From bites to bytes: Startups use AI for instant quality check of farm produce

Traders sampling a soyabean farmer’s produce at Madhya Pradesh’s Harda mandi. (Harish Damodaran)

A legacy of the ‘Amul model’ is that dairy farmers today are paid not just for quantity, but also for quality of the milk they supply. Both cooperative and private dairies fix the purchase price of milk based on its fat and solids-not-fat content. The Gerber centrifuge and lactometer that measure these enable farmers to be paid more for the same volume of milk containing higher total solids.

This benefit isn’t available to other farmers, more so in crops that — unlike milk or sugarcane — are sold through APMC…