Pole.rf: "We Can See A Tremendous Surge In The Development Of Digitalization In The South"

In the South of Russia, agriculture is one of the most developed in the country. Evgeny Belov, General Director of pole.rf, discussed the rates of agriculture digitalization in the South

During the discussion "The Digital Field: When the Cyber Village Becomes a Reality", held at the YugAgro 2023 exhibition, some experts expressed their opinion about the insufficient digitalization of the agro-industrial complex and its slowdown due to various factors. Could you, please, sum up the results of the discussion?

The main conclusion that can be drawn is that digitalization has already started. Now people are wondering not about its implementation itself, but which way it will proceed in the agro-industrial complex. I agree with colleagues who think that there is a conservative attitude in the industry, and some difficulties with the connection of new users. First of all, this concerns small and medium-sized farms. In general, we see a natural evolutionary model of development, which is principally based on business efficiency.

This can be traced on the example of solutions implemented in pole.rf as well. For instance, this applies to more effective attraction of financial resources, which takes quite a lot of time offline. Today, there is no offline tools at all that can help farmers attract funding in 7 minutes without visiting a bank, discussions with a manager, and so on. In turn, for a farmer, the amount of funding is not always as important as the speed of its attraction. This became obvious in August, when the cost of fuel was rising almost every hour. Farmers asked for financial aid, but received money in a few days or even weeks.

The second acute problem is harvest sale. To solve it, pole.rf provides direct sales channels that bypass all intermediaries and unnecessary links. Thanks to this, farmers can build proper effective logistics.

It is noted that digitalization is most actively implemented in large enterprises, and small farms are not involved in this process enough. Do you see this gap, and how is it changing?

One should not divide the single market, but the products for it have to be different. During the discussion, we considered a similar problem, the core of which is that small farms cannot always correctly formulate the requirements specification for work with IT platforms.

In our opinion, an IT platform itself must reach small and medium-sized farms, formulate requirements specification correctly and understand business problems, recording these solutions in the digital plane. But they are usually very different from solutions for large businesses. That's why companies need to try to work with different segments.

Southern accent

It is often said that digitalization is divided into two parts: digitalization of machinery and digitalization of business. Which of these two aspects is the South of Russia the most advanced in?

When it comes to digitalization, it does not matter what form is discussed, as long as farmers understand its purposes and see that it is effective. When farmers launch drones, they understand the reasons for this. Users of online platforms, including pole.rf, also understand their purpose and effectiveness — a wide range of reliable suppliers in different ranges of agricultural products. At the same time, we in no way insist on working with one supplier or another, our task is very simple — to create an understandable competitive offer so that the user of our platform can select the most interesting, proper and effective solution in one place.

Being in the South, we cannot help asking about the Southern Federal District and the North Caucasus Federal District. In your opinion, which online tools are preferred by farmers in these regions?

The South is the most efficient region in terms of agriculture. On the one hand, it is a big plus, but on the other hand, it is stable conservatism. In the market, there is a rather difficult situation now, when the prime cost rises, but the prices fall to a minimum and stop. And the difficulty is that the high marginality, which has always been in the South, hindered the promotion of digitalization to some extent, because farmers did not understand why they should implement digital tools if they were making profit anyway.

Today, there is a huge surge in the development of digitalization in the South, as the agriculture marginality decreases, and it is not possible to ignore the digitalization. Some actions need to be taken to solve problems with the manpower, procurement, and difficulties in the market. So now, it is just impossible to ignore digitalization, as it used to be 3-4 years ago, when everyone had a pretty big rainy day fund, and thus farmers had a space for maneuver. Now it is necessary to implement effective tools, and those who start doing it earlier surely gain certain benefits.

Drawing on the example of our platform, we see a 20 times growth of transactions per year. We expect this indicator to exceed 30 times by the end of this year.

When the cyber village becomes a reality

Getting back to the beginning of our conversation, when will we be able to add the "cyber" prefix to our farms, villages and settlements? When will the digitalization process come to its end?

There is no need to add the "cyber" prefix to villages, it is necessary to add the word "efficient", which is much more important, since it changes the approach of agricultural producers who work on farms. Because when they begin to understand the digitized results of this process, a huge sincere gratitude arises as a rule. When a farmer works using digital tools, he retains the part of the staff that is needed throughout the year, because seasonal work can be done by means of digitalization.

You were a participant of the 30th YugAgro International Exhibition. What are your impressions of the exhibition this year?

In our opinion, YugAgro 2023 is one of the most necessary events that are held in our country during the year. This exhibition gathers a wide pool of experts and market players immersed in the subject of agriculture. This is the most important value of the exhibition, because all companies can receive feedback from farmers, improve their work and become more efficient.

The 31st International Exhibition of Agricultural Machinery, Equipment and Materials for Crop Production YugAgro 2024 will be held on 19–22 November at the Expograd Yug exhibition centre, Krasnodar. Free electronic registration for visitors is already open on the official YugAgro website.