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Agriculture Industry: Trading and Risk Management

Agriculture Industry: Trading and Risk Management

There is a race on across the globe towards increasing productivity and efficiency in the agriculture industry and making the businesses more sustainable. What we need is a fundamental shift in the way agriculture companies handle trading and risk operations and processes. Continuous pressure to increase operational efficiency, decrease reaction times, drive efficient collaboration and take informed decisions is at an all-time high. To keep up with the market challenges and demands, agriculture companies must find a way to leverage next-gen technology, analytics and blockchain to modernise rapidly.

Challenges

Resource constraints

It is true that we are facing a severe climate change which has triggered extreme weather events, and then we have the explosion in population growth and urbanization issues which are reducing the amount of arable land available to farmers. Water scarcity is impacting regions across the globe. Farmers must maximize yield from each acre of land, consuming the least amount of resources to produce more output.

Collaboration

Both buyers and growers want to make the best possible deals, but often they cannot negotiate directly in real time. They spend hours, days and even weeks on paperwork, email messages, and never-ending phone calls. Agriculture business managers spend a lot of their time with farmers answering questions related to contracts, invoicing, ticketing and more.

Complex supply chains

Managing end-to-end movement of goods from farm to silos to shipping to storage and delivery is complicated. Extreme weather events, changing geopolitical situations, pandemics, and social unrest wreak havoc on supply chains. Agriculture companies must assess and react to supply chain disruptions in real time to ensure crops are not lost.

Rapidly changing markets

Agriculture markets are constantly shifting. Consumers preferences change with the latest fad diets, medical research, health news, and population growth. Increased demand for biofuels also drives demand for feed crops like sugar and corn. Agriculture companies need real-time awareness and the ability to rapidly pivot when markets shift.

Traceability

Agriculture regulations must be strictly adhered to, particularly for speciality premium crops such as organic, free range, and non-GMO. These products must be carefully traced to ensure they are compliant with all regulations to command a premium price.

Financial risk and compliance

Agriculture farmers and buyers must ensure a complete audit trail of trading and finance and ensure regulatory compliance across geographies and borders.

Cost management

Costs for inputs – from seeds to fertilizer to, in some cases, water – are increasing. Farmers and buyers must decrease costs as much as possible, using advanced analytics to evaluate which crops to grow, when to start planting, and automating wherever possible to eliminate manual processes, reduce wasted time, and gain accuracy.

The way forward

Manual processes in agriculture trade operations can really wreak havoc in volatile markets and businesses must modernize their workflows from farm to fork to optimize operations and become more sustainable. To offset unprecedented market shocks and unplanned disruptions in business, rapid digital transformation of trading operations and supply chains is extremely critical.

Agricultural companies really need speed and agility to sustain and thrive in volatile markets. The need of the hour is a comprehensive solution suite that meets all the commodity trading, risk management and supply chain requirements.

Learn how for agricultural businesses, cloud delivered solutions provide an opportunity to take advantage of lower deployment costs, increased scalability, improved security and on-demand advanced analytics.

To talk to Eka experts, write to info@eka1.com

Eka Software

Eka Software Solutions is a global leader in providing digital commodity management solutions driven by Cloud, Blockchain, Machine Learning and Analytics. The company’s best-of-breed solutions serve the entire trading value chain across agriculture, energy, metals and mining and manufacturing markets.

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