Types of Agricultural marketing

Agricultural marketing is a process which includes all the steps from assembly of agricultural goods to the distribution of agricultural commodities by the farmers.
A good agricultural marketing system should ensure proper transportation, good storage facilities for agricultural goods, and provide actual cost to farmers for their commodities.
So, if we need a good agricultural conditions in the country firstly what we have to organize is an efficient agriculture marketing system so that the farmers get the actual value of their produce and proper maintanance of their commodities during transportation and get perfect storage facilities. Here we will discuss about types of agricultural marketing

TYPES OF AGRICULTURAL MARKETING

Agricultural marketing is composed of two processes namely Input marketing and Product marketing.

1. Input Marketing:- Input marketing deals with the marketing of farm inputs to the farmers for eg.- diesel, fertilizers, pesticides, farm machinery, electricity, etc.

2. Product marketing:-  Product marketing is the marketing of goods after cultivation i.e., the movement flows from farmers> primary traders> wholesalers> importers > exporters > retailers. 

In this way product marketing is the marketing of agriculture outcomes from farm to consumers.

Sometimes due to imperfect agricultural marketing farmers  face a lot of problems such as not getting actual cost of their commodity. Especially in country like India where middlemen are so much involved in farm marketing is the main cause of the suffering farmers. So, it is important to develop a good agricultural marketing system.

Measures to improve agriculture marketing

Following are the major steps to improve to improve the agricultural marketing in a community.

• Market regulation 
  There  shoud be proper regulation of market, a large number of rural markets are required. Freely transported marketing conditions are needed and faulty methods of weighing should be avoided so, that the frmers do not loose due to faulty weight.

• Improved physical infrastructure  - 
   Improved physical infrastructure such as roads, railways, storage godowns, warehosuses, agriculture machinery, cold storage facilities, etc. provides the external benefits to the farmers. Accirdingbto a suvey approx. 10% of the total agricultue outcome is wastes due to improper warehousing facilities.

• Cooperative marketing- 
   Marketing should be done on cooperative basis, all the farmers should come together to form a cooeration so as to realise the actual cost of outcome and sell them in a cooperative way. For.eg.- Milk cooperative companies such as amul and motherdairy are great example of cooperative marketing.

• Supportive Policies- 
   There are various policies started by the government to support the government , some of these policies are Minimum Supprt Price (MSP) - when the price of the crop goes down so government decides a minimum price below which noone can buy the cropfrom farmers , this price is called Minimum Support Price.  For eg. If price of wheat and rice gets too low so government buys te crops from farmees in MSP and store them as bufferstock and distribute them later under Public Distribution Service (PDS).

• Alternative Marketing Channels-  Under these marketing channels the farmers directly sell their agriculture outcome to consumers, it means no middlemen is involved in these channels, as middlemen is not involved so price the farmers get is very high comparetively but the consumer pay the normal price so, both farmer and consumer avail the benefit. Some of these channels are Apni Mandi, eNAM(online tading portal), Direct buy- Fastfood centres, Rythu Bazars( for fruits and vegetable selling at Andhra Pradesh), Hadaspar Mandi (Pune).

These were the major measures that have to be taken for an efficient agricultural marketing system, and we discussed types of agricultural marketing so the farmers  do not suffer any more and get the actual cost of their commodities and no proportion of their goods should waste during transportation and other process during marketing.