Media Monitor
Agriculture Industry
Experts discuss how agri sector is coping as COVID second wave affects rural Indiaedit
CNBC TV18 – Online
The second wave of Coronavirus has given way to concerns that agriculture could be affected. The COVID cases in rural India are on the rise as per official figures, in many predominantly rural districts, the number of active COVID-19 cases is almost nine to ten times what it was in the first pandemic wave’s peak in the month of September last year.
A CRISIL research report suggests the share of rural districts in new cases in April was 30 percent, up from 21 percent in March. This has led to concerns that India’s agriculture sector could be collateral to this potentially catastrophic surge.
To discuss this, CNBC-TV18’s Manisha Gupta spoke to Uday Deolankar, former Divisional Statistician ...
Top Agriculture News of Apriledit
Krishi Jagran – Online
There has been a lot of development in the agriculture sector at a time when the whole world is fighting against Coronavirus. Let’s quickly check out top agriculture news from all over the world.
Сorteva Agriscience to expand sunflower seed production in Romania
Corteva Agriscience has announced the investment of almost 13 million € to expand its production facility at Afumati, Romania, and to accelerate the growth of its sunflower seed business in Europe.
Technology in Agriculture
Sub-K to bring financial products for Agriculture, Dairy sectorsedit
Telangana Today – Online
Hyderabad-based Sub-K Impact Solutions, which bridges financial service providers and customers/borrowers in rural and semi-urban India, is in the process of rolling out ethical agriculture loans, which are farmer-friendly and not exploitative.
Sub-K is partnering with agritech companies to get the right data insights to design and offer the right agriculture loans in collaboration with banks.
The company has applied for a non-banking financial company(NBFC) license to work on the agriculture and dairy sectors to provide the right loan/financial products for these sectors. It is keen to address the financial stress the farming community experiences due to informal sources of funding in the ecosystem, particularly in rural India.
Omnivore to set up $150 million fund to boost rural agritechedit
The Hindu – Online
Omnivore, an agritech venture capital firm, said it is setting up a new $150 million fund to be invested in tech-driven, predictive crop insights that can help improve productivity and profitability for farmers in India.
The VC firm would start raising its new fund towards the end of this year and would have another $132 million invested in various agritech ventures in the country by 2023. It already invested in 30 agritech start-ups and these ventures in turn are touching the lives of around 10 million farmers in the country.”The fund will take care of our needs for four years,” Mark Kahn, managing partner told The Hindu. “We have been seeing an acceleration in technology adoption in agriculture ...
Stubble Burning
Making Covid hospitals from stubble: Meet Shriti Pandeyedit
Times of India – Online
29-year-old Shriti Pandey, a civil engineer from Gorakhpur making waves for building Covid hospitals with zero water usage from stubble. Every year, stubble burning leads to massive pollution in north India, but Shriti found a sustainable way of converting it into building material. Not just this, during the moment of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, Shriti made something that was beyond possible.
Tractor industry
Sonalika Tractor Sales April 2021edit
Rushlane – Online
Sonalika registers overall sales of 9,130 tractors in April ’21. This in the backdrop of an increasingly difficult business environment. Covid-19 pandemic infections have a firm grip in India at present with numbers reaching continuous daily highs. Sonalika Tractors is committed to 100 percent vaccination of its workforce. Over 5.4k vaccines have been administered at its Hoshiarpur facility. The manufacturer aims to ensure it’s entire workforce, channel partners, and dealer staff across age-groups is vaccinated by May ’21. Moreover, Sonalika’s teams remain fully committed to develop robust quality products for the farmers across the globe and support them with our superior quality service for maximum uptime of our advanced technology powered products. Overall, Sonalika has sold overall ...
Escorts tractor sales robust to 6,979 units in April 2021 rising by a whopping 890% yoyedit
IIFL – Online
Escorts-led Agri Machinery Segment (EAM) in April 2021 sold 6,979 tractors registering a growth of 889.9 per cent as against 705 tractors sold in the same month a year ago.
In its regulatory filing, Escorts stated that domestic tractor sales in April 2021 were at 6,386 tractors registering a growth of 941.8 per cent against 613 tractors in April 2020. The demand in April last year was drastically impacted by Covid-19 national lockdown; so was it in April 2021 although not to the same extent. This time around supply chain had minimal impact from local restrictions owing to the second wave of Covid-19. This enabled the Company to build some inventory in anticipation of some pent-up demand ...