Satish Nikam no longer makes frequent trips to the Shree Chhatrapati Shahu Sahakari Cooperative Sugar Factory to know about the details of payment and weight of cane delivered from his field at Kagal in southern Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district. A simple click on the Shahu Sakhar app downloaded by him provides all the necessary information. Once the mills has credited the payment against cane supplied to his bank account, even that information is instantly conveyed by the app to Nikam through a now-familiar ping.
“I can today track everything without having to physically go to the mill and find out from officers there how much did the cane harvested from my field weigh, what is the payment that is due, and so on,” says Nikam. For small growers like him, who has to supplement his farm income by working in a nearby factory, the mill’s decision to go online and provide all relevant information via an app isn’t a small thing.
IT per se — more so, ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems for tracking daily factory operations — isn’t new to the sugar industry. But what could, perhaps, be new is mills increasingly turning to mobile-based applications for augmenting their interactions with farmers. While mills, including the one to which Nikam supplies, are employing apps to help growers track their post-harvest dealings, some like the Sahyadri Sahakari Sakhar Karkhana Ltd have gone a step further. This particular cooperative, based in Satara’s Karad taluka, is using a mobile-based programme to even track cane planting and registration operations. According to Prakash Sonawane, IT manager at the mill, its specialised custom-made app helps get more reliable data on cane acreages and yields. That, in turn, allows for drawing up accurate time tables for harvesting of cane from individual farms. It ultimately translates into higher sugar recoveries, as the mill gets to process fully-mature and ready-to-crush cane.
Currently, data on cane availability within the command area of mills is largely compiled manually based on registrations by growers just after planting of their crop. Such registrations happen during July-August for the 18-month “adsali” cane (crushed by mills from December of the following year), while being done in September-October for the 15-month “pre-seasonal” and in December-January for the 14-month “suru” crops. Once the farmers have intimated the field offices of mills about their planting details, the latter send their technical teams to verify the claims. These teams, comprising agriculture assistants and slip boys, visually inspect the farms. The information resulting from all this is what gets compiled at the central mill level, and helps to infer estimates (actually guesstimates) of cane area, yields and likely output for the season.
The above system, given its high dependence on visual inspection made at least a year prior to crushing, is prone to errors – including those due to wrong manual entries. That is where mobile apps using GPS tagging could well make a difference, if it is already not.
The special utility app developed by the Sahyadri Sahakari Sakhar Karkhana, which is in operation for the last three years, is claimed to have significantly improved the cane availability estimates from the mill’s command area. “This app has been downloaded by our 130 slip boys on to their phones. These boys, who carry out the survey work for cane area estimation, switch the app on while moving around the perimeter of individual farms, which enables geo-tagging of the fields on GoogleMaps. Once the four corners of the field are uploaded, the app prompts the slip boy to click a picture of the farmer on the field. The entire data is, then, transferred to the mill’s central server,” explains Sonawane.
With geo-tagging, the slip boys also have the option of uploading additional details such as availability of irrigation and the presence/absence of approach roads. Apart from contributing to better yield estimates, these allow the mill to plan better the entry and operation of mechanical cane harvesters or labourers in the field. The grower’s picture, moreover, is proof of his/her consent to the information provided. This is unlike in manual entry, where there is scope for dispute between the grower’s claims of area planted and that recorded by the slip boy, adds Sonawane.
Shree Datta Shetkari Sahakari Sakhar Kharkhana at Kolhapur’s Shirol taluka has, likewise, armed its slip boys with a special app for enumeration of cane planting area. “This app, published in Google Play Store, provides for online cane registration as well as informing growers about their crop weight and payment details. Not only is information now available at the click of a button, but it is more accurate, while helping us to plan our cane scheduling and crushing operations better,” points out M V Patil, managing director of the cooperative mill.
Samarjitsinh Ghatge, chairman of the Shahu Sahakari factory, believes that the real benefit from mobile app technology has been its bringing greater transparency in the dealings of mills with farmers. “Everything that our grower-shareholders want to know is made available through the app. While doing away with their need to come to the mill each time, it has at the same time helped cement a stronger relation of trust with them,” he affirms.