New Delhi, 03 August 2026: Digital Green India has announced a major milestone in agricultural technology: its multilingual, AI-powered farming advisory assistant, FarmerChat, has officially crossed 10 lakh (1 million) users in India since its launch in October 2024. This achievement spans both smallholder farmers and frontline extension workers nationwide.
Coinciding with this milestone is the launch of FarmerChat 2.0, a significantly upgraded version of the app designed to make trusted, hyperlocal farming advice even more accessible to millions in low-connectivity environments.
Bridging the Knowledge Gap for Smallholder Farmers
Smallholder farmers frequently face volatile incomes due to unpredictable weather, pests, and crop diseases. While agricultural knowledge exists, delivering it directly to farmers exactly when they need to make a decision has historically been a challenge.
To bridge this gap, Digital Green built FarmerChat. Available in five languages, the AI-powered app offers context-aware guidance covering the entire farming cycle—from crop planning and pest management to livestock care and weather forecasts.
Recognizing diverse literacy levels, the app utilizes a conversational interface that allows farmers to ask questions via voice, text, or photos. This is particularly crucial because field problems, like a specific crop disease, are often much easier to photograph than to describe.
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FarmerChat doesn’t just rely on generic AI. The assistant is powered by fine-tuned language models combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and expert-validated datasets. Furthermore, the system is continuously refined through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
Crucially, local agronomists and veterinarians regularly validate the app’s responses. This ensures that any guidance provided remains technically accurate, locally relevant, and grounded in verified agricultural science rather than hallucinated AI output.
Slashing the Cost of Agricultural Extension
FarmerChat marks a fundamental shift in the economics of agricultural advisory. Traditional, in-person agricultural extension can cost approximately ₹3,300 per farmer annually. Digital Green previously disrupted this with a video-based model, but FarmerChat has drastically reduced the cost to just ~₹33 per farmer a year.
The platform has already answered over 30 lakh queries in India, with women constituting about 45% of its user base. Impact metrics are equally impressive:
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60% of active users act on the advice they receive.
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91% report greater confidence in their farming decisions (per a third-party evaluation by 60 Decibels).
FarmerChat 2.0: Rebuilt by Listening to Farmers
While the first iteration saw strong adoption, farmers’ actual usage patterns dictated the direction of version 2.0. Over the past year, users shifted away from typing, overwhelmingly preferring to speak to the assistant or upload photos of their fields. Notably, users engaging with the image feature were significantly more likely to apply the advice.
FarmerChat 2.0 hardwires these preferences into its core design. Instead of waiting for a farmer to initiate a prompt, the app now proactively suggests starter questions tailored to the farmer’s specific crop, location, and the current season in the agricultural calendar. It also introduces advisory cards and an evolving farmer profile to continuously personalize the experience.
The Road Ahead: The Agricultural AI Harness
Digital Green aims to bring an additional 35 lakh farmers onto the platform by 2028, with a strong focus on deepening the participation of women farmers and driving climate-smart agricultural practices.
“Everything in FarmerChat 2.0 came from listening to farmers,” said Nidhi Bhasin, CEO of Digital Green India. “Through millions of interactions, they shared that they wanted advice suited to their crop, their season, and their language, delivered the way they naturally communicate.”
Looking forward, Bhasin noted that the next evolution will be the Agricultural AI Harness—an ecosystem foundation where trusted services for weather, markets, and government schemes can plug directly into the AI, providing farmers with a single, highly personalized hub for every service they need.