Farm services provider eFresh Portal Private Ltd today launched its web-based market linkage platform and farm machinery information bank, helping farmers, food processors and buyers to interact directly on a common platform.
Introduced for the first time in the country, eFresh says the platform would help farmers and buyers access products, including organic and processed foods, which are certified to various food safety standards.
eFresh is supported by the National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (Nabard), National Horticulture Mission (NHM) and ICAAP, which is promoted by International Food Policy Research Institute.
To start with, eFresh is offering the market link platform and farm machinery info bank for free to various farmer groups and small suppliers, for a period of three months. However, it plans to charge from the importers and exporters and other big institutions.
In the first year of its launch, it expects around 20,000 subscribers for market link platform, mostly farmer groups and processed food suppliers. The price for “importers and exporters would be around $250 (Rs 15,000) per six months. However, for farmer clubs in India it would be priced at Rs 1,000,” said Srihari Kotela, managing director, eFresh.
“Under Phase-I we plan to cover agri (farmers) and processed food suppliers from 8 countries, including those from West Asia,” said Kotela.
In India, it has already compiled 4,200 certified suppliers and 3,000 non-certified suppliers in its list for the programme. From the US, it has covered 5,000 suppliers till date and another 3,000 would be added soon, it said. For processed foods linkage, it follows the food safety standards certification like ISO 22000 and HACCP.
On the other hand, the farm machinery info bank would enable Indian farmers to access a full range of machinery equipment manufactured by Mahindra and John Deere among others.
The facility allows farmers to access product reviews, government subsidies linked to their purchase, maintenance, etc. For this, it would charge Rs 1,000 for farmer clubs and farm cooperatives for six months.
To set up farmer development centres
eFresh is planning to launch farmer development centres in Andhra Pradesh at Karimnagar, Jagityal, Guntur. “Next month, we would launch the first centre at Jagityal with Nabard’s support,” said Kotela.
These centres would work closely with registered farmer cooperative groups to educate farmers on latest crop techniques, government intervention programmes and credit facilities among others.
