2-CASI Value Chain-One Stop Solutions
Transcript
Hello friends. Today, we are in Satmile Satish Club in Cooch Behar. You must have come across words like startups or entrepreneurs. Today, we are with such a startup that started out with conservation agriculture and now has successfully expanded to its allied sectors like fisheries, poultry, selling input to farmers and providing machines to them. This enterprise also works in the area of capacity development of farmers and also provides them with important information.
We have Amal ji with us and from him we shall know how he started out on this journey.
Hello. My name is Amal Roy and I am the secretary of Satmile Satish Club. Our enterprise works as a custom hiring Centre. We started working on conservation agriculture from the year 2009. Now, we have started to work on SRFSI project based on conservation agriculture. Our focus is on rental model. We provide every type of conservation agriculture based machines on rent to farmers. Farmers are able to do farming on a larger area in less time with these machines. This is beneficial to farmers as it is cost effective. In addition to providing machines on rent, we also have an input shop where we sell inputs to farmers. Our shop has all kinds of pesticides, insecticides and fertilizers. We also provide agriculture advice to farmers.
Our Satmile Satish Club is connected directly to around 30,000 farmers and indirectly to around 1 lakh farmers through FPC (Farmer producer organization). For this, CIMMYT and Godrej agrovet is providing us with the required funding for 3 years for the capacity development of farmers. Through this initiative, we have done a lot of capacity development work for farmers. As a result, technology is getting popular among farmers. Also as there is a lot of labor problem, so farm mechanization is very important and is being introduced through a rental model. This work is being done throughout West Bengal.
In 2009, we started our work through zero tillage with KVK. Now from 2014-2015, we got associated with SRFSI project with KVK.
In the beginning, when we started to work on conservation agriculture based zero tillage, it was very difficult to convince people to practice zero tillage wheat and maize. So we would organize a lot of training programs and capacity building in association with the agriculture department. We would also organize a lot of demonstrations.
By doing all this, we explained to farmers that we can do conservation agriculture based zero tillage under SRFSI project. During that time, there were problems in rice transplanter technology. Farmers were unable to understand how to grow seedlings so we worked on their capacity building of raising seeds through farmer’s club.
The rice transplanter machine does uniform sowing of rice. Its main advantage is that it costs just around 1500 rupees per acre to the farmer with a rice planter as opposed to 3600 to 3700 rupees during transplanting with labor. Farmers are able to save time as they are able to transplant a one-acre field in 2.5 hours. So farmers are happily accepting this technology in renters’ model as they are able to save cost and time.
Parutosh Da has completed a diploma in fertilizer from Cooch Behar KVK. He provides farmers with the correct advice and guides them in the right direction.
This is the training centre of our Satmile Satish club. We provide training to farmers over here. Farmers from other blocks and even other countries come here for training. This is our conference room. We also have a residential facility and a place to stay upstairs.
When we talk about business then it should cater to the problems of someone. We saw how Amal ji first understood the needs and problems of farmers. He has every type of machinery that one needs be it small or big.
We know agriculture is a system. Many times we just provide information or just capacity development to farmers. But over here, he has developed this enterprise as a one stop solution where we can find machines, technology, capacity development, quality inputs and free information. So he has developed a 360-degree business model. So far he has only touched a few dimensions of the value chain. Agriculture is a very big sector and conservation agriculture has immense scope.
So any new upcoming startups can learn from this case study and begin their own startup and also work together with Amal ji.
Thanks
