Agricultural Development and Digitization – An Exploratory Study of Adoption of Technology from a Farmers Producers Organization Perspective

Abstract

When all the sectors of the economy registered negative growth during the last 3 years owing to the pandemic, the agriculture sector was the only sector that continued growing positively. This growth underlined the vital role that agriculture plays in overall economic development of the country. Farmers Producers Organizations played a significant role in facilitating this growth as they established a direct connection with the customers leveraging on diversified tools of technology. Platform of Farmers Producers Organizations (FPOs) were put into service to mend the fractured supply lines and they were given exposure to outreach of technology to address their extension related matters and product marketing. With the advent of the FPOs during the last decade or so, an awareness is created about leveraging technology and automating the process at the farmers’ level to optimize capacity utilization and facilitate improvement of processes at the field level. Adoption of technology not only facilitates enhanced output, it also trims down the input cost, thereby increasing profit in the hands of the farmers. For Small and Marginal Farmers (SMF), pooling of agricultural technical innovations helps him cut down his input and marketing cost and obtain a better price realization. Faster adoption of technology by SMF would provide better price realization and qualitative enhancement in the value chain. Three critical components-manpower, capital and weather advisory of agriculture can be better managed with technological advances in the field.