De-risking Bangladesh’s agriculture through digitised farm planning

Every season, farmers face challenges in making critical arable farming decisions about which farm enterprise (crop) to grow, and how to manage farms timely, efficiently, and profitably. In the absence of structured decision-support tools, farm decisions are often guided by traditional practices, past experiences, peer influence, and advice from input dealers. 

Over decades, Bangladesh has confronted a long-standing absence of evidence-based farm planning due to a lack of farm economic tools, national information to guide crop and machinery choice, machinery markets, and farm investments. 

Historically, Bangladesh did not often need crop budgets for farm planning. This is because of the dominance of subsistence agriculture that primarily focuses on household food security, where the market is simply a way to clear up surplus production and help reimburse operating expenses. 

However, farming over the last two decades has been going through a rapid transformation with increasing labour scarcity and hiring costs. Agriculture and mechanisation for farm management now, more than ever, require business sense to exist. 

Continuing family farming traditions is no longer a priority in rural Bangladesh. Many farm families prefer non-farm employment for their children owing to better opportunities in manufacturing, ready-made garments, and construction. 

They are worried about the perceived low social status associated with farming. Entrepreneurial farmers recognise the economic potential of a more business-oriented farm sector. The country's graduation from the Least Developed Country (LDC) category encourages rethinking of the farming business model. Linking with economic growth and agricultural transformation, evidence-based budgeting is essential to support informed agricultural policy, programme design and investment decisions. 

Brief overview of the world's farm planning 

Crop budgets are among the most fundamental farm economic tools to support farmers, agribusiness, academics and researchers, extension actors and policymakers in making data-driven informed decisions. A crop budget is used to estimate the costs, revenues, and projected profitability of producing a specific crop. 

It breaks down all expenses (seeds, fertilisers, labour, machinery) against expected yields and market prices to determine your break-even point and net return. Such farm planning is most effective if updated regularly, and this addresses the dynamics of prices, costs, and returns. 

In countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Argentina and Canada, crop budgets are updated annually and made publicly available online and/or as a published book to guide the relevant stakeholders. 

Literature shows that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and different US universities update annual state-level crop budgets. For instance, the Purdue University's Crop Cost and Return Guide, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's farmdocdaily, Kansas State University's Agmanager.info, the University of Georgia's Crop budgets, which guide farmers, agribusinesses, agricultural extension services and government agencies. 

Canadian crop budgeting also plays a key role in guiding agriculture, including the Alberta government's Cropping alternatives: crop budget planning, and Manitoba's Crop production costs. 

In Argentina, the farmer organisation CREA produces crop budgets and shares them through regular publications. Similarly, the United Kingdom has enterprise cost and return guidelines, such as  Agro Business Consultants and John Nix Pocketbook, and Ireland follows crop production and budgeting guidelines, e.g., Teagasc Crop Costs and Returns 2026. In Germany, KTBL international offers data on input costs, output prices, and farm budgets. 

Comparable initiatives can also be found across Asia. However, they tend to be fragmented and often lack extensive historical track records. For instance, the Indian Union Budget 2026-27 promotes the production of high-value crops. 

China has a comparatively good track record of publishing: Book series: China agricultural products cost-benefit compilation of information. A global network of experts has developed a platform called Agri Benchmark, which compiles and compares national farm enterprise costs and returns across the world. 

What does crop budget planning do?

The prime target is to bring stakeholders under one umbrella with a data-driven digital crop budget planning. A recent research initiative by the Hub for Smallholders Agri-Tech Economics (HSATE), a research lab based at the Department of Agricultural Economics in Bangladesh Agricultural University, sheds light on this long-standing farm planning gap. 

HSATE developed nationally representative division-level crop budgets for major cereals (Aman rice, Boro rice, and wheat) and rotational crops (maize, lentil, and mustard), followed by the development of an open-access digital crop budget planning tool for guiding evidence-based farming decisions. 

Data-driven agricultural decisions are crucial for Bangladesh's agriculture to transition into a commercially successful industry. Appropriate planning and decisions would facilitate the country's graduation from LDC.

This initiative endeavours to combine national data from different representative sources of Bangladesh, like Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC), Bangladesh Bank (BB), Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and Department of Agricultural Marketing (DAM) complemented with key informant interviews (KIIs) including agricultural experts, and representatives of several leading agro-chemicals and agri-tech companies to fill the data gaps. 

This initiative is funded by the International Growth Centre (IGC), which is directed by the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. 

Firstly, 'key crop zones of Bangladesh' were mapped using geographic information systems (GIS) for major and rotational crop zones at district and division levels, followed by the development of the nation's first crop cost and return guide focused on key crop zones and an open-access digital crop budget planning tool. 

Facilitating data-driven agricultural decision-making in Bangladesh

The budgeting offers stakeholders evidence-based farm planning opportunities to reduce risks in Bangladesh's agriculture. Implications include:

• Data-driven agricultural decisions are crucial for transitions of Bangladesh's agriculture to being a commercially successful industry. Appropriate planning and decisions would facilitate the country's graduation from LDC. 
• Frequently updated budgeting can help farmers and businesses to identify profitable crops and labour-saving agri-tech, thereby supporting the national agricultural mechanisation policy and plan of action. 
• Digitised crop zoning, and profitable crops production and planning can facilitate a 'sustainable, safe and profitable' agriculture vision targeted in the national agriculture policy.
• Policymakers could benefit from budgeting to design targeted crop support programmes and region-specific investment strategies instead of proposing a 'one size fits all' approach for agriculture, which is well known as a risky business.
• Combined with high-frequency meteorological and soil quality data, this could potentially support the development of predictive models, which could feed into the decision-making process from the farm level to the policymaking level.
• AI-integrated chatbots could be linked with automated crop budgeting that could generate inference of evidence-based farm planning decisions. 

More importantly, the implications of budgeting depend on the quality and accessibility of national datasets and interrelated institutional coordination. National agricultural administrative datasets should be digitised and linked with the automated crop budget planning tool to generate informed agricultural decisions. 

A K M Abdullah Al-Amin is an Agri-Tech economist, working on the staff of Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) as an Associate Professor.

Dr James Lowenberg-DeBoer is Professor at Harper Adams University and a former president of the International Society of Precision Agriculture (ISPA).

Aminul Aman is Country Economist, Bangladesh at the International Growth Centre (IGC).