For any seed corporation or agro-input business, reaching its urban distribution centers, vendors, dealers is not a challenge. With a network of transport channels, stakeholders, touchpoints in place from the word go, consistently supplying agro-input products like seeds, chemicals, fertilizers becomes relatively simple.

However, the key consumers of various agro-input companies are farmers who have their livelihoods and farms established in their villages or nearby towns. Efficiently reaching out to farmers, rural vendors, traders and dealers is a challenge that many companies experience and due to a plethora of bottlenecks associated with the same, they prefer to keep it in their work-in-progress pipelines. But neglecting this vital rural last mile can adversely impact the growth of any agro-input company if they do not address the same at the right time.

What are the Key Challenges of Rural Last Mile?
Barring the logistical uncertainties, one of the main challenges for agro-input companies is to maintain the trust that is slowly established between the rural network of farmers, vendors, traders.
Often, the belowmentioned issues can exacerbate the professional trust that is sustained through efforts by the field forces:

Dissatisfied farmers and rural business network
Considering the ever-changing, dynamic weather conditions and local uncertainties, farmers need agro-products without any logistical delay. Yet, shipment delays, lack of co-ordination on ground can result in to delayed or incredibly late deliveries. This in turn makes the farmers more unhappy and dissatisfied with the agro-company.

Lack of communication channels to discuss the product quality
Product quality is vital in farming as in every other sector. In farming, however, its impact can cause long term ramifications. Therefore, a bad product can damage the entire harvest of farmers. Many times, farmers wish to share their inputs, suggestions for products as per their on-ground know-how, however due to no effective digital communication channels, field forces, they fail to do so. Hence, even agro-input companies bear the brunt of not receiving real-time, practical feedback from the farmers.

Dearth of tracking and product suggestion as per the terrain
On the other hand, due to lack of real-time tracking, data on the districts, villages and terrain of the farms, agro-input companies or their representatives end up sending products that are not really relevant to that particular region. This creates confusion on ground and farmers feel overwhelmed for being catered to as per their suggestions.

Increasing gap in the promised delivery time and actual delivery
Timelines are critical in farming. With changes in seasons, impact of pandemic, farmers need to think on feet and sow seeds, line up fertilizers. During such instances, if the companies fail to deliver the products on time then it can create a gap of professional reliance and it can cost the reputation of every stakeholder who is involved in the process.

Having closely observed all these bottlenecks of rural last mile that can hinder the growth of farmers and agro-input companies, we have developed an intuitive digital platform backed by agro-informatics - PANDO. Through PANDO, agro-input companies can outgrow all the aforementioned challenges and streamline their operations with the help of expert-guided field forces. To know more about PANDO and avail its demo, visit our website .