The Indian Farmer Is No Longer Just an Agri Customer
Opinion by Sreya Majumdar, Consumer Marketing and Digital Transformation Leader
07 July 2026, New Delhi: The clock chimes six o’clock in the evening. Radha, a twenty-year-old girl, has just returned from her college after a day full of learning, gossip, and discussions. Her dual SIM smartphone carries two prepaid SIM cards, one from operator A, one from operator J. She uses whichever offers her better value that month.
Her father, Dilip, has also returned from the bank, disappointed. He had applied for an agricultural loan two weeks earlier and the bank has told him that it may take another six to eight weeks.
The sowing season is here; it has already rained today. So, he needs cash now as tomorrow he will need to prepare the land.
Within the next hour, he borrows money from the local moneylender, Shyamji, instead, whom he has known for two decades. Shyamji charges an interest rate of 24% per annum. Dilip knows it is usurious but he cannot wait and deal with the uncertainty.
That evening, Radha asks Dilip for ₹229 to recharge her phone. He notices the monthly plan has gone up from ₹199 to ₹229. So, he asks her to check the other SIM; it is still ₹199. She switches.
The same man who accepted a 24% loan without negotiation refused to pay ₹30 extra for a mobile recharge. The same household that switched telecom operators without hesitation trusted an informal lender over a formal financial institution.
A few days later, Radha watches an advertisement online announcing a new flight connecting an airport, seventy kilometres away from her village, to Mumbai. She dreams of studying fashion technology there. Her father aware of her daughter’s dream, wants to send her to Mumbai on her very first flight. To him, that ticket is not luxury, but an investment into her future, a future he never had.
One farming household. Three decisions. Three motivations.
Yet businesses often assume that a farmer carries the same mindset into every purchase they make. They don’t. We are wont to classifying farmers by landholding size, income profile, geography, crops grown, or access to irrigation. Those are necessary ways to segment markets, but they do not sufficiently explain buying behaviour.
The farmer knows his priorities and until we, as brands, align ourselves to the same, we don’t understand him fully well.
When the consideration is for arranging finance for sowing, certainty of funds and immediacy of need outweigh cost. The trade-off between a waiting period of six weeks for a better rate of interest and losing the sowing period vs borrowing money at 24% is almost a no-brainer.
However, when he buys a mobile recharge, he views the category as commoditised. At that point of interaction with the category, every rupee counts for him, because switching is effortless and convenient and the alternatives are readily available.
While investing in his daughter’s education, their collective aspiration wins over being penny wise. The purchase of a flight ticket is no more mere utility (travel) but an investment into the future, a symbol of hope, opportunity and prosperity that extends beyond the village.
The customer has not changed, his context has. This distinction matters enormously in agriculture.
For decades, agri companies have focused on understanding the farmer through an agricultural lens, studying cropping patterns, farm economics, weather, soil health, yield, and so on. While all of these continue to remain critical considerations in segmentation-targeting-positioning in marketing to a farmer, today’s farmer is equally influenced by experiences and his interactions with categories outside of agriculture.
The fact is that the same farmer who buys seeds also shops online, pays through UPI, watches YouTube videos to make a purchase consideration, tracks deliveries on e-commerce platforms, books railway tickets on a mobile app and expects instant confirmation for digital payments.
Those experiences do not become unimportant when he walks into an agri-input retail outlet.
Agri-input companies today no longer compete only with businesses in their own category. Agricultural businesses increasingly compete against the best customer experiences farmers have had elsewhere.
If digital payments settle instantly, farmers begin expecting quicker agricultural loan approvals. If he is used to e-commerce platforms providing real-time order tracking, he expects similar visibility after placing orders for seeds, crop protection products, or farm equipment.
Consumers do not compartmentalise experiences, they transfer expectations.
This has profound implications for agricultural businesses. Competitive advantage is no longer created only through better genetics, better chemistry or better machinery but it is also Increasingly, created through every interaction surrounding those products.
His brand experience is laced with expectations of a loan approval that reaches before the sowing season is missed, of a dealer who proactively informs him about delayed inventory and alternatives, crop advisory that arrives before a pest outbreak peaks, a service engineer who reaches the field during harvest instead of a week later. He expects an insurance claim settled when he actually needs the money.
These moments often shape trust far more than marketing campaigns ever can! Twenty years back, competitive advantage came from scale, ten years back from digital transformation, and today, it comes from understanding the evolving farmer faster and better than competition and organising the enterprise around that understanding of customer centricity.
The organisations that recognise this the earliest will not simply build stronger brands but will build stronger relationships, deeper trust, and enduring relevance with the modern Indian farmer.
Global Agriculture is an independent international media platform covering agri-business, policy, technology, and sustainability. For editorial collaborations, thought leadership, and strategic communications, write to pr@global-agriculture.com
