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Agricultural Marketing – Definitions: Provided by Thomsen and National Commission on Agriculture
According to Thomsen – the study of agricultural marketing comprises all the operations, and the agencies conducting them, involved in the movement of farm produced foods, raw materials and their derivatives, such as textiles, from the farms to the final consumers, and the effects of such operations on farmers, middlemen and consumers.
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According to the National Commission on Agriculture – Agricultural Marketing is a process which starts with a decision to produce a saleable farm commodity, and it involves all the aspects of market structure or system, both functional and institutional, based on technical and economic considerations, and include pre- and post-harvest operations viz., assembling, grading, storage, transportation and distribution.
Marketing of agricultural goods in India is of no mean significance. Agricultural marketing is one of the manifold problems, which has direct bearing upon the prosperity of the cultivator. Agricultural marketing, in its wide sense, comprises all the operations involved in the movement of goods and raw materials from the field to the final consumer.
It includes handling of product at the farm, initial processing, grading and packing in order to maintain and enhance quality and avoid wastage. Unfortunately, the present system of marketing of agricultural goods in India is extremely defective and needs a thorough overhauling.
The close inter-relationship between agricultural production (farming), agricultural finance (credit), and agricultural marketing (sale of farm products) has been recognised by the Government as well as by the experts on agricultural problems.
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Farm products cover not only the products arising out of cultivation, but also products arising from dairy farming, poultry farming, fruit cultivation, vegetable farming, etc. In this wider sense, milk and milk products, eggs, fruits, vegetables, honey are also agricultural goods.
In spite of developed agricultural marketing with respect to highly sophisticated means of transport facilities, improved form of standardization and grading, advanced communication system, scientific method of storage and warehousing, the Indian agriculture is still for behind.
Therefore, it is required that wide and effective distribution channels should be used for different types of marketing, which exercise different functions in the marketing of agricultural goods. The small-scale production of farm products further leads to concentration, equalization and dispersion. As a result, these agricultural goods necessarily move through some important wholesale markets such as – jobbing market and secondary market.