustainable horticulture farm network company and the one-stop-shop for horticulturalists, today announced expansion into the farming output business with the launch of ‘Fasal Fresh’. Fasal Fresh removes intermediaries in procurement to ensure fairer prices for farmers while bringing end-consumers export-quality produce that has been grown using Fasal’s proprietary farm-level crop intelligence systems.

Through its patented IoT system called Kranti, Fasal has been making horticulture farming guesswork-free with advanced irrigation alerts, farm level forecasts, and pest/disease forewarnings. Today, Fasal works with Indian farmers over 60,000 acres across 20+ crops, who are leveraging this technology. Fasal Fresh, which has been in the works since last year with a focus on building the horticulture farming network, will directly bring the produce grown via precision farming to the end consumers via retailers/e-tailers, wholesalers and exporters.  Currently, Fasal Fresh is operational in Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad with its Mumbai operations planned for March this year.

Shailendra Tiwari, Founder, Fasal, said, “Procurement of fruits across the country remains fragmented and hindered by several issues in the value chain like lack of any visibility of supply, quality inconsistency, and wastage of produce during transit, among others. But with our progressive horticulture approach through differentiated tech deployed on large acreages combined with the Fasal Fresh network, we are able to solve a lot of these supply chain issues.

We can completely revamp the entire value chain by providing a consistent supply of high-quality produce to buyers and significantly better compensation to the farmers. The network is built to bring a higher level of predictability and traceability to the horticulture supply chain via tech at a scale which was not possible before. “To drive the business vertical, a veteran horticulture supply chain expert, Manoj Kumar, has joined as Director, Fasal Fresh. “Through Fasal Fresh, we are excited to directly connect farmers growing high-quality produce using Fasal’s IoT systems and advisories with exporters, modern retailers, and end consumers. The aim is to have assured availability of precisely grown, high quality and sustainable fruits with competitive pricing for the end-consumers while ensuring transparency in deals and timely payments for the farmers – all using Fasal’s end-to-end platform,” added Manoj Kumar, Director, Fasal Fresh.

Our predictability in supply allows consistent availability of high-quality sorted, graded, and packed produce enabling buyers to plan well in advance and minimize transit loss. Fasal Fresh aims to be a system that dramatically simplifies the lives of farmers, sellers, retailers as well as end-consumers in gaining access to safer and healthier fruits as well as vegetables at fair prices. Right from making conscious decisions to use only required levels of pesticides to eco-friendly packaging, Fasal Fresh comes with the promise of access to safer, precise and sustainably grown fruits and vegetables.

Fasal Fresh simplifies procurement by bringing end-to-end