Interviewed By Bonnishikha Chowdhury, MBR Team

MBR: How was the idea of iFarmer initiated?

iFarmer: In Bangladesh, agriculture provides 40% of employment that provides food security and nutrition for 170 million people. However, agriculture and farming as a sector are declining. Farming and rural lifestyle is often romanticized but in reality, it is a thankless, risky, and even back-breaking job, especially as undertaken by the disadvantaged and vulnerable smallholder farmers. Almost 70% of the farmers are unbanked and thus have to rely on informal sources of capital or microfinance paying a very high-interest rate. As a result, farmers cannot invest in quality inputs or smart technologies to increase the quality and productivity of their farms.

On the other hand, most farmers have to rely on numerous intermediaries to sell their produce, resulting in a 30% postharvest loss and a 40% loss in revenue for farmers. Farmers transport their produce to the agricultural market at their own expense or sell it to a local trader without any knowledge of current market prices. Additionally, the long chain of intermediaries transfers their expenditures to the farmers, leading to unfair price discovery. Resulting in the high cost of capital and expenses, Farmers have no choice, but to sell their harvest at a throwaway price.

MBR: Could you please give us an overview of iFarmer in terms of services you offer, the number of clients you have and the size of your business, etc.?

iFarmer: iFarmer provides services to farmers in 3 categories. First, they provide them with access to finance by connecting them with individual or institutional funders. These funders invest in our portfolio and this money is then channeled to the farmers according to their needs and according to their requirements. Secondly, iFarmer provides advisory services to these farmers such as proper training on the recent farming techniques, ensuring quality inputs for all of the farms and lastly through IoT remote sensing for cattle, etc. that helps to get live health updates of each cattle. Lastly, iFarmer helps to sell their produce directly to the local market or to institutional buyers without going through 4-5 middlemen. Till now, iFarmer has worked with
20,000+ farmers and 1,000+ Urban Farm Funders in less than 3 years. It has earned a revenue of more than 577M BDT from its B2B Farm Produce Supply Chain.

MBR: How was the response of people in the initial stage? And what changes do you observe now?
Investors, Farmers, and Suppliers

iFarmer: During the initial stage, we personally reached out to all the farmers to let them know about our work. Some of them believed in us and took our services, while most of them did not. It took a while to gain the trust but once the farmers realized that the profit from the services we provided was higher, they eventually started to put their trust on us. We started our journey with a total of 50 Farmers now we have more than 20,000+ Farmers on board with us for whom we provide financial and advisory support. We faced similar challenges with our individual funders as well. Initially, we received our funding from our
friends and family who believed in our model, but now we are receiving great responses from every farm we launch. Recently in our B2B supply chain, we also partnered with institutional buyers who solely buy products from us. 

MBR: What are the challenges iFarmer is currently facing in general and how you are mitigating those?

iFarmer: Every day is a more challenging day than the other when you are running a startup. The biggest challenge that we have faced is to earn the trust of the farmers in providing them the right services and more importantly, ensuring their financial stability. We are also working towards building a more stable Supply Chain. Our key focus is to ensure more sales so that our
farmers can effortlessly sell their products to the end market. We have worked on it so far and now have more than 20,000+ farmers on our platform. The key to growth is to make mistakes, correct them, learn from them and move on.

MBR: What are the strategic priorities of iFarmer at the moment? How do you hope to scale up the business?

iFarmer: Currently, our biggest priority is to connect all dots which gives the farmers a 360-degree service starting from harvesting to selling their products to the end market. For which we are working to build a stronger and efficient supply chain. We are also working on generating demand from the market and for which we are building our own collection centers in our farm location to ensure proper supply and quality of products. In the next year, we plan to hold a good amount of the market to make sure our farmers are able to sell their products at the best possible price.