A Study on Enablers and Challenges in Adoption of Technology by North Indian Dairy Farms A Systems Approach

Abstract

The dairy sector in India is a substantial part of agriculture. The advent of technology in the sector has further contributed to better farm management, health monitoring of milching units, improved productivity and ease in managing operations with reduced wastage. Global evidences show that the adoption of technologies in dairy farming has significantly facilitated the objectives of precision dairy farming. In India particularly, the prime focus is upon the strengthening of the milk cooperatives based supply chain by adjoining small holding farmers to the state milk federations. Other than the supply chain coordination and using technologies at milk unions and logistics, the dairy development board has recently come forward to provide basic e-consultancy and services to the farmers with the help of technologies. But the awareness, promotion and adoption of in-house technologies such as milking machines, RFID cow collars, silage makers, ICTs, etc. are at the low pace. The reason is major portion of unorganised sector (i.e. around 60-70%) with low herd size. As per the research indications, it has been found that encouraging the development of organised dairy farms can help to cater future rise in demand of milk products both domestically and internationally. In contrast to the west where the concept of dairy farm is more popular that manage every task with the help of technologies from farm to consumer, Indian dairy supply relies on milk cooperatives, unorganised local supplies and self-consumption, and thus rests less scope for farm technologies, expansion and restricts financial recognition in the GDP of organised sector. newlineWith the help of systems methodologies, this research is an attempt to showcase a holistic scenario of technology adoption in the dairy farms of North India using interviews with the 60 dairy farm units as a base. 21 varied domain experts from dairy were included in the research work to study the enablers and challenges of technology adoption, role of technology in value maximisation of dairy farm units supported by a case study and development of the strategic model to help the decision makers and policy planners to make efforts in the desired directions. The sufficiently greater number of factors in the model result serves as the base for future researchers to choose and test the validity of the crucial factors using various statistical techniques. newline newline