In December, a single room in a dusty direction in North Bangalore, India, was the setting for the next step of a thrilling food assignment. There was lots of sparkling produce, while banners, balloons, and free meals created a pageant atmosphere. The shrine in a single corner to the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, who represents wealth and prosperity, became a reminder of this task’s last objective: enhancing farmer livelihoods.
Kisan Saathi is a social organization operating to cut down on the many intermediaries. The numerous steps that reduce produce high-quality and farmer earnings as meals make their manner to Bangalore’s consumers. Typically, farm products go to a village aggregator, then an agricultural produce marketplace committee, then a wholesaler, and then to outlets and customers sooner or later. The system takes two or three days, and each intermediary takes a reduction out of farmer profits. There’s also a wide quantity of wastage along with the numerous steps.
Kisan Saathi is looking to reduce the steps by replacing the aggregators, committees, and wholesalers with a single intermediary that offers marketplace hyperlinks and builds farmers’ capacity. This includes support with crop manufacturing, contracts, agribusiness advertising, and technological improvements like drones to monitor fields.
Another technological tool assisting farmers is sun insect traps, which cost approximately INR 4,000 (US$57) per unit, in keeping with Prem Kumar Rathod, the top of Kisan Saathi. The company is likewise developing upgraded versions of pushcarts, which can be ubiquitous around Bangalore. The tooled-up versions will encompass digital scales, shows, and refrigerators. These are expected to be ready by April 2021.
Rathod estimates that for every kilogram of tomatoes offered, this integrated version adds 3–4 more rupees (approximately 50 cents) for the farmer. This represents a 10–20% earnings improvement, consistent with Rathod. He additionally estimates a 10–12% reduction in food waste compared to conventional gadgets.
Kisan Saathi is currently funded by the kingdom government of Karnataka. The enterprise operates with around 200,000 farmers in Karnataka and over a hundred clients.
While the corporation has existed since 2015, the farmers’ keep was inaugurated in December, and it’s now not the only agency taking on India’s complex web of agricultural intermediaries. It is not the simplest Logitech-related startup in India.
Venkatesh Reddy is a mixed-crop farmer who grows produce like tomatoes and potatoes. He calls for extra assistance for farmers like himself. Reddy says that he and his fellow farmers supported through Kisan Saathi have seen better earnings due to factors like a publish-harvest recommendation, consisting of “pre-cooling, sorting and grading and packing as in keeping with buyer requirement.”
Meeting purchaser conditions is one part of the puzzle. Other aspects include shipping, a waste discount, market linkages, and technical statistics. All of those display the advantage of a one-stop shop for supporting India’s city farmers to make the most of their work. While many commercially available nutritional supplements are available at every corner, through necessity, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does little to regulate the manufacturing of food supplements such as vitamins, minerals, and herbal products. The FDA cannot manage its main tasks of regulating the pharmaceutical industry and ensuring the safety of the American food supply.
In the last several years, many counterfeit pharmaceutical products have been discovered. For example, flu medication sold online, manufactured outside of the United States, was found to be gelatin capsules filled with sheetrock particles. Besides, Americans have seen case after case of E. coli and Salmonella contamination of both American and foreign farm crops such as lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and peppers enter our grocery stores. Some of these products were even the so-called “organic” products, purported to be safer than traditional crops.
Why a Whole Food Supplement
There is inadequate supervision of the pharmaceutical and food production industries, so there is even less of the nutritional supplement market. The average vitamin or nutritional supplement is manufactured using chemical synthesis and heat processing, which destroys the product’s nutritional value. Many commercially available products are manufactured with fillers, additives, preservatives, and other dubious chemicals. Whole food supplements are not.
Significant shortcomings have come to light within the last several years regarding foreign-made food and health products. Many products have proven to be contaminated with the known chemicals in the American food supply and much more dangerous unknown chemicals that should never enter the manufacturing process. The only way to ensure this does not happen is to purchase high-quality products from a company with a well-established reputation for maintaining high manufacturing and purity standards. As whole food supplements are natural products, it would be optimal if the manufacturer employed sustainability and green policy practices.
