Transforming Indian Agriculture Through Farming Innovations

Contract farming has existed for a long time, taking different forms, such as a sharecropping contract that was initially regarded as a feudal form of agriculture because the markets were either absent or underdeveloped (Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985). Initially, contract farming was a common practice in developed countries, driven principally by concerns over food safety and quality (Otsuka et al., 2016; Mishra et al., 2018; Bellemare and Bloem, 2018). Glover (1984) describes contract farming as an institutional arrangement with advantages for plantations and smallholder production. Farmers and buyers commonly use contract farming to make advance agreements on volume, specific requirements, delivery, and price.