With rapid globalization and increased awareness about food consumption, ‘Organic’ has certainly become a buzzword in today’s market place. Organic food, cultivated using organic farming techniques, is the produce that is grown with nil or minimal use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. No chemicals, artificial colours, flavours or additives are used in its processing. Often, it is produced using organic manures, biofertilizers and biopesticides. Increased awareness among consumers coupled with rising disposable income has led to a steady demand for organic produce. This demand is not just from metros or urban cities, it is coming from Tier I and Tier II cities as well, the consumers are now ready to pay the premium, an estimate of at least 20%-25% higher, for healthier organic food. Realizing the market potential, farmers have also started exploring the realm of organic farming by eschewing the use of agrochemicals. As a result of which, more and more farmers are making use of biofertilizers, biopesticides and organic growth promoters to improve the yield of their agri-produce and significantly reduce input costs.
Headquartered in Pune, Netsurf is one of India’s leading direct selling companies. As far as the agricultural range is concerned, Netsurf is the only company to market organic farming products through direct selling in India.
Netsurf does not merely offer the organic farming products but also offers an additional income opportunity to the farmers. Till date, it has sold more than 8 million Agricultural products to 20 Lac farmers since inception. Lacs of hectors of agricultural land across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh has been benefitted by the use of Biofit products.
Netsurf has been successful in creating the organic farming product solutions that can be used alongside regular agrochemicals. In the later stages, Biofit is designed to reduce dependence on the agrochemicals and finally replace them with its range of organic products making the entire produce 100% organic. Many farmers across India have been able to convert their farming to organic farming by consuming the Biofit products systematically for over 3 to 4 years.
Rajaram Shankar Balte a seasoned farmer from Sangli, Maharashtra was facing several difficulties while cultivating sugarcane and pomegranate. Almost every year, his crops caught diseases and he bombarded them chemical based products - hoping for a quick cure. It certainly helped to fight the disease but left terrible side-effects such as poor health of soil, increased expenses and most importantly deteriorating quality of his produce. He says, “While looking for an alternative solution, I came across ‘Biofit’ products. Today, I am using Biofit-95 and Biofit INTACT for my crops for last 3 years.”
Truly convinced about the importance of finding right & effective organic farming products, Rajaram adds “The Biofit products boosted a healthy life cycle of my crops. The productivity improved so significantly that the per acre cultivation of pomegranates increased from 5-6 tonnes to almost 27 tonnes in a year. It also worked very well for my sugarcane crops as the per acre produce increased from 50 tonnes to 90 tonnes. The best part is that I could ask for much better rates in the market because the produce looked much healthy in terms of size and colour. In addition to this, the soil health has also improved which is certainly a long-term benefit for any farmer.”
The Biofit product range has helped the farmers in increasing the farm production while reducing the cost attached to chemical input in the farm, which makes it profitable, thus creating many such success stories across India. In addition, ‘Biofit farming’ eliminates the health risk linked to the residual effects of hazardous chemicals; hence farmers can expect better price for their crops.
As estimated, the current organic food consumption in India is not even 0.1% of India’s total annual food consumption of $300 billion. That paves a way for the genuine manufacturer-marketers like Netsurf to witness many more ‘Organic Agripreneurs’ in the recent future in Maharashtra & across the country at large.
