A startup wants to solve India’s farmer problems with data and tech

Photo credit: CIAT.

My family has owned a farm for years and we’ve always made our money growing and selling vegetables, but things have been changing. To sustain ourselves, we now need to sell to people in cities – customers whose faces we’ve never seen and are only talked about by the men who arrive once a week in big trucks to sift through our vegetables and throw half of them away.

Some give us reasons – the eggplants we grow aren’t worth anything because they’re not popular this year, or less lumpy potatoes have become the fad – how would we know that? Is there any way we can speak with these customers directly?

I have other questions too. What about the fact that our tomatoes just aren’t growing at all this season? Can we replace those crops with something else in the meantime? What are other farmers in our state selling? How can we grow something different from them that customers want?

Those are the types of questions that the founders of Ninjacart are trying to answer. Started by Sharath Loganathan, Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Ashutosh Vikram, Sachin Jose, Vasudevan Chinnathambi, and Kartheeshwaran KK, the startup connects farms to the businesses that want to buy from them – like restaurants and grocery stores. It helps farmers figure out what to grow and when, and what not to sow.

It also tries to answer the many questions that buyers have. People buy spinach everyday at my grocery store. How can I make sure that my supply of greens is constant and consistent? How can I be certain that the cucumbers I’m buying are always high quality? How do I stop wasting time and money by throwing them out?

The questions are endless and answering them is no small task – but as Sharath explains, the challenge is the only one that was worth the team’s time. Ninjacart launched as a startup that sold groceries directly to individuals. That didn’t tackle the root of India’s agriculture problem, though – one that is so far-reaching that 2,000 farmers change their profession everyday, and 116 farmers have committed suicide in just the first three months of 2016.

Ninjacart pivoted in January and since then, claims to conduct 370 to 375 orders a day at an average of US$40 per order. “We’re equipping farmers and their customers with data,” says Sharath. “It will change everything.”

Data is food

There are big, branded grocery stores in India, like Reliance Fresh, that source from dedicated farms and sell at their own stores. That means they constantly track what customers are buying and plug that info back into the farms they source from, creating an easy back-and-forth.

That’s the sort of seamless technology supply chain that Ninjacart is trying to replicate.

“We create a customer profile of each store or restaurant within just two days of onboarding,” explains Sharath. “We track consumption patterns and what type of stuff they aren’t ordering, and then find the farmers who are selling those things.”

If a grocery store wants lots of potatoes but a small amount of eggplants, for example, Ninjacart will find a large farm for the potatoes, and a smaller one for the eggplants. Or it will find a farmer that can do both – but with less of a focus on the latter. It’s most useful for small farms, Sharath explains. They have less money and therefore less traction – but the data provided by Ninjacart helps them figure out how to fine-tune their offerings to fit the market.

Photo credit: CIAT.

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