Should I wait or should I sell? The impact of market information and commercialization advice on farmers’ sales decisions
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Aaditeshwar Seth
Dec 20, 2025, 10:04:26 AM12/20/25
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The blog doesn't say much about the accuracy of the recommendations, maybe the paper will have details, but does indicate that price forecasts put more bargaining power in the hands of farmers.
Sharing some broader context about information asymmetry and decisions that farmers face. A famous study by an economist, Robert Jensen, in 2007, showed that the availability of mobile phones with fishermen in Kerala helped them track prices at different markets on the coast and lowered price dispersion. This central thesis was behind many projects in agriculture that helped communicate mandi prices to farmers which helped them negotiate better. Today a lot of this runs over whatsapp groups of farmers who share prices in different mandis. With good communication infrastructure, while information asymmetry may have reduced considerably on current prices, the play now is on future prices. Whoever with better price forecasting models will be able to negotiate better. This insight was shared by Farmveda and the Center of Collective Development who help run several hundred cooperatives in Telangana and AP. We did a project together where we tried to build price forecasting models for soyabean, and coupled with prospect theory we tried to recommend to farmers whether to store or sell, the idea being that if they were likely to get better prices in the future then they could store the soyabean and sell later. The coops were already doing this - they had a shared space they used to aggregate produce from the farmers, and which they transported in bulk to the market or buyer at the right time. While building the price forecasting system was difficult, and the pilot ran into difficulties since covid hit at that time plus the context changed entirely since soyabean got listed on the commodity exchange during that year itself rendering the deployment scenario as "out of distribution", but the experience underscored this as an another example where it matters who is the technology used by - price forecasting models that use yield prediction and crop type classification, if in the hands of larger buyers, can exploit farmers, whereas these models in the hands of ethical market entities like coops can put more power in the hands of farmers.
Adi
Co-founder, Gram Vaani; Co-founder, CoRE Stack
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