AI has changed the way we interact with small farmers: Nidhi Bhasin, CEO, Digital Green Trust | Technology News

Nidhi Bhasin is the CEO of Digital Green Trust, a non-profit working on using technology to empower small and marginal farmers across the country.Digital Green has built an AI-powered assant to help small-scale farmers around the world improve their productivity and incomes. It is working with governments to boost the effectiveness of agriculture extension workers providing them with new tech and helping them interact with small farmers in an effective manner.Nidhi is a leading voice in the social development sector with experience in technology for good projects. She has previously worked with the Nasscom Foundation and Concern India Foundation in various roles.Nidhi speaks to about how their organisation is using tech to empower farmers in India and Africa. Edited excerpts:
Venkatesh Kannaiah: What is Digital Green’s focus, and how is it using tech to create an impact?
Nidhi Bhasin: Our focus is on tech and agriculture. Our journey began when we found that the information or advisory being given to small and marginal farmers was not timely or in the language of their choice, or at times not very relevant. This could be information on cropping patterns, yields, use of pesticides, fertilisers, or on government subsidies. Those were the days of Krishi Darshan on Doordarshan, and there were opportunities to make the information farmer-friendly.

Our first tech intervention was simple. It was providing the information in easy-to-digest videos for farmers for their questions. It was around 2008, the period before 4G, mobile video, and mobile video dribution platforms. These videos, which were shot with care, were dributed to farmers mostly through agricultural extension workers of the government agriculture department. We worked with various state governments across India, helping their agricultural extension workers to dribute the videos and the information therein. We also worked with non-profits and community organisations working with small farmers. Later, we moved on to chatbots and began providing these advisories through WhatsApp, and then Telegram. We have also facilitated the production of 10,000 videos in 40 languages.Story continues below this ad
You must understand the challenge that India’s agricultural extension workers face. Though they might be motivated enough and have good connections with farmers, they are often unable to have a substantial impact at the farm level because of the ineffectiveness of the systems they rely on. They have to do farm-level data gathering and advice farmers on best practices. Many of them might be overworked, and their impact is limited as they lack sufficient digital tools to collect data, report them, analyse them, and communicate with farmers. This is where Digital Green comes in.
We have built an Android app named Farmer.Chat.We are extensively using AI to enhance the app and multiply its impact. Apart from India, we are working in various African nations like Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia. So far, seven million farmers have benefitted from our advisories. With the rise of GenAI, our reach has amplified, and our services are available in most Indian languages and three African languages.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about Digital Green’s work with various state governments.
Nidhi Bhasin: In India, we work with various state governments and have agreements with around 12 of them. We are now focusing on states like Bihar, where we have — from Dec 2024 to March 2025 — seen an increase of one lakh users for  our application. We find that farmers are fairly engaged on our app, and the average queries are around 9-11. From our base of around seven million active users globally, we are working to add around 5.5 million farmers/active users within the next three years. Due to our focus on tech, we have dramatically reduced the cost of generating a positive impact.Story continues below this ad
We track the impact that we have on farmers. We even track the impact that our videos have, whether the farmer has taken action based on our information or video and whether it has led to an increase in his income.
In India, we also train extension workers in agriculture departments to help them master the app so that they can train the farmers or be like a helpdesk for  farmers. While the global reach of our active farmer usage is around seven million, around 60 per cent of the farmers are from India. We are also using leaderboards in the app to incentivise farmers and are looking at various gamifying options. In all our tech initiatives, the focus is on the small farmer, with climate change and gender being the additional lenses. We look at whether our interventions are climatesmart and whether they are gender sensitive.
Digital Green is also running a feasibility study to test whether satellite-based yield estimations are a viable tool for assessing yield in person verifications. We do this physically visiting and observing practices adopted farmers.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How are you using tech to help small farmers? In detailStory continues below this ad
Nidhi Bhasin: In our Farmer.Chat app, we are looking to bring in additional features like marketplaces or e-commerce, or we could bring in a service provider layer on top of the app that we have. We also have eFarm, a kind of ERP product for farmer-producer organisations, where directors of the organisations can log in and find out how and what their member farmers are seeking information on, and how they are faring.
We can also, in due course, onboard other non-profits or organisations who have their farmer members and our Farmer.Chat app can be used them for their respective advisory services.
You must understand that we integrate large databases and the research done agri research organisations across the country over a long period of time. This is where the breadth and the accuracy of the Farmer.Chat application comes from. We are also open source and our work and our analysis is available in the public domain.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How does Digital Green incorporate a gender lens?Story continues below this ad
Nidhi Bhasin: In India, our tools feature women farmers as role models and promote best practices which reduce women’s labour. In other places, we have incorporated women’s empowerment content. We find that this has worked, and in our field visits to various locations, we find the active participation of women farmers, and their use of our app has empowered them in the household and in public spaces.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Do you work with the startup ecosystem in the agritech space?
Nidhi Bhasin: Yes. We work with quite a few of them. For example, while we were giving out information and advice to chilli farmers in Andhra Pradesh, we found that the farmers grade their chilli at the buyer’s location, in a buyer-controlled environment. This might not be advantageous to the farmers. There was a startup AgNext, which was doing the grading, and we put the farmers in touch with the startup. Startups are a commercial operation, and we initially funded the grading done the farmers. It was only after they started seeing the utility of the grading done a third party, the startup,  that they actively adopted it and are now utilising it and willing to pay for the service. This is one example of how startups could provide value to farmers using our app and also benefit from the same.
There is another startup Kheyti, which is into building greenhouses and soil conservation, which has partnered with us and has effectively built an audience for its services.Story continues below this ad

Small farmers need to see value in your services, and only then can they pay for them. They may not have the money to experiment and might not be willing to trust newcomers.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: What ails the agritech startup space in India?
Nidhi Bhasin: Some of the solutions in the agritech startup space appear to be a bit top-down. It is like techies looking for a problem to solve without a deeper understanding. This might be the case in some of the social tech interventions too, and not exclusively with agritech. In agritech, the final consumer is the farmer, who might not have the resources and might not be ready to experiment. Trust needs to be built first for products to succeed.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How effective is the government in using tech in the agri space?Story continues below this ad
Nidhi Bhasin: The government is very proactive in using tech in the agri space. You might have read about AI Centres for Excellence in agriculture, and they are actively exploring the use of AI to reach out to farmers in a cost effective manner, and also using AI tech in various aspects, from pest control to farm management.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: How has AI changed your focus and the way you work?
Nidhi Bhasin: AI brings about a scale one could never have imagined. It also allows us to operate in multiple geographies at a fraction of the cost. And the more data, the more accurate it becomes. The conventional model of reaching out to individual farmers and making them engaged and ready for change, using agriculture extension workers, would cost around $35. With the video-based advisory, we got it down to $ 3.5, and with mobile applications and GenAI now, we are trying to bring it down to 35 cents 2030. AI has changed the way we interact with small farmers across the world.