DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Exchange Description: Hi all,


DARE is an excellent platform for IDEA WORKERS @ WORK. Every time I read it, I can feel a gush of adrenalin to charge me up.

I have been for long contemplating with an Idea, in fact to some extent experimented with its practicality through a few beta versions. Now I am looking for a mentor and fellow thinker to build it up together.

In brief, this is about Crop Health Management. In essence, crop health and human or animal health management principles are the same, but unfortunately although we have excellent system for human and animal health management, in case of crop health, still primitive and largely misguided approach is being followed. So farmers primarily depend on the advice of its peers and pesticide of fertilizer sellers for solving its problem.

On the contrary, India has a fairly advanced, agriculture science resource base and lot of money has been and are being pored into this sector. Commercially, contract farming is slowly but steadily catching up, too. Internationally, more and more countries are now becoming sensitive about the pesticide residue and other health hazard issues concerning agro-commodities.

So my idea is to develop Crop Health Management in the same lines as human health management. In the centre of it would be a progressive farmer or a rural youth who will be trained in basic agronomy and crop management to act as the first point of contact from farmers, in the same fashion of a primary health worker. This cop health worker would be supported by a network of scientists, agronomists, laboratories, agro-input manufacturers, agro machinery manufacturers etc. The crop health worker would also be connected real time through mobile telephone network (there have been some development in this recently like Reuters’’ Market Light etc) to and fro with the farmers and with the advisors and suppliers.

The economic viability would be coming in the similar way a human health professional start his/her practice. So we can think that the crop health advisor would initially collect some fee from farmers for advice, field visit, lab test etc and then slowly s/he would scale up by selling fertilizers, pesticides etc. Government can also use them for communication and implementation of rural development projects, private sector can use them to promote their products, they can be the facilitator for large scale contract farming, organic farming etc.

Anybody finds interest in this concept and share same passion to be the harbinger of Green Revolution V2, please get in touch with me for further brainstorming.