German agritech major Bayer CropScience will expand its better life farming (BLF) programme in the country to cover as many as 2 million smallholder farmers by 2025. BLF, which comprises assorted farming services. will be reinforced with support from a clutch of firms and lenders including International Finance Corporation, Axis Bank, Netafim, Yara, DeHaat, Agri Bazaar and Big Basket, D Narain, CEO and MD told FE.
Launched in 2018, BLF benefits – – finance, irrigation, crop advisory and best agricultural practices – are currently available to more than 0.6 million farmers in India.
There are at present 1700 odd BLF centres operating across states including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and West Bengal.
“We have identified the geographies especially in central and eastern parts of the country which are agriculturally poorly served regions to scale up outreach of BLF and other programmes,” Narain, who is also the Global Lead for Bayer’s Smallholder Farming initiatives, said.
BLF centres are run by rural agri-entrepreneurs and each caters to more than 500-1000 farmers. “Through our model farms in these clusters of four to five centers and with the help of our agronomists, we are able to display and showcase the complete technology piece to farmers in those geographies,” Narain said.
BLF centres provide support in aggregation and marketing of farm produce to the farmers who grow several crops including rice, corn, vegetables and millet.
Besides supporting the farmer with risk mitigation strategy, Narain said that the company has been able to help smallholder farmers directly linked with procuring companies so that they get a better value for their produce.
The company through its collaboration with around 70 odd leading food companies under the ‘food chain partnership’ initiative is currently helping farmers in boosting production and exports of fruits, vegetables and other crops through better farm practices and regenerative agriculture for meeting consumer demand.
Launched in 2007, Bayer has partnered with farmers, processors, traders and retailers and currently has alliance with leading corporates and farmer producer organisations including Reliance Fresh, LT Foods, ITC, Nestle, Mc Cain, PepsiCo, GreenYard, Mother Dairy, Big Basket, Fortune Rice, Purandar Highlands and Sahyadri farms. “The focus of the programme is to meet the domestic nutrition requirements of agricultural crops and we are helping all the partners for producing and making them available for export-compliant production,” Narain said.
Bayer has committed to support more than 100 million smallholder farmers in developing countries by 2030 as part of its global sustainability initiative.