Old traditions vs new skills India’s dairy farming is steeped in tradition. “VLEs and veteri- narians can help because we realised that dairy farming prac- tices in India have been passed on from generation to gener- ation; there’s never been formal training as such.” With the vets and VLEs, farmers can receive much-needed farming and digital skills. Aashna says, “For example, some farmers would give water to their cattle perhaps two or three times a day be- cause this is how they were taught, but it isn’t enough. Also in terms of hygiene, we’ve had cases where the water trough was filled with fungi and insects and not a lot of attention was given to cleanliness on farm.”
Gender equality Nearly 90% of backyard dairy farmers in India are women so we are looking at about 60 million farmers. Aashna adds that usually the men at the farm take the milk from the farm to col- lection centres, but the women are doing the actual farming. Also, there are a lot of cultural restrictions for women. “We re- alised that women were not present when the information was being passed on,” she says. VLEs go door to door to ensure that, from a gender perspective, the information gets to the right person. MoooFarm started working with Internet Saathis (internet trainers). Tata Trusts and Google joined forces in 2015 to address the gender gap and introduce a digital literacy pro- gramme in India, based on the train-the-trainer model. Women from villages are trained in using the internet and are equipped with data-enabled devices. By 2019, more than 80,000 women were trained. The Internet Saathis have covered nearly 50% of the villages in India already (nearly 300,000 villages). “We part- nered with the Internet Saathis – nearly 30 million women so far have been trained in digital skills through the Internet Saathi initiative, but owning a mobile device or having access to one continues to be a challenge,” she states.
Partnership in the Netherlands The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and MoooFarm are currently exploring a partnership
looking at smart farming and data sharing. “About 10 years ago, TNO, together with industry partners, education institu- tions and some dairy farms, started working on how to create more from the data we have to see, for example, how pieces of information can give you predictive information,” says Caro- line van der Weerdt, a consultant with TNO. In this framework, ICT technology and data infrastructure are significant factors. “The fact that MoooFarm is already crediting farmers for their data is unique, as we were already looking into a situation of mutual value, which is not necessarily monetary. With Mooo- Farm we are currently looking at three main factors: techno- logical, end-user adoption and business model. What would make a farmer adopt a solution is a very important aspect. In terms of data sharing, we already have experience with this in the Netherlands and with experience we can create a scalable situation for MoooFarm. We want to make it easy for a million farmers to connect in a data-driven way – to access all sorts of information and to interact, for instance through bench marking with other farmers,” says van der Weerdt.
Future vision MoooFarm will focus on India for the next two to three years. Param says that the next countries they would like to deploy their solutions to are Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Kenya and Bangladesh. Other plans also include e-pharmacy services, predictive health analysis and fintech services. “Hopefully in about 18 months we can make loans and insurances, as well as cattle trading, available to farmers. In terms of gender equali- ty, we would like to see better access to smartphones for wom- en. Another issue is ownership of animals – small animals like goats are usually owned by women but when it comes to large animals like cattle, men are the owners,” says Param. India’s dairy farming sector is certainly a binary one – im- mersed in tradition when it comes to farming practices, yet the sector is gaining momentum in the necessary skills and knowledge needed to enter the 21st
century. For more information visit:
mooofarm.com. ▶DAIRY GLOBAL | Volume 7, No. 3, 2020 15
PHOTOS: MOOOFARM
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