The one thing business teaches you to sniff out fast is the money in every crisis. The biggest problem in the Indian countryside today is an acute labour shortage. Sure enough , it has become a corporate goldmine . ET helps you join the dots. Farmers are spending 40 paise on hiring labour out of every rupee they invest in a crop. Even then, there is no guarantee of help to cope with the back-breaking task of growing food, fibre and feed. In theory , one out of every two Indians is employed on a farm. In reality, skilled labour is now so scarce and expensive that farm-owners have to either scale down operations or suffer yield and quality losses. Sensing their desperation, companies are lining up with solutions. Mechanisation is the most obvious one.
Machines were always available for tilling, sowing, spraying and harvesting crops. Drip irrigation , where entire field is watered at the push of a button, is increasingly becoming popular. The big difference now is that mechanisation is driven by consumer demand rather than subsidy push from central and state governments . Farmers themselves want to buy these cost-effective machines that come with peace of mind and independence attached. From tea and cereals to sugarcane and spices, farmers are replanting fields keeping machinery in mind. Commercial broiler poultry farms are adopting expensive automation that can cost . 80-100 per bird because savings in wage bill and efficiency make it worthwhile.
The biggest companies are fast launching new models of tractors, harvesters and power tillers. The number of patents filed in India for agricultural machinery has jumped 20% between 2008 and 2010. No wonder then that CII this month asked for greater push to the $250-million farm machinery market through soft loans, subsidised lease rental schemes and shifting subsidy from rupees per kilo to rupees per acre. The smell of money is too enticing to be ignored. Unfortunately, machines can’t do weeding, a vital Six Sigma activity on each farm. The amount of time spent on weeding varies: from six days per acre of sorghum, 10 days per acre for groundnuts or sunflower , to 18-20 days per acre for maize .
Farm experts say late weeding can badly hit yields. The obvious solution is to replace manual weeding with herbicides, i.e., chemicals that kill them. Herbicide demand is rising sharply and could double in the next three years . Companies expect sales to touch $530 million by 2014. Market for glyphosate, the world’s top-selling herbicide, is expanding 20% every year because farmers can’t afford manual weeding any more. Chemical weeding is the hot new trend. Machines need land of certain minimum size to be effective. They run on increasingly expensive diesel and scarce electricity.
Most importantly , Indian farms are now being tended mostly by women, who find machinery and manual equipment too heavy to handle. Chemical weeding can hurt the crop as well as human health. Seed has no such disadvantage. It is affordable, plentiful, safe for human health, doesn’t need electricity , spare parts, instruction manuals or large farms. That’s why in a country with 121 million farms, most less than 2 hectares in size, the most daring and exciting solution to the labour problem is seed that doesn’t need frequent tending, weeding and harvesting. Money is pouring in. Seed companies are ploughing the biggest chunk of their R&D investment into cotton and corn, already the poster boys of science-driven industrial farming.
They are confident of good returns because of the value and convenience new seed will offer. Single-cross corn hybrids, for instance , can grow cobs at uniform height. That makes it easy to use mechanical harvesters. A new cotton hybrid ensures that all the bolls flower simultaneously . This means a field can be harvested manually in one go. Currently, farmers hire pluckers at . 300 per day thrice in a season because bolls on the same plant mature at different times.
Herbicide-tolerant corn and cotton allow farmers to spray the field with weed-killers without worrying about damaging the crop. That reduces the wage bill while increasing yields. Like the IT industry, agriculture too is facing a serious crunch of skilled manpower. With no chance of outsourcing or offshoring, farmers are eagerly buying products and technology that can free them from dependence on hired hands. For corporate India, hands-free agriculture is a mega profit opportunity that can only swell as more youth head towards city lights.
