Ergos app reshapes how small farmers sell their crops in India – Courtesy of Kishor Kumar Jha / via Better India
From the Indian state of Bihar comes the story of a life-changing argi-tech application that’s giving farmers unprecedented control over the financial destiny of their crop.
Called Ergos, this digital “grain account” is linked to a network of “grain banks” where farmers can store their crops, monitor inventory and national prices, and sell when they’re ready too with the touch of their phone.
Farming is a hard job with no shortage of anxieties. No small landowning farmer has the hours to spare during harvest season to build a network of brokers, couriers, and sales teams that would be necessary to get their grain to market at a price that will reliably put food on their table.
That’s where that most infamous and mostly necessary figure in commerce comes in: the middle man. Before, one farmer said, middle men would quote prices, and farmers had little choice but to sell or risk their crop wasting away.
This status quo was something Kishor Kumar Jha and Praveen Kumar hoped to end. They founded Ergos, the system of grain banks and accounts to remove these middle men and allow farmers complete control of their sales decisions.
Ajay Kumar Chaudhary, a 66-year-old farmer from Bihar’s Kalyanpur, spoke to the Better India news outlet about his experience using Ergos, and how it transformed him from distressed seller to patient trader.
“If they said the price has fallen by 10 [rupees] today, we had to sell at that rate,” he explains. “Now we decide when to sell. If the price is not good today, we can wait. Maybe after a few days, the rate becomes better.”
“If we need money immediately,” Chaudhary says,” we can take a loan at about 1% interest and keep the grain stored The loan is automatically repaid when the grain is eventually sold.”
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Borrowing money in the developing world can be extremely costly. If you think a 19.5% interest on your Discover card is a lot, try signing for some of the rates that these Bihari farmers are subjected to: often 50, 60%.
Undoubtedly some of that is predatory. On the other hand, consider the risks involved in lending money to a poor farmer who has little in the way of farm machinery, sanitary grain storage capacity, A-rated collateral, or effective pest control measures.
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The farmer reiterated that in his profession, there are no shortages of uncertainties: weather, political decisions, pests and crop health, and of course, market pricing. But with the introduction of Ergos, at least one major dependency has been removed.
The benefits, explains the business’s founder Jha, extend beyond the farmer and his finances, and indeed touch the whole nation. India loses approximately 18% of her harvested grain every year, Jha says, through improper storage facilities. The village grain banks operated by Ergos use scientific best-practices for keeping grain stored for long periods without rot.
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