Case Study Details - AI4AI - Food Value Chain - A partnership platform enabling sustainable, resilient agri-value chains through direct farmer-to-industry integration across multiple crops.

Challenges

The food industry faces increasingly fragmented supply chains, limited traceability, inconsistent raw material quality and growing pressure to meet sustainability and responsible sourcing commitments. These challenges are further compounded by climate variability, making it difficult to ensure resilient, transparent, and reliable agricultural value chains while improving farmer livelihoods.

Intervention

The Food Value Chain (FVC) Partnership, led by Bayer Crop Science addresses these challenges through an integrated, multi-stakeholder platform that directly connects farmers with food processors, retailers, exporters, and other industry partners. The model combines strong backward integration with Bayer's Regenerative Agriculture Framework, providing farmers with quality inputs, technical advisory, traceability systems, sustainable production practices, and market linkages. Operating across multiple crops, the partnership enables scalable, sustainable sourcing while supporting companies in achieving their sustainability and Scope 3 commitments.

Impact / Outcome

The Food Value Chain (FVC) Partnership currently engages approximately 200,000 farmers across 500,000 acres and collaborates with more than 60 organizations across India's food industry. The Sustainable Basmati Rice workstream has scaled from pilot projects in 2023 to 22,000 hectares by 2026, demonstrating a replicable model for sustainable sourcing. The programme has delivered measurable environmental and economic outcomes. In 2025, participating farms achieved up to 17% improvement in water productivity, 4,400 MT of CO₂e emissions reduced, and 500+ soil samples analysed for 14 nutrients, along with EC, pH and organic carbon (OC) to support regenerative farming practices. Despite excess rainfall, floods and lower market prices, farmers recorded up to 5% yield improvement and 12% higher revenue through export markets. Earlier programme results (2024) demonstrated up to 18% improvement in water productivity, 1,400 MT of CO₂e emissions reduced, 9% yield improvement, and 20% higher export revenues. Collectively, these outcomes have improved resource efficiency, strengthened farm economics, reduced emissions, and increased the resilience of sustainable basmati value chains.