Bayer, Cargill ink pact to empower smallholder farmers in India with digital solutions

Bayer’s e-commerce strategy involves expanding tailored solutions through the 'Digital Saathi' app, starting with corn farming in Karnataka and later expanding to other crops and regions.

Additionally, Cargill’s 'Digital Saathi' platform offers convenient crop input e-commerce and crop sell offer features, ensuring farmers have improved access to high-quality crop inputs and facilitating market linkages between farmers and aggregators through a digitally-enabled marketplace.

"This integrated approach aims to enhance farmers’ decision-making capabilities, streamline agricultural operations, and foster efficient and seamless connections within the agricultural ecosystem," Bayer added.

Simon-Thorsten Wiebusch, Country Divisional Head, Crop Science Division of Bayer for India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, said, "Access to advisory, quality inputs, credit, technologies, or markets is one of the biggest enablers to unlocking smallholder value, and it lies at the very core of what this partnership is all about. We also believe that digitisation is key to this exercise…."

Therefore, the company is looking at leveraging all relevant digital tools to ensure that it is able to deliver greater value to the smallholder farmers and create for them a level playing field, he added.