Professional Farm Management Services - An Opportunity!
1. In every city there are thousands of urban land owners - in possession of prime agriculture lands. It is estimated that about 10 million absentee – investor farmers holds about 10 % of the agriculture land along the 50 kilometer’s periphery of any city.
2. Despite being very productive and high quality about 90 % of this land is very poorly managed and does not generate any valuable outputs for owners. Also, for majority it is an annual cash outgo to even maintain the land.
3. These lands are also not offered on long term lease - as the present land lease laws do not provide the security expected by the owners to retrieve the land as & when needed by them.
4. The present share cropping system with so called “claimed to be farmers but with very little managerial abilities” is very inefficient and is also not fair to the best interests of the land owner. On the contrary it definitely offers better opportunities for exploitation to share cropper.
5. This has been the situation for last 50 years for sure and may continue in future as well. This is despite the recent advancements made in technology. The problem with technology is that those who knows technology - do not know agriculture and is true vice a versa as well.
6. There is need to set up a “Farm Management Advisory Services” with following components;
6.1 Step 1: Undertake a feasibility study of farm unit - complete 360 Degree evaluation to help prepare complete plans, including suggested activities, investment estimates, operations, revenue projections etc.
6.2 Step 2: On approval - convert the above plans in to execution guidelines with complete details including cost estimates, vendor details, service providers, time lines etc.
6.3 Step 3: If agreed - then carry out the execution on turn key basis. (through internal resource or by contract service providers)
6.4 Step 4: Take the responsibility for regular and day to day monitoring of progress and ensuring adherence to plans and projections. This was expected to be at two levels:
6.4.1 Provide only data - surveillance - analytics based reports. (kind of Farm Management cum Accounting Software)
6.4.2 Additionally take the responsibility and provide the corrective action services, based on above.
6.5 Step 5: Take the responsibility for value addition and marketing linkages services.
7. The different clients can subscribe to different service packages, making it viable to service provider.
8. The fees can be charged as package costs. Expenses can be on reimbursement basis. Profit sharing and in any combination/s of above.
9. With the requisite expertise, experiences, understanding and access to experts, professionals, etc it can be standardized as the processes can also be automated to make it a scalable operation.
10. Beginning with this service portfolio, the opportunity can expand to cover many more peripheral business activities at back-end as well as in front-end domain of agri-value chain to make this a worthwhile pursuit and excellent employment opportunity for agriculture graduates.
