MoooFarm, an innovative AgTech company that uses global leadership and expertise in the areas of skills, agribusiness and technology to drive social change in developing countries such as India, has pledged to increase the incomes of 2,00,000 dairy farmers by 2020.
This announcement was made on the occasion of National Milk Day, which marked the birth anniversary of Verghese Kurien, co-founder, Amul, and the pledge was in line with the Government of India’s initiative to double farmers’ incomes by 2022.
“As a pilot, we have successfully trained over 4,000 dairy farmers trained in over 100 villages in Punjab and are all set to scale nation-wide,” stated Param Singh, founder, MoooFarm.
The aim is to eradicate the farmer distress condition by leveraging information and communications technology (ICT) applications to support the sustainable development of farmers and ensure economic independence for women farmers.
Seven years ago, Singh, then 29, visited the Asian Development Bank in the Philippines and learnt about sustainable livelihood work for India and he determined to do his bit for farmers, he invested half of the proceeds from the sale of his first Australian business into Uday in 2015.
Today, Uday works in six states of India. MoooFarm is established from just a dairy project of it, and now is a full-fledged company in its own right. These initiatives see Singh alternating between Australia and India, spending three weeks in each country. “You have to be innovative. You have to bring technology into your training,” he stated.
MoooFarm is an end-to-end last-mile connectivity solution offering extension and technology to the smallholder dairy farmers through The App, The Cloud and The Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE) model.
The App maps the life cycle of each cattle owned by the farmers, manages their accounts, send need based alerts etc. It will allow the farmer to request home visits of the local vet, artificial insemination workers, or cattle insurance agents and order products such as feed, fodder seeds and equipment directly at their doorstep at a price lower than the market.
The training methodology via the Cloud allows the farmer to stream e-learning videos, connect with dairy experts via video conferencing and seek assistance through a call centre. Further, a local resource person called the VLE forms the backbone of the model ensuring digital literacy and implementation of the dairy farm management practices.
Given the goal of increasing the incomes of two lakh farmers is achieved by 2020 or much earlier, it will lead to an economic impact of 240 crore of savings through reduction in cost of production.
Not only that, the farmers will benefit with revenue worth Rs 182 crore increasing through increased milk quality/reduced rejection and a cumulative increase in the farmers’ incomes to the tune of Rs 824 crore.
The MoooFarm on-ground extension team would do a robust one lakh visits to farmers’ homes, and 50,000 visits by dairy experts to villages. There will be 2,500 hours of face-to-face extension with about one million minutes of video watched.
MoooFarm envisions to successfully contributing to the Government of India’s initiative of doubling the farmers’ incomes by integrating digital-technical literacy, providing financial inclusions and creating a foolproof eco-system for dairy farmers by providing last-mile connectivity.
