Start-up Stars: How Salam Kisan is democratising data-driven agriculture

Adgully has been turning the spotlight on the entrepreneurs who fought against all odds to bring their dreams to fruition in our special series – START-UP STARS. We at Adgully wholeheartedly support the ‘Vocal for Local’ movement and have been featuring numerous local/ homegrown businesses, brands, and Apps in the country launched in the last few years.

In conversation with Adgully, Dhanashree Mandhani, Founder & CEO, Salam Kisan, speaks about the growth and entrepreneurial journey of Salam Kisan, venturing into a challenging field like agritech, empowering farmers across the country, and more.

Could you tell us about your journey as an entrepreneur? What motivated you to establish Salam Kisan?

It was during my time at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2019 that I realized the immense difference between the farming ecosystems in India and the United States. While farmers in India earned less than $3,000 each year, those in America earned an average of anything between $60,000 and $180,000. Looking at this disparity, I decided to further get insights and pursued an internship at an agricultural-based company in India.

It led me to set up a call center, through which I interacted with over 100 farmers and more than 50 professionals in the sector. These conversations helped me understand the challenges that they faced on the ground. After keenly observing our nation’s agricultural operations for around 8 months, I realized that we can improve farmer productivity and profitability through technological adoption. Hence, Salam Kisan was established, an agritech platform that facilitates data-driven decision-making from pre-sowing to post-harvest for farmers across the country. We bring together different stakeholders from across the agricultural value chain to fill the gaps in the sector.

What was the need of Salam Kisan from a consumer’s perspective? What is the core business proposition?

The agritech sector in India has huge potential for growth and evolution. While the demand for food is increasing, climate volatility is impacting the yield. In this scenario, the need to support our farmers with tech-enabled innovative solutions for better yields is much greater. Precision agriculture, digital advisory, and predictive analytics can bring multi-fold transformation by improving productivity and sustainability across crops, soil types, and farm sizes. This is exactly what we are striving to offer with Salam Kisan.

We are taking the lead in the ongoing agricultural revolution in India by developing comprehensive, data-driven solutions for the farming community. With a successful track record of improving lives in Maharashtra through our app-based solutions, we are ideally situated to expand across the country. Our main objective is to empower Indian farmers through an integrated agritech platform that provides everything from hyperlocal weather alerts, tailored crop advising, access to inputs and financing, and end-to-end market connections.

What are your key learnings so far? How do you see the Salam Kisan ecosystem progressing in 2024?

In this journey of establishing Salam Kisan as a business that empowers farmers across the country, I have learnt numerous lessons. One of the many lessons includes adapting to business and market needs while keeping track of ongoing trends to gain a competitive edge. Since we are in the agritech industry, it is even more important to continuously evolve with tech developments and stay attuned to farmers’ needs to build suitable solutions. For that, I make it a priority to study market insights weekly. The aim is to increase productivity and profitability through data-driven practices, transparent market linkages, affordable agri-services, and timely precision advisory.

Since we are trying to address a challenge as immense as ensuring food security, my approach is usually breaking it down into smaller manageable pieces and tackling them systematically, one at a time. For now, we have started by leveraging data-driven farming practices to increase yield as well as offering access to the transparent marketplace for enhanced profitability. Our affordable precision agricultural services make farming productive and profitable for farmers. By methodically resolving these interconnected aspects in a supply chain, we are working to progressively inch closer to empowering India’s farmers and food security.

Another lesson that I’ve learnt is that staying ahead of the curve and beating the curve is a lot about looking at the most efficient, seamless ways to solve the problem. This is why throughout our comprehensive solutions we focus a lot on whether we are solving the problem in the most efficient way possible, from every front including process, product, cost and time efficiency. We constantly evaluate our solutions from this lens. Never being complacent and always learning is key for progress.

As our business model’s accuracy relies on the data we have access to, we plan to continue focusing on curating authentic real-time datasets and best practices directly from the farming community going ahead. This is the primary reason why our current efforts are solely concentrated within Maharashtra. Once we have established a robust success story and proven track record in this state, we will consider expanding our operations to other regions.

In 2024, after scaling up in Maharashtra, we target deeper penetration on both the input and output front. We’re planning to collect more data to improve the accuracy of our calendars for enhancing our precision agriculture tools. Also, we will be introducing financial services by conducting eligibility checks and connecting farmers with relevant banks for availing loans. This fiscal year, we intend to make our drone services accessible in more districts, while adding drone-enabled seed spraying and crop monitoring to our offerings.

What were the challenges that you faced in your start-up journey and how did you overcome them?

I established Salam Kisan when I was 20 years old and in college. I was initially told not to venture into a challenging field like agritech, primarily because of my age, gender, and lack of prior work experience. Some people even said that I was being too ambitious since I was trying to create an impact across the entire agricultural supply chain. It was chaotic to balance both work and school, but it was important to ensure that people in the business took me seriously despite my age. The only way to overcome these challenges was to keep showing up, learning continuously, and trusting myself.

Despite all the challenges that I face even today, I know that we can democratize data-driven agriculture through the work that we are driving at Salam Kisan.

What are your plans for the year ahead?

Salam Kisan is driven by the ambition to positively influence rural communities in India. Being a tech-driven platform, we see the Indian agritech sector’s potential to become a $34 billion market by 2027 as an opportunity to contribute to its growth. Our focus will continue to be on pioneering research in frontier agritech, whether it’s about using AI-enabled image recognition for crop disease monitoring or employing satellite data and ML models for yield forecasting. Through our offerings, we also hope to influence other agricultural segments such as residue-free farming, precision agriculture, farm-to-fork integration, and improved use of big data in agriculture in the year ahead. All in all, farmer’s needs remain at the center of our innovation.