Sharing app for farm mechanization: Gold Farm's digitized access based solution for financially constrained farmers

Sengupta, Tuhin, Narayanamurthy, Gopalakrishnan ORCID: 0000-0002-3119-5248, Moser, Roger and Hota, Pradeep Kumar (2019) Sharing app for farm mechanization: Gold Farm's digitized access based solution for financially constrained farmers. COMPUTERS IN INDUSTRY, 109. pp. 195-203.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2019.04.017

Abstract

India continues to experience strong challenges in the agriculture sector due to its increasing supply-demand gap, which is attributed to the increasing population, rapid urbanization, low productivity, absence of automation, weak infrastructure support, small and scattered land holdings, and migration of labour force to other sectors. Farm mechanization is one of the potential solutions to most of the above-listed challenges as it increases productivity as well as reduces the input resources. However, due to severe financial constraints experienced by the majority of Indian farmers, the adoption of farm mechanization has continued to remain beyond their reach. In this paper, we propose how digitized access based solution can help in overcoming the financial constraints experienced by the farmers in accessing expensive farm equipment. We validate our proposed solution by documenting the experience of the firm “Gold Farm”, which has developed and implemented a digitized sharing mobile app that can enable farmers to adopt farm mechanization. Gold Farm's sharing app offers access based solution for accessing farm equipment at affordable prices. Pay per usage, reduction in ownership risks, removal of upfront financial investment constraints, continuous monitoring and tracking of vehicles and increased utilization are the key advantages of digitized Gold Farm's sharing app. We discuss research, practice and social implications of implementing digitized access based solution for agriculture.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Access based solution, Sharing economy, Digitization, Agriculture, India
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	30 May 2019 09:25
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 00:42
DOI:	10.1016/j.compind.2019.04.017
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3043447