Context:

• The year 2019 turned out to be a golden year for the 450-odd registered agriculture-technology start-ups, as they witnessed a growth rate of 25% (Nasscom, 2019).

Why agri start-ups are important?

• Indian agricultural ecosystem is thickly populated by smallholders and driven by informality in the domestic markets, and lack of scalability, traceability, transparency in agri-value chains has made agribusiness less trusted, ill-governed and less remunerative to farmers and/or processors.
• Hence, an end-to-end technology-enabled architecture is necessary to integrate the value chains spanning production, processing and distribution.
• To this end, agri/dairy-tech start-ups have gained salience because technology innovations brought out by these start-ups aim to capture or augment values in every possible “node” of the chain, and enhance chain traceability and efficiency through smart contract between multiple stakeholders.

Digital Technology start-ups:

• Digital technology start-ups have unleashed their potential in improving crop production systems, optimising utilisation of critical resources, enhancing traceability in food supply chains, and improving transparency in transactions.
• In addition, it provides agricultural market network to connecting farmer producer organisations with wholesale buyers, agri-finance companies, input suppliers, and logistics via market linkages.
• However, the fact is that most of these start-ups are yet to showcase scalable and time-tested solutions.

Steps to sustain the agri start-ups and integrate them into agri-value chains:

• First, especially for agri/dairy-tech start-ups, business-to-business (B2B) is emerging as a revenue-generating segment relative to B2C and, thus, these start-ups need to partner with corporates and government agencies for value creation and appropriation.
• Some of these have already marked their footprints in employment rationalisation, stakeholder empowerment, supply chain integration, processing and exports, resource utilisation, and digital infrastructure.
• Second, public-private partnership (PPP) in agricultural value chains is gaining ground for start-ups as they can benefit to private as well as public sector through formalising value chain finance, improving decision-making, streamlining direct benefit transfer or subsidies, accessing large markets and so on.
• Third, fund-raising remains a challenge as start-ups require a few critical years to withstand the test of time. Impact investors can, therefore, come forward to enable performing start-ups achieve their scalability and viability in value chain businesses.
• Fourth, agri-tech start-ups regulation calls for a robust policy framework—integrating financial inclusion, agribusiness incubation and acceleration, data privacy and sharing, and licensing policies into a single-window system. 
• Fifth, as agriculture and dairying is a state subject, agriculture and animal husbandry universities and anchored extension agencies need to identify potential start-ups for tie-up for technology solutions such as farming as a service and crop/livestock management.
• Agribusiness incubation centres should rope in agri-tech start-ups to sustain technology transfer from lab to land and attain scalability in agri-value chains.
• Sixth, there is an utmost need for an appropriate institutional design, incentives and enabling market infrastructure to integrating digital technologies into agri-value chains.

Conclusion:

• In order to doubling the farmer’s income in the era of climate change, innovations and agri start-ups are vital.