The RootsTalk family has three mobile apps — FarmPal (for farmers), FarmAssist (for agro-input dealers and rural facilitators), and FarmPundit (for agri-experts). These three apps help their users seamlessly transact with each other.

Agro-input sellers use FarmAssist to (1) promote crop advisories among farmers and (2) process their input orders. Rural facilitators also promote crop advisories using FarmAssist. In addition, FarmAssist helps them handle the input orders on behalf of the farmers, and take care of the delivery logistics.

Major features of FarmAssist

1. Promoting Crop Advisories
Agro-input sellers can promote crop advisories generated by any organization on RootsTalk. Promotion means they pay the subscription charges on behalf of the farmer.

2. Receiving orders from farmers and facilitators
Farmers can send input orders directly to the sellers, or they can route it to the sellers through facilitators. The seller can accept or reject the received orders.

3. Marking the availability of inputs ordered
Sellers see the items one-by-one and mark them as ‘available’ or ‘not available’. They can also mark an item as ‘postpone’ if the item would take a couple of days to be made available.

4. Brand flexibility
For every item ordered, the sellers have the choice of selecting the brand from among those available in the shop. However, the advising organization can limit the brand flexibility of the sellers for particular items.

5. Identifying dealerships
Sellers can identify the companies for whom they have the dealerships. FarmAssist filters brands based on this identification, which makes it easy for the farmers during brand selection.

6. Automated volume estimations
For every brand selected by the seller, FarmAssist automatically calculates the required volume and suggests the same to the seller. However, this is only a suggestion; the seller can provide the volume based on the available pack sizes of the products.

7. Price discretion, No stock inventory
Sellers have the choice to enter, or not to enter, the price of the products on FarmAssist. Also, FarmAssist never asks the sellers to prepare a stock inventory of the products in the shop.

8. Farmer approval of item list
The seller sends the list of products offered to be sold for farmer approval. This happens through FarmAssist.

9. Packing list
FarmAssist automatically prepares the packing list after receiving farmers’ approval. The seller can share the packing list with other shop members to facilitate physical packing.

10. Picking up the order
If the farmer has routed the order through a facilitator, then FarmAssist instructs the facilitator to pick the order from the shop and deliver to the farmer.

11. Incomplete orders
A seller is not expected to provide all the items in the order. Providing items is limited to what is available in the shop and what can be procured and sold. Pending items can be forwarded to another seller by the farmer or the facilitator. The seller cannot forward an order to another seller.

A rural facilitator does not have the features related to dealership selection, and cannot open the orders. These are with the sellers only.