Increasing Labor productivity in farming

This challenge is about my village and issues faced by the farmers due to increase in labor cost. Rolling back the calendar to 30 years, when I was a kid, most of the families in my village depended on farming. Farming was the major source of income. Most of the work in farming like ploughing, seeding, spraying fertilizers and harvesting were done with manual labor and cattle.  Most of the labor was from the same village and nearby villages. Use of fertilizers was less and mostly it was cow dung. Every farmer used to have on average 10 to 15 cattle. I considered my village was a self sustained village in terms of food. Even cooking oils were produced in village by crushing seeds manually.

Recent years there was lot of migration of people to cities for the jobs due to low profitability of farming. This resulted in scarcity of the labor.  Launching National work for food program in 2004 made the situation worst and lot of workers preferred National work for food over farming. This increased the demand for the labor and results in steep rise in labor cost. Cost of farming became very expensive and farmer’s margins were decreased drastically. Most of farmers were in full of debts ,sold their lands  and left farming. Some of the farmers migrated to cities and are working as night watchmen.

Labor is mostly required at the time of harvesting the crop. Example chili growers harvest the chilies from month of December to March. The chilies are plucked with hand, chiller are dried under sun, dry chilies are graded properly before packing them into bags.

      

Harvesting season of the chilies required lot of labor for plucking the chilies. Cost of labor for plucking the chilies per 100 kgs will cost on average Rs 2000 to Rs. 3000 which is around 20% of the cost of chilies produced.  Sometimes, it is hard to get labor for plucking the chilies as it is very hot during the months. Some of the farmers go to nearby states to get labor, but these workers are not enough for harvesting all the fields. In 2016, when demonetization was implemented, the price of chili fell down as low as Rs. 3000  and most of the farmers left their fields without harvesting the chilies because of labor cost. Day by day labor issues become more severe. This is the same case with other crops like cotton, paddy etc.

In foreign countries, farmers keep chilies until the plant dry completely and cut the plants completely at once. This leads to low productivity of chilies and poor quality of chilies. There are some sophisticated technologies like robots being used in other countries to pluck capsicums. However, those robots can’t be used in for plucking the chilies as the size is very small. Not only this, technology need to be adapted in all the stages of cultivation from ploughing, spraying pesticides and harvesting.

In summary following are the major challenges

v These days ploughing is done using tractors. Sometimes it is very hard to get drivers for the tractors and farmers alone can’t drive tractors continuously. Tractors which can be operated remotely will help here. This makes farmers life easy and they can drive tractors remotely by sitting under the tree. Developing such technology is challenge. Not even autonomous tractors required. However, lot of tractor manufacturers like Mahindra working on autonomous tractors.

v Spraying pesticides are another pain point. Farmers spray fertilizers by holding big tank of fertilizer at the back. It is very difficult job and they have to carry this tank all over the field. This takes lot of time typically one day per acre. Spraying fertilizers also health hazardous. Getting labor for this job is very difficult. There are some solutions like spraying with drones, these are being used in other countries. This method will help in spraying fast, but there are chances of wastage of fertilizer and excess fertilizer on plants. In my view, spraying robots like small dragon ply which can suck fertilizer and can pump on plant in controlled manner will be useful and this will help in optimizing pesticides usage also.

v Plucking the chilies required lot of labor. Semi automated devices which can help labour for quickly plucking the chilies will help in reducing the labor cost. Existing robots may not be an option as they are very slow in execution.

v In order to adapt the technology into farming there is a need of huge capital investments. It is very difficult to farmers to buy such sophisticated equipment alone. So implementing concept of shared equipment will help for the farmers.

Lot of challenges to adapt technology in farming to increase the productivity and hence the profitability of farmers. I like to see one day farmer is again called as “ king”. Adapting the technology will help in attracting the youth and educated people to do farming which eventually help India and farming will again become backbone of Indian economy.

  

One-day experiment:

I like to conduct one-day experiment in my village to test following hypothesis

Hypothesis1: Farmers are willing to use technology if it is available for reasonable cost.

Hypothesis2: Performance of existing technology in farming

As a first step I like to get pesticide drones available online and like to make it available for the few of farmers for free of cost and like to take feedback from the farmers.

Cost of feticide spraying drones which is available online: $5699

Cost of my experiment will be $5699.

I will be conducting this experiment in my village during the season where there is a high demand for spraying fertilizers. Based on the results I like to take this idea forward to create platform where such equipment can be rented to farmers.

I can conclude my experiment is successful if following criteria are met

• Farmers are able to use the drone properly for feticide spraying and showing interest in using this again
• Time to cover one acres of land and also effectiveness of the spraying the feticides.