Agtech startup Agri10x is planning to better connect small-scale farmers to global buyers by using blockchain to cut out the middleman.
As cited in local news source Business Standard, the company announced Tuesday it had entered into a partnership with the Indian government to help remote farmers sell their produce on the market in a bid to generate fairer value.
“Indian farmers have been the unsung heroes of the Indian economy and we wanted to ensure that they get easy access to a global marketplace to sell their produce directly, without any middlemen” CEO of Agri10x Pankajj Ghode said in a statement.
The partnership provides Agri10x access to the government’s national common service centres (CSCs), which would enable rural and remote farming communities to register on the company’s blockchain platform through what the projects calls village-level entrepreneurs (VLEs).
Under the existing model, farmers engage with middlemen to sell their produce, who then find an appropriate buyer for the farmer in a particular market. Agri10x hopes its business model will help smaller farmers connect to more buyers without the need to squeeze profit margins from engaging in the middleman process.
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Another potential benefit is that farmers would receive timely payment in full through the use of smart contracts, as third parties causing delays in the process would be eliminated. Blockchain technology can also assist in collecting real-time data to manage harvests effectively, the company said in a previous blog post.
Agri10x CTO Sundeep Bose said the platform would help farmers better understand the fair value of their crops and get an equitable price of their produce directly, from both local and global buyers.
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The notion of bringing a blockchain boost to small-scale agriculture such as coffee production has been around for quite some time. Majors firms have also been developing tools to assist producers while making the industry more sustainable, and U.S. lawmakers have been pondering the use of blockchain in agriculture for monitoring inventory and local conditions.