The Founders
Padmakumar AV, the co-founder at CommunityFarm completed his masters from the College of Engineering Trivandrum. Soon after completing his masters Padmakumar started his career in the IT sector with some of the big names like Intel and Cisco. With more than 20 years of experience, Padmakumar has a proven track record in driving high-quality products and building highly effective teams.
Revathy Murugesh, the co-founder at CommunityFarm has a keen understanding of rural markets, organic markets, organic farming, and building supply chains for the farm products.
Revathy completed her Architecture degree from UVCE, Bangalore, and got trained in Landscaping at the School of planning and Architecture, Delhi.
What is CommunityFarm all about?
CommunityFarm is a community-centric online marketplace helping farmers and Agri/food startups. The company partners with farmers and vendors who practice sustainable agriculture and helps them to sell their products directly to consumer communities through the company’s online market place.
The company assures consistent quality by disclosing farmer’s details on the site so that consumers are aware of where their produce is coming from, which helps create “farm-brand” and a loyal customer base for each farmer.
The company helps to increase the income of farmers with landholding less than a hectare by encouraging farm visits/farm tourism to explore revenue generation models to tap income from services segments.
Check out the CommunityFarm platform here.
Idea and Inspiration behind CommunityFarm
Padmakumar and Revathy understood the need of having a reliable source of produce that is safe and healthy for families.
In the early stages, the duo conceptualized the idea of providing land on lease to grow and sell their products, but due to high input cost, labor, and farm-animal related problems, they realized that as urban citizens with limited resources, they could not compete with the farmers; instead, they molded their thoughts to support, encourage and educate farmers.
This was the seed that grew and turned into CommunityFarm, an online market place that aims to bridge the gap between farmers and consumers.
Check out the CommunityFarm platform here.
Challenges in the outset
The company faced difficulties in educating both consumers and farmers. The challenges with consumers were that they had limited information about food and safety, source of origin on the other hand farmers could not follow healthy practices because of price problems, and their inability to reach the targeted customers who look out for healthy category of produce.
The company bridged this gap through two-way communication through portals allowing direct farmer-consumer communication.
Hitting the first Milestone and current growth of CommunityFarm
The company has flourished well in no time and observed 80% annual growth, with consumer base spread out to 350+ communities in Bangalore.
The first Milestone of the company was reaching 2500 families and regularly delivering products to them. The company is planning to expand its customer base to 50000 families in the next two years.
