Zetta Farms onboards farmers as partners to ensure benefits like insurance, pension etc

Although it’s had its ups and downs, the farming industry has been present and prevalent since over a decade and continues to be much sought after by many. According to a report by IMARC, the value of the agriculture industry in India stood at Rs 80,550 billion in 2022 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 12.2% by 2028.

Founded in 2014 and registered in 2020 by Rituraj Sharma and Krishnna Joshi, Zetta Farms is a technology driven farm project for sustainable farming. The company cultivates crops ranging from coffee and tea to coconuts and moong.

The Jaipur-based company onboards farmers to the company’s payroll, acting as partners of the company, and assigns them crops to grow according to the geographical locations. Now it mainly works with two types of farmers- farmers with land and landless farmers. Zetta Farms conducts land deals in various states where landless farmers are allocated to work on.

The onboarding of farmers to the platform is done mainly to ensure they get the benefits every other worker gets. Adding the farmers to the payroll of the company, changes their status from daily wage worker to employee, and ensures them benefits like insurance, pension, child education benefits etc. CEO and co-founder of the company told Entrackr, “All these cannot be given to daily wage workers. The government doesn’t allow you to give such benefits to unnamed persons who one cannot keep track of.”

Apart from the benefits and the monthly income, farmers are also given a share of the profit. This division of profit has two components- farmers who own the land they work in get a higher share of the profit as compared to the landless farmers.

In order to ensure the quality of crops grown, data about the land and crops are collected from drones and IoTs and are deployed in the farms projects to monitor and analyze the farms and their progress.

Till date, the company has worked with around 1,200 farmers to cultivate over 70 crops in 13 different states.

Zetta Farms is the agricultural half of the parent company Yotta Agro Ventures; its investment counterpart is Growpital. Farming is done on the farm projects using the funds raised from Growpital by retail investors. The produce is later then sold to buyers like McCain and PMV Maltings on profit which is distributed amongst the investors.

The bootstrapped company has a valuation of Rs 500 crore and a CRR of Rs 60 lakh per month. It also recorded a revenue around Rs 55 crore last financial year. Although the company does not currently export its produce due to the extensive process involved, it plans on expanding its farm projects to the global markets in the coming years.