Syngenta India launches multilingual app for farmers

Crop protection and seed major Syngenta India has launched a multilingual ‘cropwise grower’ application, which provides farmers with facilities such as digital agronomy services, farm loan, product scan, drone services, mandi prices and weather-based advisory.

The app, which currently provides crop advisory services for nine crops including rice, cotton, soyabean and vegetables, is available to farmers in nine major languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali.

Susheel Kumar, country head and MD, Syngenta India, told FE that the company will eventually provide all the services customised based on farmers’ request through the introduction of a chart box in the app.

App-based services would include personalised crop calendars, nutrient recommendations, image-based disease diagnostics and credit access to small farmers.

″We will gradually introduce several services or features, including a chart box for providing interactive interface for the farmers so that the customised advisory would be provided on various aspects such as pests, usage of pesticides, agronomics services to be followed by the farmers,″ Kumar said.

The app can be downloaded from the Play Store on Android devices.

Earlier, Syngenta India had tied up with fintech partner Jai Kisan, which enables farmers to access various financial products, including credit at a reasonable interest rate.

Under a partnership model, the farmers have access to the selected retailers to get easy finance through hassle-free documentation and convenient repayments for meeting their expenses for carrying out agricultural activities. Under Jai Kisan, farmers avail loans up to `30,000 for one season for a period of 120 days.

″Farmers get access to availability of credit through this app,″ Kumar said.

The company has been promoting extensive usage of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and drones to expand outreach among farmers of its crop protection products consisting of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides.

Among the first companies to get approval for using drones for spraying of agro-chemicals, Syngenta is all set to scale up the use of drones in agriculture. Syngenta is ready with two products (a fungicide and insecticide) for six crops for drone spraying. It is also the leading producer of vegetable seeds — tomato, capsicum, chili, watermelon and corn seeds.

Syngenta, which had set up research and development facility at Goa in 1998, had also invested in research stations in Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh, where field trials on various crops for the diverse agro-climatic zones are being undertaken.

The company will be focusing on expanding its outreach among the small holder farmers in the North-Eastern states in the hybrid seeds of crops such as tomato, pepper, okra, cauliflower, watermelon, cucumber, gourds etc.