Insight Report: Know Your Grower
In the early MY 2023/24 cotton season, Sourcery has started the implementation of its Impact and Assurance Programme in India and Pakistan following three years of development and piloting. Starting with Grower Essentials (GS 1-4), a mandatory set of primary data required for all growers enrolled in Sourcery's Direct-to-Grower™ Programme, Sourcery has begun to engage, train and enrol thousands of individual growers from the Indian states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat Rajasthan and the Punjab province in Pakistan.
By collecting this essential data, Sourcery establishes a clear picture of who exactly their Grower Partners growers are, where their farms are located, what their households look like and gain a general understanding of their agro-climatic conditions, current farming practices and pre-existing economic circumstances & available market linkages. This sets the context for deeper insights into commercial, social and environmental impact data and setting progress milestones.
This data will be made available to other select Direct-to-Grower™ Partners following harvest for the MY 2024/25 season, which begins later this year.
Read the full report
Our initial insights and learnings are a wake-up call for all stakeholders in the supply chain that there is a need for clear market demand and incentives for accurate data collecting and sharing.
Discover the key learnings:
Beyond GPS: While GPS coordinates are commonly used for farm identification, early learning from the program revealed their limitations in accuracy. A more precise and reliable alternative is polygon mapping, which traces cadastral boundaries using a smartphone app and uses additional digital identification information through multiple interactions and data triangulation to create a more dynamic view of growers, farm farms and their communities.
Incentive-Driven Data Sharing: The early programme learnings revealed that farmers are more likely to share data when they see a direct financial benefit. They have often felt that they have given their data for free in the past, only to receive unfulfilled promises of access to business linkages, agricultural inputs, equipment, larger margins or other benefits—few of which translate into a clear business case for most growers to adopt and continue improving their commercial and environmental progress.
Investment in Grower Engagement: Effective grower engagement requires investment in professional extension services teams, including larger teams, to cover more farmers, focus more on individual grower and community capacity building, agronomic support, and providing improved infrastructure such as agronomic and community centres, etc. This ensures ground teams are well-equipped to support growers at scale, collect accurate data, and link the data with market buyers who ultimately pay for the right to use the data under license.
Adapting to Ground Realities: To address grassroots challenges like limited smartphone usage and network availability at the village level, data collection methods must be tailored to growers' way of working, and crop cycle and are sensitive to capabilities to ensure that data collection is not a burden, but rather an opportunity to make more revenue, provide critical insights and feedback to improve their crop and grow their businesses.
Transparency and Inclusion: The early learning of the programme has highlighted the importance of transparency and inclusion, fostering trust with growers, aggregators, verifiers, processors, and merchants by encouraging collaboration and more accurate data sharing that benefits everyone from grower to retailer. This commitment to transparency and inclusion builds trust and leads to more robust and accurate data where data becomes an asset alongside the crop itself.
Want to learn more?
Watch the Launch Webinar of our Impact and Assurance Programme to learn how we enable a more robust, accurate and equitable way to collect verified primary farm-level data.
