The Covid-19 has turned the world upside down and has shut down large parts of the world economy. With one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns, Indian economy too has taken a hard hit. Many sectors, if not all, are partially out of action and have reported job losses and unpaid leaves.

The impact of the pandemic in the agriculture sector, which forms almost 16 per cent of our GDP is multifold. The coronavirus outbreak has caused a workforce crunch as most of the workers are migrant labourers. As a result, the harvesting, transportation and accessing market at the right time have taken a severe blow leaving thousands of farmers in the lurch.

Pune based agri-tech company Farmpal’s mission is to address this problem through Artificial Intelligence(AI). The company organises the post-harvest supply chain, so farmers have better access to alternate markets, improved incomes by receiving a fair price for their produce and more broadly, reduce inefficiencies across the supply chain thus all the stakeholders are benefitted. “We started building Farmpal in 2017 on this idea. We connect farmers directly with end consumers in the urban areas. The company uses technology as an enabler to manage the end-to-end supply chain including logistics,” says Karan Hon, Founder of Farmpal.

A mobile app at the front end connects the farmers and the customers. This is backed by a powerful ERP solution and analytics at the backend that helps Farmpal streamline inventory management, order cycles and supply-demand forecasts.

How AI helps?

Farmpal has designed an AI solution to predict demand and matching farmers supply data to demand to keep wastage below 5 per cent. According to Hon, “Post, harvesting supply chain, is currently completely unorganised, which is causing wastage of about 30-40 per cent of the farm produce. One of the major reasons is that the stakeholders do not have data on the demand and the supply. The biggest challenge is predicting consumer demand and matching available supply, so there is no over or undersupply, resulting in minimum wastage across the value chain.”

To understand the demand and supply, Farmpal is leveraging AI. The company is utilising Oracle ERP historical data of supply-demand and has placed an AI layer over ERP to curate historical data. AI derives information out of the available data to understand variation in demand considering peak and off-peak days in a week for each customer segment. AI can also predict the seasonal variations for each stock keeping unit, for example, the spike in demand during a festive season and so on.

“AI modules help us to understand weekly demand for more than 50 stock-keeping units. This helps us to inform demand to the farmers a week before, and farmers can plan harvesting based on the demand to avoid over as well as undersupply. Thus we can sell at about 95 per cent accuracy and in turn lower the wastage to less than 5 per cent across the value chain,” says Hon.

Another challenge in the value chain is time to reach the market. In the traditional supply chain, it takes about 24 to 30 hours for the produce to reach the market resulting in wastage. Next level, Farmpal is planning to develop an AI-based solution to reduce this supply-chain time. “We are developing an AI module to arrange logistics efficiently from farm to last-mile delivery within 15 hours. AI will collect information based on orders received from various locations, and group them together based on vehicle capacity, delivery window and travel distance. This will reduce farm to fork time and cost of logistics significantly,” visualises Hon.