The moment you read the term ‘Farmer’,

What’s the first image that clicks in your mind?

This one?

Or this one?

If the answer was the first one, then you have just generalised 118 million Indian cultivators (source: registrar general of India and census report 2011).

If the second picture was in your imagination then congratulations! You have a better idea of the layers and segments of farmers in India.

Like some of you, the moment the idea of Fasal came into genesis, I had the first image in mind and was completely unsure whether Ag-tech has any potential in the first place.

There were so many questions in mind like;

Don’t the farmers already know what they are doing? Why do they even . need help? Are they all similar in thought process? Will they be able to ‘buy’ any kind of services? Do they have the kind of purchasing power, that a sustainable business can be built around their problems? Will they understand a digital product? Will they be able to use it? Is there reasonable internet connection in villages in the first place? Do all farmers live in Villages only? Should we build a product in the first place?

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I remember and love this quote which says;

“The best product was the one that never got built, saved millions of dollars”

And thus came the yearning to look for answers. I was looking for answer to 6 fundamental questions

What is a farmer and ‘which’ farmer should we serve to, if any? Whether this farmer has any problem that he wants a solution to in the first place? If any, then what are the pressing problems of ‘this’ farmer that we can help? Can these problems be solved using the skills/experience/background that we have? If so, then what are the solutions to these problems? And, can we solve it in a way that they will concretely benefit from it?

Given our backgrounds in farming, we had a relatively easy access to quite a few farmers. The next task was looking for answer to the questions mentioned above.

We did not intend to build anything, not design anything, just look for answer to these questions honestly and objectively.

It was really important to look for these answers because in my past life, I had the opportunity of doing user research for multiple companies/multiple products. Some of the biggest observations i made during those days, while working with some of these companies were

There was disconnect between what users actually wanted and what people were building for them. Many product builders often, if not always, suffer from biases . The most common biases that i observed were recency and confirmation bias. This makes it really difficult to objectively understand a problem. I also observed that quite a few product builders were solving ‘problems’ which rather seemed like a figment of their own imagination. User research in any form (quantitative/qualitative) makes sure that the product is actually aligned to what users want. It is extremely convenient to say or assume that the user are ‘stupid’. It takes a lot of effort to understand a user, their problems, their motivations, their needs, their goals and build something meaningful for them. The users are not stupid. You have just not done enough homework to truly understand them and thus declaring them stupid is the easiest thing to do.

These learnings are in my DNA now. Even though thinking by first principle requires a lot of training to become an intuitive response to random ideas, but it is a blessing in terms of product skill. The impact of these learning was that even in case of fasal, while looking for the answers to the questions mentioned above, first principle analysis was at play, digging the very basics.

The first thing that we did was we ran a survey with these farmers (Thanks to the telecom revolution; most people seem to have mobile phones and do use what’s app) . I had my own apprehension towards running a survey with them. I was wondering if they will understand the nuances of the survey in the first place. Whether they will be able to complete it properly or not? What if we do a poor job of framing the questions?

If the first picture of the article was a representation of an Indian farmer, then it’s safe to assume that responding to a digital survey could be a challenge.

But then we did send the survey as it was the cheapest form of any structured contact.

The result of the survey was the first myth buster. Farmers actually responded to that survey. And it was not one or two farmers responding, there were many who responded. The survey response was insightful. The interesting learnings were

Of many farmers we sent the survey, almost all of them who responded were fruit and vegetable farmers only. No paddy farmers, No wheat farmers. This was really interesting. The landholding was right from 1 acre to a 1000 acres. They were growing multiple vegetables throughout the year. After plotting the graph of number of farmers by vegetables they grew, we found this.

4. By the way this also made us curious as to why so many people were

growing Tomatoes and chillies. After researching, we came to know that . India can be divided into many belts by crop. For example the South Maharashtra/North Karnataka belt has many Grape and Pomegranate farmers. Guntur in Andhra Pradesh is a huge chilli belt. There is a large Kinnow belt in Punjab and Rajasthan and so on and so forth.

5. Most of them were having difficulties with crop disease and were looking . for ways to manage them.

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Motivated by the response from the survey, we started getting in touch with these farmers individually. We also created a what’s app group to bounce some of the things that came to our mind. We also visited them. And at the end of this exercise we inferred the following.

There were many kinds of farmers. And they could be segmented by the size of their land holding, the kind of crops they grew, the types of farming practises they utilised, the kinds of machines and techniques they used so on and so forth.

The learning was that we must not make the mistake of generalising them. The telecom revolution was playing an interesting role in the lives of these farmers. Farmers from one part of India were connected to farmers from another part of India and each other via smartphones and what’s app groups and were sharing Information regarding new practises, mandi rates, demand requirements etc etc.

The learning was that they are not really untouched by technology. Farming is being done by 3 categories of farmers. The first one are the folks whose families have been doing it for decades and thus they continue to do so even today with the same traditional wisdom. The second kind of folks had family members who had received some kind of formal education in agriculture and thus had better farming practises and were always looking for ways to improve them. The third kind were folks who had hired consultants and just did what they were told. The interesting part was that farmers in category 2 and 3 were mostly doing commercial farming, that is every penny they were putting into the farms, they wanted a better return. Category 2 and 3 were the first sign of a customer base, that we could serve to.

The learning was that there are farmers who are looking for ways make the most out of their farms. They want better yields, they want more yield and they want to cut cost.

We had now made a few learned conclusions after this exercise.

There are farmers who are genuinely looking for solutions to improve the returns from their farms. Most of these farmers were fruit and vegetable farmers. They were already using various technologies like drip/sprinkler irrigation, fertigation systems, mulching, proper row spacing, controlled cultivation systems like Net-house/polyhouse/greenhouse etc to increase their yields. They were already using various apps for weather forecasts, mandi pricing, disease identification etc. They did not understand the technology behind these apps, and they did not even care about it. What they were looking for was solution to their problems. Plain and simple. We believed that if we could build something meaningful for these farmers, we could have a feasible business. We identified that most of the farmers who were of our interest had drip irrigation. This became our primary marker. Our identifier. The tool which we could use to easily identify a probable customer to a non-probable one. We looked at data for area covered and found that as of 25 December 2016, India had about 10.2 million hectares (2.52 crore acres) of land under drip/sprinkler irrigation (Source: ToI). States like Gujarat, Andhra, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana leading the way with a total of 15 lakh hectares. By this marker, we assumed that it was worth taking a shot at learning more about these farmers and identifying their issues until we truly size the market of our interest.

We had clarity now. We would focus on fruit and vegetables. But the question was whether we could be a general solution for all fruit and vegetable growers or highly specialised one’s?

Will pen down the further parts of building Fasal in Part-II of our Journey.

In the meanwhile would appreciate all your comments and claps and questions :)