AGRICULTURAL MARKETING (ACTIVITIES INVOLVED)

Agricultural marketing covers the services involved in moving agricultural products from the farm to the consumer. Numerous interconnected activities are involved in doing this, such as planning production, growing and harvesting, grading, packaging, transport, storage, agro- and food processing distribution, advertising and sale.

Some definitions would even include “the acts of buying supplies, renting equipment and paying labour. These activities are listed below:

Production planning: production planning means to fix the production goals and to estimate the resources which are required to achieve these goals.

It prepares a detailed plan for achieving the production goals economically, efficiently and in time. It forecasts the problems, which may arise in the production process. It tries to remove these problems it also tries to remove the causes of wastage. Planning production provides answers for two major questions viz:

1. What work should be done
2. How much time will be taken to perform the work.

Planning production is concerned with the determination acquisition and arrangement of all facilities necessary for future operations. (Ray Wild: Essentials of operations Management).

Growing and Harvesting

Growing and harvesting are activities in agricultural marketing that involve the science, art and business of cultivating soil, producing crops and raising livestock farming and also the act or process of gathering a crop

Grading and Standardization

Grading is an agricultural activity which involve sorting out products into different groups according to the quality specifications already determined and laid down. It is a method of dividing products into groups according to pre-determined standards. Grading comes after standardization and it is a sub-function of standardization.

Standardization means the determination of the standards to be established for different productions, it is the determination of the basis limits of the process and methods of producing, handling and selling goods and services.

Grading and standardization is very important in agricultural marketing. Some of which are listed below:

1. It makes it possible to purchase goods by description.
2. It conforms to the different qualities expected by different buyers according to their purchasing power or expected satisfaction.

• Grading and standardization encourages prices discrimination and this enables the seller to obtain better prices.

1. It helps in the handling and transportation of agricultural produce.
2. In the case of raw materials, grading is absolutely necessary in order to exercise control over the quality of the finished product.

Apart from those importance, it has the following shortcomings:

1. For some agricultural products, the basis of the grade standard is sensory taste. Sensory taste varies from person to another person and the best product for one person may not be liked by another person.

2. Agricultural products such as fruits are perishable or semi-perishable commodities which deteriorate n quality after they have been graded and packed. By the time they get to the final consumers there are complaints about the poor quality of the graded product.
3. Consumers are sometime confused because different standards have been laid down by different departments for the same product.
4. Lack of uniform quality: the grading of agricultural products is a more difficult task than that of industrial goods because when they are produced they are not of uniform quality.
5. Most consumers are quality conscious when it comes to agricultural products so this produces a poor incentive for the farmers to adopt grading.