New apps to assist farmers
Farmers will now have easy access to high value and technical agricultural equipment at their doorstep. Through the newly launched CHC Farm Machinery App, farmers will be able to select and order the required machinery at rates feasible for them from the Custom Hiring Centres within a radius of 50 km. Till date more than 40,000 custom hiring service centres have registered on this mobile app for renting over 1,20,000 agricultural machineries and equipment.
The Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar shared this information while launching two mobile Apps – CHC Farm Machinery and Krishi Kisan app for Geo Tagging.
Tomar said the Krishi Kisan App will provide farmers the information of best demonstration of high-yielding crops and seeds in their nearby area. Any farmer with high quality of crops can utilise this platform to demonstrate best practices of cultivation to other farmers so that this will help other farmers also to adopt these methods. The App will also help in geo-tagging and geo-fencing of crop and give weather forecast message to farmers. The Minister requested every farmer to utilise these services for betterment of their cultivation methods and thereby ensuring higher agricultural productivity.
The multilingual Mobile App CHC Farm Machinery is already available to custom service providers for registration and uploading with geo-reference photographs of agricultural machinery custom service centres and photographs of machinery available in it. Through this app, farmers, especially small and marginal farmers, will have easy access to high value and technical agricultural equipment which will facilitate optimum use of all types of inputs using these farming machines. This will not only increase the income of the farmers, but it will also take mechanization to maximum farm holdings in a short time frame. This app connects the farmers with Custom Hiring Service Centres in their area. The app can be downloaded on any android phone from Google Play Store.
Custom Hiring Centres/ Farm Machinery banks and hi-tech hubs have been established under the various Schemes like Sub –Mission on Agricultural Mechanisation, Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana and Crop Residue Management Schemes of the DAC&FW, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers welfare to provide Agricultural Machinery on rental basis to the Farmers, especially small and marginal farmers who cannot afford to buy the high value machinery and equipment.