When a software engineer walked into a rice-mill yard in Karatagi, Karnataka, and watched a farmer dump bags of paddy onto the concrete, an ordinary scene felt like a moral emergency. The farmer handed over the grain and walked away with whatever price the buyer declared; quality checks, payments and credit terms were opaque. That moment became the origin story of M5 Info Solutions.

“I’m not from a farming background, but when I stood in the mill yard and saw a farmer put down 40 bags, and then be told whatever price the buyer gives, I said something’s wrong”, recalls Raghunandan, CEO, M5 Info Solutions. From ERP for rice mills to a farmer-first digital marketplace, the company’s trajectory has been shaped by that one unsettling observation: information determines agricultural value.

M5 arrived at Bhoomee Digital Agri Platform by living the workflow before coding it. Raghunandan experienced the entire cycle from buying the farm produce to selling it in the market. The operational humility produced a platform that is a practical apparatus for decision-making. Crop-cycle management, provenance-aware farmer registers, localized expert advice, and a marketplace that lets buyers and sellers signal, match and transact with far greater transparency.

Visibility Dissolves Rent Seeking

Farmers can list crops on platform weeks before harvest; buyers can locate supply by taluk and village; local entrepreneurs, called Udyamis, onboard farmers, collect data and provide a human bridge where digital literacy is thin.

The company reports 48,500 registered farmers on the portal, a scale that converts anecdote into pattern. By aggregating supply and preannouncing harvest windows, M5 reduces the advantage of middlemen who hoard information and pocket the margin.

By aggregating supply and preannouncing harvest windows, M5 reduces the advantage of middlemen who hoard information & pocket the margin

The app’s crop-cycle architecture is where the platform’s mission becomes tactical. Each crop is modelled as stages (sowing, vegetative, flowering, harvest) and for each stage the platform prescribes likely pests, remedial practices, labour needs and a budgeting tool.

Farmers can photograph symptoms and share them with peers or experts; consultants and input enterprises can present location-specific recommendations; and a crop calculator tracks expected versus actual costs.

Recalibrating Buyers’ Outreach

A vendor can target specific taluks where harvests are upcoming, pre arrange inspection via Udyamis, or make bids that undercut the slow, costly choreography of traditional procurement. A watermelon grower in Sira, Karnataka, used the platform to connect with a buyer who agreed to pay near-market Chennai rates instead of the local buyer’s ₹3/kg; another producer in Puttur posted 30 tonnes of pumpkin and watched multiple buyers bid, selling 25 tonnes at prices that netted roughly rupee 50,000 more than his typical margin.

The platform’s future reads like a sensible extension of existing strengths like tighter soil-test integrations, labelling of provenance for higher-value buyers, and service bundles for mechanisation. In addition, M5 is onboarding licensed drone pilots, tying loan-financeable assets to demand for spray and surveillance, and positioning operators as recurring-revenue service providers to farmers. If information is the currency of markets, then M5 is trying to rewrite who gets paid.