During the early pandemic days, I had the opportunity to work with SG Agtech. SG Agtech Innovations was focused on building innovative solutions to transform India's agriculture-based rural economy. They had designed and deployed technology solutions under their product banner –Yukt- for FPOs to digitize the FPO operations. Yukt had been leveraged by Illupur Agriculture Producer Company Limited (IAPCL), an FPO in Pudukottai District, Tamilnadu, to digitize their enterprise operations and processes.
Disclaimer: *SG Agtech wound up their operations.
I had a chance to visit the FPO and talk to multiple stakeholders there.
Capturing my conversation with Mr. V. Velankanni, Manager, Milk Enterprise of the FPO.
One of Mr.Velankanni’s primary jobs was to handle everything around the Milk Enterprise of the FPO. This included aggregating milk from the 12 centres around the FPO, twice a day, checking the milk supplied for quality, and also delivering the aggregated milk to the various customers such as the local tea stalls, hotels, and dairies. Being a cattle owner himself, meant that he had to milk his cows too.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sir, tell a me little about your typical day
I am up by 4 a.m., and I milk my cows first. Then by 5 a.m., I reach the collection centre near my house and supply the milk at the centre. At around 7 a.m., I leave with the company tempo to collect milk from all the 12 collection centres. This process takes about two hours as I have to verify the collection data at every centre. I also test the milk (each dairy farmer leaves 50 ml of milk in a separate container for testing) and then deliver the supply to all our customers – local tea stalls, hotels, and dairies. I get back home by noon.
I ask him to pause so that I can catch my breath, take notes, and wrap my head around how hectic it is for him.
He resumes: After lunch, I used to go to the FPO office around 1 p.m., input some of the milk data collected into the system, return home to milk my cow at 3:30 p.m. and then start the aggregation and delivery cycle again, from 4 p.m.- 7:30 pm. Every other week, I would also go back to the FPO office after 7:30 p.m. to tally milk records, quality reports, and farmer payments.
Used to? Has your schedule changed now sir?
Yes. Earlier I had to enter all data manually and also physically verify them. There were too many papers to keep track of and cross-verifying farmer payments based on their milk grade results every 3 days. This used to take a lot of time. With Yukt, data entry, calculations, and information management are a breeze. I enter data directly, on the go. So I save at least 1-2 hours every day.
Sounds like Yukt has been a good addition. Was it easy to use Yukt?
Initially, I was scared to use Yukt as I was worried about what would happen if I made mistakes while entering data and thought it would just add to my time spent on data entry, tracking, and calculations. However, once the Yukt team member trained me, I gained confidence and now use it every day. All entries and calculations are a breeze. I finish doing the entries on a daily basis and have access to all payments payable and receivable at any instant. Yukt has also helped us increase our trust and good reputation in the member farmers’ community. Personally, I have more time to focus on providing other services such as giving farmer-specific inputs on how to increase the milk yield. I also get the satisfaction that farmers get paid within two days of their due dates and are happy with the work we do.
Sir, a curious question. How often are the farmers paid and how has Yukt helped?
The vendor invoices are raised every 10 days and farmer payment calculations have to be done every 15 days. This farmer payment calculation used to sometimes take me even a week after the due date as cross-verifying paper records were difficult. Any wrong calculation would result in the farmer losing trust in the FPO. Hence, the payment was made 10 days after the due date. Now the entry and calculations are all done almost real-time and farmers get paid a day or two max after the fortnightly cycle is over.
Thank you, sir. I am glad that Yukt is helping.
He gushes: another way Yukt has helped: I get to be home by 7:45 p.m. :) and am not stressed out!
---------------------------------------------------------------
The conversation impacted me deeply and left me with two indelible impressions:
1. The amount of hard work that farmers and anyone in the space put in
2. How technology, when appropriately designed and used, can be an enabler to a more convenient life on the field. Most importantly, we forget about how it can free up precious time. (Ironical when for a lot of us it is about how to handle and free up our time from social media!).
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments