Krushak Mitra Agro Services

Since FPO is an excellent concept to tackle the problems of farmers to a larger extent, many FPOs are still struggling to make itself sustainable. The major reasons for this may be lack of resources in terms of capital and skilled manpower. While FPOs with limited capital can still undertake input supplies, extension services, aggregation of produce, they find it difficult to venture into sophisticated warehousing and processing, branding, packaging and promoting its agricultural produce. Since post-harvest activities like sophisticated processing, state-of-the-art warehousing, packaging, branding and other activities under marketing are capital intensive and yield favorable economies of scale, there is a need to federate them into suitable organization structures. An individual FPO, if not receive the guidance and support constantly cannot sustain for long. Some FPOs in the country are performing excellent on all the aspects of business; others are still not able to make the way.

To bridge these gaps in FPOs, Yuva Mitra came up with an innovative solution. Yuva Mitra and FPCs promoted ‘Krushak Mitra Agro Services Pvt. Ltd.’ (Special Purpose Vehicle), a multi stakeholder enterprise as a marketing entity. This SPV works as an apex body for marketing the products of all the FPCs. Currently total 8 FPCs have stake in the SPV and we also have a provision for external finance in terms of investment, debt or in any other form. The vision of this SPV is to work as an apex body to establish centralized and sustainable market linkages and required infrastructure for its member FPCs to market their agri produce and it will also provide backend agro services to the farmers of its member FPCs.