• Pune-based company is already servicing more than 30 countries and with more than 500 clients.
• They see growth opportunities in the Middle East and the US.
• Even though they compete directly with big giants like Oracle, SAP and Sage, they are by default focused on agribusiness, CEO says.
• CEO says that sustainable agriculture is the only pathway towards a more resilient, equitable and environmentally sustainable food system that benefits the planet.

There are many enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from big players as well as small ones in the agribusinesses but one Indian player is making ripples in this sector and that is Shivrai Technologies’ FarmERP.

“Even though there are big players such as Oracle, SAP, Sage and others, we are focused purely on agriculture and feature-rich than the giants and by default designed for agriculture while the big players are more focused on manufacturing despite having agribusiness products,” Sanjay Borkar, CEO and Co-founder of Shivrai Technologies Private Limited, said in an interview with TechChannel News.

The Pune-based company was founded in 1996 but started working on FarmERP in 2006.

“We were working on IT applications for agricultural business, building various websites, web portals and multimedia contents for companies such as Syngenta, DuPont, NetApp, John Deere and many others,” Borkar said.

Borkar and his partner Santosh Shinde, both hailing from agriculture families and being computer engineers, found a gap in the market since inception but it was too early to use IT solutions for the agriculture sector then as the digital divide was so prominent and implementing this idea was an extreme challenge.

“So, we decided why not create our software to record the farm activities and their management in a more organised way. FarmERP is a more advanced and comprehensive digital platform now, practised in more than 30 countries,” Borkar said.

Bridging the gap

The SaaS-based FarmERP serves enterprises to ensure the seamless management of plantation farms, hydroponic farms, plant biotech operations, packaging and exports, etc.

After winning numerous awards from India, the company’s entry into the Middle East was at the right time as the region was not widely known for its agriculture and saw a gap to bridge.

“The Middle East was not known for its agricultural output despite the focus on food security and water conservation due to its harsh climate. Moreover, companies and the governments in this region are investing heavily in Africa and other parts of the world to ensure food security,” Borkar said.

The company’s first international exposure was in 2011 through Oman, where it was deployed for a 1,400-acre vegetable farm and completed an IT consulting project for a 6,000-acre Government farm for establishing IT infrastructure over eight farm sites.

Cotton Connect, UK, chose FarmERP for its Tracebale – Cotton traceability project made operational for 50,000 cotton growers.

The software supports more than 11 languages such as English, Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, French, Turkish, Thai, Russian and many Indian languages.

Milestones

FarmERP reached Thailand, Turkey, DRC, Zambia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Qatar and many other countries for big-sized farms and plantations between 2012 and 2017. FarmERP was selected by the International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group) for its agroforestry project.

Borkar said that a minimum of 300 acres of land is needed to implement this solution and since “we are a B2B platform, we typically work with enterprises and who in turn work with small farmers.”

In UAE, he said that they work with Silal Food and Technology, part of Abu Dhabi Development Holding Company, and they work and procure from farmers. 

 “We also integrate our FarmERP with other big giants like Oracle, SAP or Sage and also integrate it with precision farming tools such as vehicle tracking, automated weather stations, automated irrigation systems, and sensors. All the data is pooled to a single database to bring more predictability in the business as agriculture is not so predictable because of the extreme climatic conditions,” Borkar said.

Predicting the growth

Moreover, Borkar said that they have certain algorithms or models that help the farmers’ requirements to get the exact crop requirement for that day and for that crop, nutrient recommendations, pest and disease alerts, yield estimation using satellite imaginary analysis by using FarmGyan, solutions based on artificial intelligence, deep learning, computer vision and satellite imagery.

“Not only that, we also provide intelligent advisory services to educate agribusinesses about innovative agritech solutions,” he said.

Globally, FarmERP has about 500 clients and out of that, more than 300 are from India.

Borkar said that the advantage of FarmERP is that 20 per cent of the productivity is increased, based on the client’s data, and between 20-25 per cent of inventory costs, about five per cent of water costs, about 15 per cent of labour costs and increase operational efficiency by about 40 per cent.

“We want to help agribusiness to improve 3Ps – productivity, predictability and profitability. In the next two years, we aim to add around 10 million acres of farmland onto our ERP platform. The focused regions where opportunities lie are in the Middle East; where there is a lot of talk about food security and a lot of investments are happening in this sector and the US,” he said.

Embracing new challenges

The way technology is advancing, Borkar said people are not interested in monolithic architecture and are more interested in open architecture.

“We have partly achieved it and are working to achieve 100 per cent. We plan to add more hardware integration as people are becoming more devices dependent. Even though AI and ML have been added to our products and yielded good results, we plan to add more of these into our products,” he said.

Despite all the technological advancements in agribusiness, he said that many individual farmers are not keen on boosting 3Ps using technology as they don’t have that kind of incentive but at the same time, big corporates believe in this and are ready to invest.

He said that UAE-based Silal is a good example; they have done a lot to help the farmers.

“We want to take up the new challenges such as carbon reporting. There is a lot of data captured from Farm ERP such as business data and farm data and that could give a report on carbon footprint and how to achieve carbon credit.

“We are going to extensively work on climate change and climate-smart agriculture and may come up with multiple product offerings,” he said.

Despite getting an investment of $1.5 million in 2019, Shivrai Technologies is not looking for any investment this year.

“Our business is growing and we are scaling up very fast. Maybe, we will look for an investment by the end of next year or the year after that. IPO is not on the radar now but may be in the next two years,” Borkar said.

He added that conventional farming practices such as intensive use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides and large-scale industrial farming have negatively impacted the environment, public health and food security worldwide and the only pathway towards a more resilient, equitable and environmentally sustainable food system that benefits the planet is through sustainable agriculture.