Warehousing and Farmers
“Every farmer during the time of harvest knows that if he/she may hold on to the grains, cereals, millets, pulses, oilseeds etc. for a few more days extra then the prices in APMC will at least be 2 or 2.5 times better. All that are needed are some scientifically designed warehouses close to village rice & Dal mills.” Said a senior colleague from a bank recently.
In 1990’s we’re running an NGO in Bastar Chhattisgarh where we ourselves provided capital assistance of TRIFED (Tribal Marketing Federation) to several primary forest coops in villages. We saw this holding capacity of communities getting translated into beautiful marketing returns for Tamarind, Honey, several medicinal and aromatic plants, silk cocoons etc.
Thus, I asked my colleague what is his idea of solving this problem. He cited the overall warehousing context which is worth understanding here:
Our country is estimating 328 Million MT of overall grain production in 2022-23 which can be further broken down as
- Wheat 106 MMT
- Rice 105 MMT
- Pulses (Produced) 8.37 MMT + Pulses imported 2.7 MMT
- Millets, Oilseeds etc. 105.9 MMT
- Sugar 34.7 MMT
In terms of warehousing capacities we as a country have reached a new high of 42.5 Million sq ft of warehousing space or 3.95 million sq mtrs
How much grain will this be able to store? We asked “Google” which that for “Wheat” it’ll be better to multiply this area with 4 mtrs height and find the volume and then calculate @ 790 kgs/ m3 (Cubic meters). That’s complex mathematics for us yet we did it and found that we’ll have capacity of store 124.8 MMT (Million Metric Tons) of our produce.
My limited understanding is that beyond cereals, pulses, oilseeds, millets and Sugar we also have to provide dry and scientific warehouses for Spices, NTFPs (Non-timber Forest Produce), Tendu leaves, Fodder stock (grasses), salt, oil, several other edibles (groceries), market based warehouses and we’re not even touching perishables here!!!
In this process of discovering some more we came across the wonderful work that #ergos (HQ in Patna) has started doing (https://lnkd.in/gsi83SpN).
So maybe a good amount of revenue is hidden for both farmer producers (through avoiding the glut of supplies immediately after harvests) and for a series of small warehouses across the country by private agripreneurs awaits our attention.
Worth Noting: If these warehouses are “WRDA approved” (Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority) then the farmers can avail loans from all banks against the Warehouse Receipts of their stocks.
Maybe small and marginal farmers getting together under “Farmers Producers Companies” will be the instruments to get this facility.
FDIs and Grants willing to partner with us for promoting Warehousing Startups and help Indian Farmers reach enhanced incomes.
