SSNUP project completion: crop quality evaluation via an AI app in India

Sohan Lal Commodity Management Pvt Ltd (SLCM), is a leading Indian agri-service company that provides warehousing, collateral management, financial and procurement services. The company primarily supports smallholder farmers with a focus on both profitability and social impact.

At SLCM, quality assessments are crucial for regularly monitoring crops stored in the warehouses to determine sale prices or their value as collateral to secure financing.

A SSNUP co-funded project by impact investor Incofin replaced the cumbersome, manual quality control of rice, maize and chickpeas with an artificial intelligence – based mobile application, thereby drastically reducing the assessment time from three days to three seconds. 

Image

Accelerated crop listings and sales

The app automatically identifies the commodity, classifies defects using image analysis and determines quality grades and prices. This is not only faster but also much cheaper and more transparent than the manual procedure which involved sealing and sending samples to a lab for analysis and generating quality reports, with costs generated by courier services, quality scientists, lab administration and reporting.

In addition, the app provides a more direct connection between smallholders, traders, processors and consumers    , thereby facilitating quicker sales at a fair and unbiased price, enlisting crops for trade in a shorter period of time and fostering mutual confidence for future higher value transactions on the rice, maize and chickpea markets.

Multiple benefits for smallholder farmers

As a result of the SSNUP project, 230 000 smallholder farmers now benefit from transparent and fair pricing, cost savings as well as accelerated crop listings and sales.  

Image

The project also demonstrated that smallholder farmers can directly benefit from value chain digitalisation, even without using the technology themselves, and that market enhancement and improved transparency between various actors along the chain can ultimately benefit all actors.