Nobody decided this.
Every season, Indian farmers choose what to sow with almost no information about what the market will want at harvest. Last year’s high price pulls everyone into the same crop. Six months later they arrive at the mandi together, holding a perishable product, and the price collapses. Six months after that, the consumer pays triple.
Sowline is the demand-side mirror that does not exist yet: it normalises what the country will buy into kilograms per district per week, subtracts what is actually coming, and shifts the difference backwards through the crop calendar into a sowing date a farmer can act on — capped, so the advice cannot itself become the next glut.
Every peak is a farmer ruined. Every trough is a consumer paying triple.
Price and arrivals for tomato, three years, weekly. They move against each other with almost mechanical reliability — and the mechanism is simply that thousands of people made the same reasonable decision at the same time, alone.
across 4,066 district-weeks under 0.8 coverage
district-weeks above 1.2 coverage — farmers told to stay out
148 opportunities, each capped at 80% of its gap
sowing window closed or agronomically impossible — shown, not swallowed
Who this is for
Demand portal
Retail, quick-commerce, FPOs, mandi committees
Upload a sales or procurement file. Free-text product names are mapped once per distinct string, the mapping report shows every unmapped row, and you get the aggregate shortfall picture for the districts you buy in.
OpenSurface BFarmer app
Smallholders, low literacy, native language, low-end Android
What to sow, on how many acres, by which date, at what price band — with the reasoning shown, a risk band, and a one-tap decline that frees the acres back into the pool.
Speaks any Indian language, and the form fills itself as you talkOpenSurface CGap dashboard
Agri department, press, anyone
Where the country is over- and under-planting, by commodity, district and ISO week — with the arithmetic behind every cell and an audit trail for every number.
OpenThe limits, stated before you find them
Not a buyer commitment
An indicative price band is not an offer. Nothing here is binding on anyone, and the card says so.
Not an ML forecast
Demand projection is last year's same week × a growth factor × a hardcoded festival table. A rule a judge can read beats a model a judge must trust. Labelled v0 baseline throughout.
Not a supply registry
Declaration coverage is a few percent. Everything else is inferred from mandi arrivals, and the coverage number is shown on every screen rather than buried.
Not identity infrastructure
Phone number only. No Aadhaar, no land records. Where AgriStack Farmer ID would plug in is marked, not faked.