Digital Green FarmStack Data Platform Reaches 2.3M Farmers

Smallholder farmers in India and Ethiopia face significant barriers to accessing agricultural knowledge, markets, and financial services due to limited formal education, language barriers, and lack of documented credit history. Traditional extension services struggle to reach dispersed rural populations effectively, and when farmers do generate data through digital agricultural tools, they often lack control over how that data is used or shared. This creates power asymmetries where technology companies and intermediaries capture value from farmer data without providing equitable returns to the farmers themselves, while farmers remain locked out of market and finance opportunities that require data-driven creditworthiness.

Digital Green implemented a two-pronged approach combining FarmStack, a decentralized data-sharing platform launched in 2021, with farmer-to-farmer video extension services. FarmStack provides farmers with an Ag Data Wallet to store personal data digitally and a user interface to understand data-sharing benefits, ensuring privacy, security, and farmer control through a neutral account aggregator model. This enables farmers to share data in exchange for useful insights into new skills, impact measurement, collective bargaining power, and introductions to finance and market opportunities. Simultaneously, Digital Green works with over 50,000 extension agents across India and Ethiopia to produce localized video demonstrations where farmers show agricultural methods in visual storytelling format, available in over 20 different languages, making agricultural knowledge accessible to low-literacy populations.

The combined initiatives reached over 2.3 million smallholder farmers across India and Ethiopia, with 73% being women, demonstrating strong gender inclusion. The farmer-to-farmer video extension model proved highly effective at knowledge transfer across language and literacy barriers, with videos produced in over 20 languages and delivered through a network of 50,000+ extension agents. The FarmStack platform established a functioning data ecosystem that allows farmers to maintain privacy and control while accessing services previously unavailable to them, creating a neutral alternative to corporate-controlled agricultural data platforms. The decentralized data-sharing protocol enabled farmers to leverage their data for collective bargaining, market access, and financial services while retaining sovereignty over their information.

This case demonstrates that data sovereignty and farmer empowerment can be built into digital agricultural platforms from the ground up, challenging the prevailing model of corporate data extraction. The combination of localized video content in 20+ languages with a privacy-preserving data platform addresses both the knowledge gap and the power asymmetry faced by smallholder farmers. The 73% women participation rate shows that culturally appropriate delivery mechanisms (farmer-to-farmer videos, local languages, community extension agents) can achieve strong gender equity. The case illustrates that sustainable digital transformation in agriculture requires not just technology deployment but reimagining data governance to ensure farmers share equitably in the value their data creates.