Bengaluru, May 24: Infoholic Research LLP, a global ICT and Electronics market research and consulting organization, has published a study titled “Worldwide Advanced Farming:Market Drivers, Opportunities, Trends and Forecasts, 2016-2022” (May 2016).
Infoholic Research forecasts that advanced farming will change the way agriculture is practiced and will result in increased productivity, better crop-yields and reduce the demand of manual labour on farms. With higher ownership and deployment of farm mechanization equipment across large, corporate farms/plantations, and the rising trend of custom hiring of equipment by individual/family owned holdings for tillage, sowing, plant protection, harvesting, post-harvest processing and so on, the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4% during the period 2016-2022 to touch an aggregate of $ 25.81 billion by 2022. Most of the Advanced Farming systems are linked with Farming Management Systems (FMS); these technologies also help farmers track and monitor animal health. In the last 2-3 years, cloud based FMS have started penetrating into the Advanced Farming market.
“Advanced Farming is turning out to be a key revenue pocket for policy makers and agri-equipment makers. However, faced with economic challenges and a dynamic global commodities market, adoption is subject to farmers’ feeling the need to acquire appropriate technology within a suitable farming policy framework,” said Tariq A. Shaik, Research Manager at Infoholic Research.
Advanced Farming and its close cousin, farm mechanization, are still in a nascent stage of adoption in emerging economies, and need significant support from governments to achieve higher market penetration. Despite the potential, bringing about sustainable growth in the advanced farming market remains a challenge for most developing countries on account of various macro-economic, demographic and market factors:
The benefits of the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s-1980s have run their course in major emerging markets such as India;
Changing consumer choices – food preferences and habits are increasingly influenced by health, lifestyle and convenience considerations;
Non-availability of farm labor during peak season;
Rising production costs such as seeds and chemical fertilizers;
Resource scarcity and efficient utilization of the same, for example, water for irrigation in dryland farming, and
Impact of climate change on crop yields and the need to develop drought-resistant, high yield plant and crop varieties.
In view of the above, leading stakeholders in the business, especially large, MNC vendors need to invest in research and development and testing of market-specific machinery and equipment for standardization and quality control, and education, training and popularization.
“Private investment in the field of agriculture will drive the market for the next few years. Developing regions and countries are expected to register high growth due to increased demand for food grains, vegetables, fruits and dairy products, and a shift from subsistence farming to cash crops as incomes rise, lifestyles change and rural populations migrate to urban areas,” said PreetiWadhwani, Senior Research Analyst at Infoholic Research.
