ITC Chairman Sanjiv Puri said ITCMAARS will build a Farming as a Service ecosystem, enabling customised value chains, traceability, resilient farming, advanced seeds and stronger global market access for farmers. A vital component of ITC’s agri strategy is to promote Value-Added Agriculture to enable farmers scale the next horizon of profitable growth. Taking this further, ITCMAARS will drive a Farming as a Service (FaaS) ecosystem to ‘Grow the Buy’, where crop value chains are customised to meet specific buyer needs. ITC’s Spices Business, for example, is today the country’s leading exporter of organic spices, supported by certified cultivation, backward integration and one of Asia’s largest spices processing facilities at Guntur. Fostering an effective science-to-farm ecosystem, ITC’s LSTC is leveraging advanced breeding technologies, molecular genetics and digital tools to develop higher-yielding, climate-resilient, hybrid and disease-resistant varieties across crops such as tobacco, wheat, potato, eucalyptus and subabul.