Non-governmental organisation Digital Green Trust, which empowers smallholder farmers in India through technology and data, is focusing on an AI-based application, FarmerChat, that puts an advisory tool directly in farmers’ hands, its CEO Nidhi Bhasin said.

“Our major activity right now is ensuring that farmers have this app in their pockets and they get timely local advisory,” she told businessline in an online interaction.

In India, the FarmerChat has reached close to one million farmers across nine states. Farmers have asked more than 3 million queries, largely around crop health, yield improvement, and government schemes. 

Independent evaluations show that 60 per cent of active users act on the advice they receive and 91 per cent treat FarmerChat as a primary or only source of farming information. The Net Promoter Score has grown from 21 to 72 for the app, and it has increased to 87 among women users.

Response in seconds

FarmerChat has been built for farmers, and its multimodal application is available in the Google Play Store for Android phones. A farmer can ask a question by voice, text or photo mode in their own language about a crop. 

Or it can be anything else to do with the crop, disease, pest management, irrigation, livestock care, weather forecast or climate smart practices. Farmers will receive an actionable response in a few seconds. The answer will be in text or in their own language in terms of a voice, said the CEO of the organisation, which is seen as one ushering in social transformation. 

Farmers tend to use a whole lot of the voice mode or the image mode to ask questions. This helps to cut across low literacy issues, said Bhasin. 

Farmers can access the app free and it helps them overcome the barrier to accessing advisory. Advisories are issued in Hindi, English, Odia, Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi, she said.

Bridging advisory gap

“We work with the extension workers to make sure that the farmer understands how to use the tool, but we also reach out to the farmers directly. The activities are more in terms of giving them advisory, building up the capacity to make decisions that will help them to either reduce the input cost or increase the productivity, thereby helping them increase their incomes,” said the organisation’s CEO

Launched in 2008. Digital Green is a  spin-off of Microsoft Research Lab Project in India. The focus has been on using technology to improve the reach and effectiveness of agricultural extension for smallholder farmers. 

For nearly two decades, Digital Green has tried to bridge the advisory gap for the smallholder farmer. For many years, it has worked on video-based learning, where local videos are created along with farmers as actors and disseminated through frontline workers, extension workers and government departments.

Today, the organisation is scaling up the FarmerChat app and is working in multiple states across the country. It has helped in either diagnosing pest attacks or providing weather alerts to farmers. 

Tapping AI

“For example, Anu Kumari, a farmer cultivating on 1.5 acres in Bihar, was planning to sow potatoes on a cloudy day. She checked FarmerChat and learned that rain was likely. She delayed sowing and it rained the next day. This helped in saving around ₹5,000 in seeds and fertilizer that would otherwise have been wasted,” said Bhasin. 

Farmers like Kumari now use the app regularly for guidance on paddy, vegetables, pest attacks, and weather decisions. Digital Green taps into artificial intelligence (AI) as the app has been built on open source. The app is provided to farmers through partnerships with other private sector or non-profit organisations, she said.

Digital Green gets philanthropic help from organisations such as   Rockefeller Foundation, which has been supporting since the app was launched 18 months ago.  Until the app was launched, the organisation created video-based learning for farmers. Over 10,000 such videos were made and they are still available on YouTube. 

“Over the last few years, we have created certain platforms for bridging the gap for farmers with farmer-producer organisations(FPOs). Also, we piloted a couple of chatbots both on WhatsApp and Telegram. And these were a few things that we were doing when the whole Gen-AI revolution came in,” said the organisation’s CEO.

Climate change

The learnings from these helped Digital Green to launch the FarmerChat app. On the impact of climate change, she said, it has fundamentally altered the operating environment for Indian farmers. For a smallholder farmer working on a very small piece of land with very thin margins, every disruption translates directly into income loss or may be debt.

“In that environment, timely advisory shifts from being useful to being a form of risk reduction,” said Bhasin.  

Women farmers have begun to play a major role in the country’s agriculture with men in their families migrating to cities. “While traditionally, women have been a part of the agriculture ecosystem, they were never the decision makers. So tools like FarmerChat are really becoming a game changer,” said the organisation’s CEO.

Published on June 25, 2026