Akanksha Barot · How I can help
How I can help
Six kinds of organisation, and what each one usually needs first.
Any organisation that deals with farmers ends up needing the same two things: a product that survives the field, and an operation around it that survives the second year. I have built both, at 0 to 1 and at 1 to 10, in India and Indonesia. What differs by organisation is which one is currently on fire.
What the help is
Two halves, and the software is the smaller one.
- 01
The operation around the product
Process and workflow design, implementation planning, reporting lines, and stakeholder management across NGOs, cooperatives, agronomists, dealers and field teams. Most farmer platforms fail here rather than in the code.
- 02
The product itself
Design, architecture, build and implementation. Discovery in the field, a roadmap tied to a metric someone is accountable for, and the thing shipped and running.
Six kinds of organisation
Different first problems, the same field.
Every one of these deals with farmers. What changes is who carries the cost when the product does not get used.
You have a farmer-facing product and a number it has to reach. The 0 to 1 failure and the 1 to 10 failure are different problems.
What I would doA farmer network you already own, and a digital layer that has not yet earned its cost. Usually a workflow problem wearing a software costume.
What I would doDiligence on farmer-facing portfolio companies, and help for the ones whose adoption numbers are not what the deck implied.
What I would doProgrammes that have to work after the grant ends, and hand over to people who were not in the design meetings.
What I would doExtension services and public schemes delivered at population scale, where procurement shapes the product more than the brief does.
What I would doTraceability and audit evidence produced as a by-product of work farmers already do, rather than as a second job nobody is paid for.
What I would doWhat I have built
The product streams, and what each one is backed by.
Where a stream carries a named product and role, it says so. Where it does not, it says that too.
- Farmer advisory
Agronomy guidance a farmer acts on the same week, in the language and at the reading level they actually have. In AgriCentral that meant seven languages, activity schedules built from the crop and the sowing date, and a question channel answered by agronomists and by other farmers.
Source: AgriCentral, Head of Product 2018–2021, launched 31 December 2018. Jiva, Product Lead 2021–2025. - Weather forecast communication
The forecast is a commodity. Turning it into an instruction someone trusts enough to change a spray date is the product.
Source: A fifteen day outlook inside AgriCentral, and the forecast panel on the Jiva advisory screen. - Pest and disease advisory
Identification, threshold and treatment, with a false-positive cost measured in a farmer’s money.
Source: Crop Care in AgriCentral: image-based pest and disease detection, shipped while I was Head of Product. - Remote-sensing crop health
Satellite and imagery-derived crop health turned into a plot-level action rather than a false-colour map.
No published metric. Capability I have worked in. Nothing is claimed for it here until there is a number and a product to attach it to. - Crop and produce procurement
Harvest purchase: quality capture, price agreement, weighment, and payment that lands when it was promised.
Source: Jiva, one of four core services on the direct-to-farmer platform. - Agri e-commerce
Input sales to farmers who compare against the dealer they have borrowed from for fifteen years. Price intelligence is the other half: AgriCentral carried more than a hundred crops across roughly two thousand Indian markets.
Source: Jiva agri-ecommerce. AgriCentral Market View. Marketplace GTM across Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Snapdeal and ShopClues at BoostMySale. - Field agent management
Visit planning, sequencing, coordination and what each agent is accountable for by the end of the day.
Source: Jiva field coordination product, Indonesia. Roughly 30 percent field staff productivity gain. - Leadership reporting
The internal view leadership actually steers on, rather than the deck assembled the night before the board call.
Source: Internal operations tooling at AgriCentral and Jiva. - Dealer, distributor and last-mile delivery
Wholesale and retail chains, delivery to the village, and payment collection from people who deal in cash.
Source: Three business lines at FarmBee across telecom, commodity trading and content monetisation. - Micro-financing
Credit that reaches a smallholder without an address, a credit file, or a spare afternoon.
Source: Jiva, one of four core services on the direct-to-farmer platform. - Farm automation
Instrumented irrigation and equipment, and the far harder question of who maintains it in year three.
No published metric. Capability I have worked in. Nothing is claimed for it here until there is a number and a product to attach it to. - Traceability
A chain of custody from plot to buyer where every record was produced by someone doing their job anyway.
Source: Rebuilt as figure four on the home page from the production product.
Next
Start with the problem.
A description of what is stuck is more useful than a brief. If none of the six pages fits, say so and describe the situation instead.