AgroTrust, the brainchild of Gaurav Somwanshi (Founder, EmerTech Innovations) and Vilas Shinde (Chairman, Sahyadri Farms) is an attempt to create a transparent relationship between farmers and consumers. Farmers generally battle a myriad of factors on a regular to ensure good crop produce and sale. Amidst the COVID 19 pandemic, this process has become all the more precarious. Combating this with their success story is Sahyadri Farms, a co-operative aimed at ensuring farmers remain the primary beneficiaries of the sales of their produce. Despite a majority of the country working in agriculture, the sector has remained largely unorganized and severely underpaid over the years. From a lack of capital and infrastructure to middleman exploitation, there is no dearth of challenges faced by rural and urban farmers. To eliminate the same and create a smoother end-to-end process, Mr Vilas Shinde began the blockchain technology initiative in collaboration with Gaurav Somwanshi’s team. This is a secure cloud-based ledger that can store amounts of information in a secure and transparent manner. In this manner, they are able to ensure transparency for farmers and traceability for consumers. Introduced in March, it will soon be launched on a full scale to enable farmers to track the sale of their produce, and consumers to see exactly who produced it and how, and how much of their money went back to farmers. By reducing the layers in between, they are able to provide better facilities to farmers for storing their produce and selling at a sustainable price, with quality assured to consumers as well. Working with 8,000 farmers, they’ve sold Rs 4 crores worth of produce since the beginning of the lockdown. This was aided by introducing a basket system, with the different sized and priced baskets for families to be delivered in select slots. They are successfully delivering these baskets to select areas in Pune, Mumbai, and Nashik. Digitization of agriculture is a slow process, and success stories of this scale especially in times like these bring a much-needed ray of hope for farmers and consumers alike. Story by Gaurav Somwanshi.