Agribusiness Matters: Recent Episodes

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One of the most amazing nonagenarian ayurveda vaidyas (traditional healers) I’ve had the privilege of knowing once told me something that I could never forget.

In a moment of visible anguish, he turned to me and said, “My medicines are working more slowly these days because the food you eat is no longer food. The milk you drink is not milk. If you had eaten better food, I would have cured you faster.”

It was a powerful penny drop moment that viscerally showcased the interplay between food and health systems.

Traditional medicine treatment rests on three pillars: Ahara (food), Vihara (behavioral regulation), and Aushadi (medicine). Medicine is one leg of the tripod. When food quality collapses, the tripod loses a leg.

When the herbs themselves are degraded — essential oils stripped from pepper before it reaches the market, soils so depleted the plant cannot biosynthesize what it once did — the tripod loses a second leg.

The medicine carries the full burden of what was designed to be a shared load. The framework quietly fails.

In Part I, Dr. A.V. Balasubramanian — co-founder of CIKS, trained biophysicist, student of the Krishnamacharya lineage — traced the philosophical foundations of Vrikshayurveda (Ancient Indian Plant Science) and its central institutional problem: What do we do when the texts survive, but the practitioner chain that once translated them into farm practice doesn’t?

Part II moves from the philosophical to the operational.

We explored the immediate low-hanging opportunities for entrepreneurs. We grappled with the infrastructural gap that comes in the way of better adoption of traditional sciences. We mapped where modern technologies could complement traditional systems.

Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited transcript of the conversation for those who want to go into the greyness and nuance we explored. Always remember. The Map is not the Territory.

Venky: I want to start with a fundamental question about the relationship between Ayurveda and Vrikshayurveda. We understand that some of the underlying principles are common to both humans and plants. But I also want to explore where the similarities end and the divergences begin.

Dr.AVB: At a very fundamental level, the basic principles of worldview are shared in terms of the composition of matter and how we understand biological change. The Panchamahabhuta siddhant, the idea that all matter is composed of five Mahabhutas (Akasha Ether, Vayu Air, Agni Fire, Jala Water and Prithvi Earth) and Tridosha, that all prakriti (Nature) is constituted by a balance of Vata (The Energy of Movement), Pitta (The Energy of Transformation), and Kapha (The Energy of Stability) is shared by all life forms, be it humans or animals or plants.

However, when it comes to practical applications, the situation is very different.

The practical goal in Ayurveda is to help someone in good health maintain it, irrespective of changes in the environment and help them come out of it and restore proper balance, if a person is struck with disease or disorder. For that work, apart from the basic texts, you have an enormous amount of principles spelled out in commentaries and a living body of practitioners.

Nobody can read a text like Charaka Samhita and simply get into practice. There is a whole lot that links the text to the actual prayogam (usage).

There is no institutionally trained body of scholars well-versed in Vrikshayurveda. There are hundreds of scholars across India deeply knowledgeable in Charaka Samhita, Sushruta Samhita, Agastya Gunapadam, Siddha and Unani texts. They have read commentaries, written commentaries, translated many of those into practice. We are not able to find any such body of scholars in Vrikshayurveda.

Venky: Is Ministry of Ayush also not able to do this?

Dr. AVB: Ayush didn't even consider it part of their mandate. They woke up later and said they have to do something about it. At the fundamental conceptual level, in the case of a human you can say that among the building blocks there are seven dhatus — Rasa (Plasma/Lymph), Rakta (Blood), Mamsa (Muscle), Majja (Bone Marrow & Nervous Tissue), Meda (Fat/Adipose), Asthi (Bones and Cartilage), Shukra (Reproductive Tissue)

Nobody has clearly spelled this out in Vrikshayurveda.

We know we cannot map those exact seven dhatus into plants. There are some things approximately corresponding, but nothing with a clear one-to-one. So that makes it quite a challenge to translate certain principles in Vrikshayurveda texts into actual prayogam (usage)

It is strange that somebody like me — not really a practitioner of Ayurveda — got interested and strayed into this. Sometimes I create a particular yukti, a strategy, for treating some plant disease. I voice it to a Bradman class Ayurvedic scholar, a real Acharya and ask what do they think. They would be very interested and say that logically, the chain of reasoning you set out is flawless. But you have to test it out in practice. We have no basis to say whether it is right or not till you put it to actual practice.

Venky: Let us say 150 years ago, somebody in Varanasi or from South India, wakes up and says, “I want to start my journey to become a Vrikshayurveda Acharya”. Could you speculate on what that journey would have been — in the colonial times, or prior to British rule, whichever you feel comfortable with? Sometime back, if there is somebody with a genuine interest — I recently met this gentleman who is calling Vrikshayurveda Agro Ayurveda, Ravi Singh Choudary, who is just attempting to learn this and go deeper — how could he become an Acharya today?

Dr. AVB: I don’t think Vrikshayurveda had a parampara (tradition) of that kind. Almost any Ayurvedic text that tells you how the text came down to you will mention a Guru Parampara — he taught it to Indra, Indra taught it to so-and-so, and through a lineage it came down to you. A similar thing you find in yoga texts like Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The Vrikshayurveda texts we have encountered do not specify a similar Guru Parampara.

So 150 years ago, if somebody woke up, it is very unlikely he would say he wants to become a Vrikshayurveda Acharya, as the term itself would not be there in his mind. That does not mean the expertise doesn’t exist.

But unlike Jyotisha — where there would be court scholars, folk practitioners, people who do Kuri Solrathu, various levels from whom you could learn, and then specializations like Nadi Jyotisha, Grantha Jyotisha, Fala Jyotisha and the calculation aspects of Siddhanta — Vrikshayurveda never had that kind of a parampara (tradition). It is not quite clear to me if it ever did.

Having said this, I must also say that Vrikshayurveda is extremely vast. Even though it has been a 30–35 year journey and we have explored various things, there are lots of byways which are fascinating that we did not pursue.

We preferred to stick to pathways with practical utility. Can it help crack the problem of certain pests that are proving very difficult by chemical methods, can it help improve the quality and quantity of harvest of certain crops? There are enormous other questions in Vrikshayurveda that I have parked. For example, Vrikshayurveda has some fascinating things about forecasting weather — short-term, medium-term, long-term. mind-boggling things. I have parked that, maybe even for a future janma (rebirth)

Venky: Few years ago, one of my favourite Ayurveda Acharyas, whom I consulted for my family, once said in a moment of anguish: my medicines today are working slowly because the kind of food you eat has become rotten. The kind of milk you drink is not milk. If you had eaten better food, my medicine would have cured you much faster. It is a statement I remembered for a very long time. It is also a fundamental question especially with the kind of climate change we are seeing — we are seeing a lot of nutrient collapse in plant life.

Are you seeing any sort of shift in the way some of these medicines are prepared? When you talk about barks and bringing in these plant materials — is that also affecting the performance of these formulations over time?

Dr. AVB: I will communicate two things.

One, at the the larger level, why there is such an obsession about food alongside medicine. In the framework of Ayurveda, at a physical level, if you are in harmony and good balance, you are in good health. Anything that triggers an imbalance is what disease is. To restore this balance, there are three pillars: ahara, vihara, and aushadi — food, behavioral changes, and medicine.

If I have a certain Kapha aggravation, my vaidya would tell me: you should be off curds completely, or at least at night; avoid refrigerated and reheated foods. That is the chunk of advice about food. Regarding behavior, he might say: absolutely no sleep in the daytime, that will just aggravate your Kapha; do bathe in cold water. Then the third aspect is medicine. Medicine is really one third of the armory. So when your vaidya says in anguish — with this kind of food, what can I do?

You are like a two-legged man, limping on one leg.

Second, on the quality of herbs, I have a famous Siddha vaidya friend in Chennai who told me: If you look at the properties of spices spelled out in Siddha texts, like Pepper and Turmeric, those properties are so fantastic that if you are regularly having them along with a regular South Indian diet, it should boost your health. But the quality of herbs in the market is very poor. A lot of people who put pepper out in the market have extracted certain essential oils from it first before it gets to the market. He was investing time, energy, and money to create his own plantations to harvest herbs. I asked why, given he was already running an Ayurveda college and Siddha college. He said: unless I invest in the quality of drugs, they are simply not working.

So the quality of herbs is one thing. And if you cannot regulate your food in the manner that was once possible, it badly affects how the medicine works. Even if someone comes and symptomatically improves with medicine, to put them in proper balance in terms of restoring the three doshas, you have to have activity at all three levels.

I will share one anecdote about vihara (behavioural regulation).

Several years back in Pune, there was a friend who came for a meeting where there was also a vaidya. This friend was an extremely intense person — the kind where if you sit near them, you feel they are radiating something. He had a horrible digestion problem. The vaidya felt his pulse and asked a strange question: Is there any long-standing habit that you gave up very abruptly? The man looked shocked and said yes. He had been a chain smoker for thirty years, but someone who can take an oath and live through it. Once, in a group of friends, somebody challenged him. He took a puff and said: This is the last puff.

I am not going to smoke anymore. A thirty-year-old habit changed abruptly. The vaidya told him he had made a mistake there. You may have the determination, but your body is acclimatized to certain habits. There is a stepwise way you should have gotten out of that habit. Because you did it abruptly, your body is not able to adjust. So this shows it is not just medicine, not just food — these habits are very important.

Venky: Today, a large part of farmers have inculcated certain habits, thanks to the influences of Western agronomy imposed through retailers and others. Seed treatment has become a very serious activity. Are there Vrikshayurveda practices that modern agronomy has rediscovered? I am just taking seed treatment as one example.

Dr. AVB: The classic example is neem. Around 1950/60s, neem as a biopesticide or bio-agent was hardly known in the West. There is a folk story that the India International Centre in Delhi has some magnificent neem trees. Somebody visiting saw that got curious and pursued it. Neem has been used in India since time immemorial for pest control, crop protection, and so many things. The West became conscious of its potential and began to investigate it. Over a period of time, they did what the West does best with herbs — they fractionated it and asked: which particular component seems to be giving the bioactivity in terms of pesticidal properties? They zeroed upon azadirachtin.

People started manufacturing CNFs — commercial neem formulations — with varying concentrations of azadirachtin. The West has done this repeatedly with so many herbs. Sarpagandhawas a herb used traditionally in Ayurveda. Fractionation led to the alkaloid reserpine.

The neem story does not end there. 10-15 years ago, there was a paper that looked at the LD50 value of various commercial neem formulations.

You would expect that as the azadirachtin concentration goes higher, it becomes more potent, so the LD50 value decreases. What was found is that beyond a point, it does not decrease — it seems to increase. We picked up azadirachtin, went on concentrating that molecule, and beyond a particular point it loses its efficacy.

One possible answer — which I think should be checked out — is that the effect of neem oil when applied is not just because of a single molecule azadirachtin, but because of a synergistic effect of a family of molecules. As you concentrate azadirachtin more and more, you lose some of the other substances and lose a certain balance. This is precisely the kind of approach that an arka or an asava carries — a family of substances in relationship, at a formulation level that does not require corrosive solvents, high temperature, or high pressure. It is much more moderate-scale friendly. So it is within the reach of a lot of people.

Venky: Let’s take chilli thrips. It is a big challenge, especially for viruses, traditional agronomy has a bit of a hands-off approach. You have to keep the plant healthy, and if it is caught, you have to only clear it off. So does Vrikshayurveda offer an alternative in these kinds of contexts? I know all the questions are still coming from a very conventional viewpoint. What are the areas where modern agronomy has a hands-off approach, and are there areas where Vrikshayurveda says this is something we cannot treat? Like, even in modern health science, immunological conditions or inflammation conditions — there is still a lot of research and complexity evolving there. I am just trying to bring these two approaches in contrast.

Dr. AVB: In the philosophical framework of Ayurveda, if you look at health, disease, and curing, disease may have three possible approaches. Sadhya — you can cure it. Krichra sadhya — with difficulty you can cure it. Asadhya — you cannot cure it, you can only manage the symptoms to some extent. For certain patients, Ayurveda may take the view that within the framework of our Shastra, we have no cure. We will look at the comfort level of the patient, see if we can manage them in reasonable health. That recognition is itself part of the framework.

I recently experienced this with an 86-year-old relative who fell into a coma. His close family decided to keep him at home so he could pass in peace, surrounded by the chanting of the Vishnu Sahasranama. He passed away a few days later. Sometime after, his treating doctor learned that my relative had premium health insurance. Visibly offended, the doctor told me he would have taken an 'aggressive approach.' When I asked what he meant, he suggested an exploratory operation. I was appalled. For an 86-year-old man whose family had accepted his time had come, what purpose would an exploratory surgery serve? The stark contrast between our family's acceptance and the doctor's reaction perfectly illustrates the gap between a system that recognizes asadhya and one that does not.

More than thirty years back, we had one of our early experiences at Theosophical Society campus in Chennai. It is a 300-plus acre plot. There was a grove of mango trees very badly affected. The guard and superintendent of that time was my high school classmate. He said: we don’t believe in using harsh chemicals — do you think you can do anything with the approach of Vrikshayurveda? So we went and took a look. Our diagnosis was that certain branches were very badly affected — they had to be cut off and burnt. Other branches were mildly affected.

The prescription for those was two things: make a mixture of neem and Pungam oil with soap solution and spray it, and fumigate it with fumes of Daruharitra and Vacha. This really arrested the further spread of the disease. The plants put forth new and fresh shoots and they got a yield that year — not a normal yield, a subdued yield, but the plants were revived.

This is possible because it was a tree, and you could distinguish affected from unaffected parts. If it is a smaller plant in a grove, about 10–20% of the plants may be very badly affected and may have to be sacrificed. You can only learn a lesson for the future — at the time of planting, pre-treat in this way.

Ayurveda also recognizes that disease goes through various stages: the purva rupa, the emerging phase when symptoms are not yet quite manifest; then symptoms are manifest, then strongly manifest, then full-blown. At what stage you catch it makes all the difference.

Venky: Was there a particular community that had ownership of this knowledge? In the Tamil context, the vellalar community had a big roles. Did they actively own it, or was the healer a separate community that took charge? How was that ownership structured?

Dr. AVB: Sometimes if you look at particular branches of knowledge or shastra that work with restricted materials — stone masonry, wood, jewelry — there is only a small specialized community who needs to work with it. Plants and agriculture involve a huge portion of the Indian population. They interact with plants because they cultivate food, harvest it, and use plants as medicine. So knowledge of a certain kind regarding agriculture and plants is very widely spread — it is not the prerogative of any particular community.

There have also been local specialists. Even today in many parts of India you would see: this family gives treatment for jaundice; there are traditional bone-setters, not college-trained, but a well-established tradition; there are visha chikitsa specialists. Ayurvedic texts will even say what stage of maturity of a particular plant you should harvest and cook it. There is a sloka which says: Vatakam komalam pathyam, kushmandam komalam visham. If you use brinjal when it is tender, it is beneficial; if you use it when very ripe, it is not wholesome. With white pumpkin, it is the other way — you should use it properly ripened. But you don’t have to read an Ayurvedic text to know that. Any person who knows how to cook would know this. That type of knowledge is very widely dispersed.

What is more specialized is eco-specific cultivation knowledge — people along coastal regions have preserved certain varieties of paddy tolerant of salinity; Basmati is cultivated at high altitudes in certain places. There is a lot of niche-specific knowledge dispersed among the people who live in those locations.

Venky: For a knowledge system to be alive, it must also create newer forms of knowledge. I was in Pune recently and met an Ayurveda vaidya, Dr. Yogesh Bendale, who has come up with newer rasayans treating various forms of cancer — he was talking about research on prostate cancer documented in a few journals.

Are there newer forms of formulation that can be created based on the principles of Vrikshayurveda that have not been spelled out in any text? Are you looking at creating newer formulations just based on the principles?

Dr. AVB: I can give various examples. Take Ayurvedic or Patyashastra texts — they talk about cuisine, properties of various preparations, kanji and various other preparations. Sometime back an Ayurvedic physician wrote an article called “Custard: An Ayurvedic Study.” Custard is not a classical preparation known in traditional kitchens. But the materials of which it is made and the process can be described and analyzed. More than thirty years back, a couple of us edited a monograph called “Ayurvedic Principles of Food and Nutrition” in two parts. I invited him to contribute this as a chapter.

Based on Panchamahabhuta Siddhant and Tridosha Vichat, he analyzed what custard does in terms of Vata, Pitta, Kapha, and the dhatus — who it is helpful for, who it is contraindicated for. This entire analysis was performed based on Ayurvedic principles applied to something completely new.

Other formulations — kashaya, arka — you can use them with newer materials, and people are continuously doing it. One of the most interesting examples: Vinay Pereira recorded that more than 25–30 years back in the Karjat tribal area in Maharashtra, the tribals were using the seed of Acacia auriculiformis.

Introduced by the forest department, this non-native pea-pod is used to catch fish without killing them. Locals dam a gently flowing stream and add a paste made from the seeds, which temporarily stupefies the fish. They float to the surface for easy picking, and the rest revive once the stones are removed. What is truly fascinating is the rapid local adaptation: tribal communities independently discovered this use within just a few years of the seed arriving from Australia, where this technique is completely unknown.

There are instances of older substances being put to newer use, and newer substances being put to newer use also. There is a lot of creativity in the sense that the method that is there is being applied to so many classical substances and so many newer substances — it may even include synthetic substances; there are instances of that.

Venky: Today, on a countrywide scale, our cotton yields have plummeted drastically. We’ve lost the native varieties of cotton. Some of them are still being revived. If we were to come up with a research agenda based on what are the most pressing problems that have to be addressed in Indian agriculture, from the point of view of Vrikshayurveda, what would be the top three areas you would prioritize?

Dr. AVB: Strategically, I must say this: Vrikshayurveda is something people may still slot as exotic, some kid’s bright idea, we don’t know if it really works. It badly needs a few demonstrations where we can say, “Look, this can crack certain problems”.

Cotton is is cultivated in just about 5–6% of our total land. But it guzzles an enormous amount of pesticides and fungicides disproportionate to that. To build belief in Vrikshayurveda, we need to be challenged with problems to which we can actually offer solutions. There are certain high-value crops — plantation crops, spices, things with high market value — where Vrikshayurveda can make an intervention and show some success that may draw attention to it.

Seed health is very important. If you can concentrate quite a bit on seed health for key and important crops, that has an impact all the way to the harvest stage. It makes the plant more robust, less prone to disease attack, less prone to pests, gives it intrinsic vitality.

The second is soil fertility . Aristotle once said that soil is the stomach of the plant. There are many lines of thinking available in Vrikshayurveda, starting from how do you prepare the soil over a period of time and in medium and short terms how we can enrich the soil.

Third, Ayurveda has the idea of Rasayana, a rejuvenator that can help improve the quantity and quality of so many tissues in the body and really boost general health.

The Rasayana approach to plant crops is something that should be seriously examined. And in the case of Vrikshayurveda, unlike Ayurveda, we have the great advantage that the kinds of experiments you perform can be very varied — you are treating plants. The ethical considerations for constituting a trial group are correspondingly so much easier. We also have an entire hundred-plus years of an Ayurvedic industry dealing with plants and processes of preparation that we can build upon.

Venky: This is also a point I want to bring in — it is a bit of a double bind. Today, a lot of people are productizing live microbial solutions. I remember a very funny incident where I was at a stall for a biological product and they were selling this microbial solution. A farmer comes in and quietly asks: this is a microbial solution? Yes, yes. Then the farmer asks: if it is a microbial solution, it is live — how can it be bottled? It is a question that often trips up modern-day approaches, because today, whether we like it or not, farmers have become in some sense habituated to traditional solutions that promise very quick results and are easy to handle. It always seems like the effort is higher with alternatives. How do we lower that effort, while not compromising on the principles?

Dr. AVB: “I think that is a very fair point. A century ago, within a traditional rural lifestyle, it might not have been such a big challenge to say: prepare this over a period of days, dilute it, and spray it. It is much like Kalamkari painting, where the dye takes a full 30-day process to mature. But once it is finished, the result is fantastic. I have a beautiful Kalamkari painting in my living room that has been exposed to sunlight—sometimes diffuse, sometimes bright—for about fourteen years now, and it has not faded. The color deepens like wine maturing in secondary fermentation. It is a slow, deliberate process.

But we must recognize that lifestyles have fundamentally changed. A hundred years back, people hand-pounded millets; today, nobody does that. On the one hand, there has to be user-friendliness at the farm level today. On the other hand, we must also realize that the ‘easy access’ of modern technological solutions has only been made possible by enormous state investments in backbone systems and infrastructure.”

Today, if you move just 50 kilometers outside Chennai, a plastic pot is somehow more viable than a traditional mud pot. How can this be? For a mud pot, the raw materials, the skills, and the tradition are all locally available. For a plastic pot, the feedstock comes from a refinery that might be thousands of miles away. It only seems more viable because the government has invested tens of thousands of crores into the necessary infrastructure—transport networks, refineries, and roads. If you question this disparity, people often ask, 'Are you trying to stop all progress?' We are not trying to stop progress. But we must recognize that a specific development paradigm has made certain technologies artificially viable while making others enormously less so.

Instead of waiting for the day when the state finally reinvests heavily in Vrikshayurveda, we have to get started ourselves. We must take those initial baby steps to prove that this is a viable path for development. We already have the foundational strength and experience to take those steps right now."

Venky: There are a lot of modern entrepreneurs who are willing to experiment. Agriculture universities are increasingly becoming privately owned. Kaveri Seeds launched their own Kaveri University with an ex-VC coming from the government institutions. I think there is a lot of emphasis on what kind of private research can be done, which is slightly more market-focused but can easily be taken to market and tested.

What are some of the immediate low-hanging fruit that someone could try out, that could be of good help for somebody who wants to get started?

Dr. AVB: Storage forms of biopesticides are promising. Seed treatments are another major opportunity. The advantage is that many of these approaches are transferable across crops and ecological contexts. We have an enormous database of knowledge, both in the textual literature and in the people’s knowledge.

Seed health has a lot of potential. If you have seeds with good health and vitality, it can result in crops that are much more healthy, getting better yield, much less susceptible to pests and diseases. We have done preliminary work with fumigation and treatment of seeds. It has been very promising. We are exploring how these treatments can have a prolonged shelf life.

Rasayana approach of Ayurveda for plants and plant health has tremendous value. Some of these special substances — people have spoken of major rasayanas for sharpening intellect or buddhi, and there are other kinds of rasayana that may be helping in various other types of functions. You can challenge the idea of Rasayana with the problems you have to solve in Vrikshayurveda.

Some of this knowledge is already widespread in our people. It is dormant. I don’t think it has been destroyed or done away with. A lot of it is dormant and capable of springing up in an atmosphere where people are willing to look at it, willing to think about it, and you are not going to be ridiculed just because you are voicing or talking about it.

There is also an enormous amount of data lying around. The Honey Bee magazine published by Anil Gupta over the last 30 years has humongous amounts of data drawing on farmers’ experiences from various parts of India. There are a whole lot of prescriptions, descriptions, and texts of Vrikshayurveda.

Several years back, I made a feeble attempt — which I couldn’t complete — to set up what in those days we called an expert system to capture all this data. Today, with the type of tools we have with artificial intelligence and LLMs, there are lots of possibilities. Supposing somebody comes and asks about a yellow hairy caterpillar problem on rice, if I don’t have anything readily available for that specifically, as a human being I’d say, “Maybe I have something that is somewhat close in terms of its habitat, behavior, or appearance”. Or I have something for yellow hairy caterpillar, but for some other crop that bears some resemblance?. Today, an LLM can be programmed to do this kind of analogical reasoning.

There is also so much in Vrikshayurveda about weather predictions — short-term, medium-term, long-term — how to use plants, how to use insects, how to use meteorological phenomena. Recently there is a new term doing the rounds called ethno meteorology.

Benjamin Orlove and his colleagues from the University of Rochester were looking at some peculiar traditions in the Peruvian Andes. Every season, the elders take a look at the stars, make some calculations, and tell the farmers whether they can plant in the normal season or there has to be some change. He published a Nature paper showing that this is a folk method by which they are able to figure out whether it is going to be an El Niño year.

More than thirty years back, I visited the Karjat tribal area in Maharashtra. In a heavy rainfall season, some surrounding communities had planted and lost a lot of the rice crop. But the tribal community I spoke to said: our elders could foresee that this was going to be a heavy rainfall season, so we were prepared. I said: how could they foresee it? They said: no single indication is entirely decisive, but you have to look at a collection of indications. Every season before rain, you observe where the birds make their nests. Are the crows making their nest in the dense foliage close to the trunk, or in the thinner foliage farther away from the trunk? That is one indication. A set of indications like this, put together and synthesized with a yukti gives you an idea of what is going to happen.

Venky: I have heard this from other farmers too on where the nests are made. When owls are spotted in a farm, I’ve heard farmers correlate it with the level of soil fertility. There’s a UK-based company called Chirrup which has made small monitors that record biodiversity sounds, bird sounds in a particular farm. They make an estimate of the ecological health of the farm. A lot of modern approaches can be interlinked with some of these traditional approaches. And especially the meteorological aspect — a lot of algorithms can be built around these. Are there other plant indicators that people have tested?

Dr. AVB: There are examples from Gujarat. If a particular plant flowers in a particular season, that is a signal as to whether the onset of monsoon is going to be normal, or whether there is going to be a change.

When we look at all of this, we need to look at it with an open mind but also non-judgmentally. Though we belong to the same culture, much of our system of upbringing and education have alienated many of us from the way things are done in our own tradition.

Very often there is this idea that people were secretive, didn’t share things, a lot of knowledge decayed because people didn’t even teach it to their children. What we actually see is that one of the underlying factors in many people who hold traditional knowledge — in Vaithyam and so many other things — is that they have moral considerations about who they will and will not teach it to. Whether that person deserves it or not.

I know some people who say: I have this powerful medicine for jaundice. I am not going to teach it to my son. That fellow is commercially minded — he will only use it for making money. I once got into an interesting discussion and challenged this person: if you teach it to nobody, this knowledge will die with you. And I found the most astounding answer.

This idea that a human being is the sole repository and carrier of knowledge — that knowledge dies with him and is born with him — is the height of arrogance.

If a human being needs a piece of knowledge, the Great Spirit holds that knowledge, and it will come and descend upon them. It is a strong moral position. There can be no logical argument against it. It is the height of arrogance to say that I generate knowledge.

This is also manifest in a very interesting experience we had more than twenty-five years ago. As part of a study commissioned to look at how some traditional Ayurveda industries are working, some excellent MBA people analyzed one successful Ayurvedic company. They said that they are doing very well, quality of products is fine, but their product mix is wrong. If you look at your total income, about 50% of your preparation gives you 70% of your profits. You should cut out about twenty-five of these preparations and you will be much more profitable.

So this family looked at what they wanted eliminated. The products the MBA team wanted eliminated was a medicine called Karna Bindu, an ear drop; a tooth preparation; niche formulations for a small range of conditions — these are products where hardly one person in many would come to a vaidya with that complaint.

But the family said that we are not here just to make a profit. It is our dharma, responsibility to give a complete portfolio of medicines that a vaidya can use in practice. If I cut those preparations in the name of maximizing business, the vaidyas who are dependent on me are deprived of those products — and that is not right.

What would a modern corporate say? You have shareholders to answer to, maximize profit, do your 2% CSR. There is a deep moral consideration here. Traditional teaching is often not transactional — you pay me, I teach you. It is relational. You establish a relationship, assess whether the person is suitable, whether they are responsible, and then you teach.

We can create dharmic structures that respect where each one is coming from. There are entrepreneurs in the community I steward who are looking at these questions with respect and reverence. I am trying to see in what ways this can be taken forward. I come with that conviction because there are people who are actually looking at this and trying to create artha, rooted in dharma.

So, what do you think?

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When a woman farmer near Bannerghatta calls for help with her tomato plants, she does not say "My tomato has a problem."

A male farmer might though. There are enough datasets to show how men are terse while engaging with the AI advisory systems.

She says, “My tomato has black spots, I have been spraying, I have been tilling, I have been removing the weeds, I have been doing everything I know to do, so why is this still happening?” She has already run her own field experiments before the advisor walks up. She is asking for the next intervention, not the first.

When women in Indian smallholder collectives engage with agricultural advisory systems, they arrive as field researchers with diagnostic intuition built from years of soil contact and a working notebook of attempted interventions.

Every agricultural AI product currently being marketed at them is built for a user who describes a symptom and waits for a prescription. That user does not exist on these farms.

In vast majority of Indian farms, the woman runs the field while the man runs the purchase order. What happens when the entire agricultural AI sector has built its product line for the buyer and not the executer?

This and several more questions surfaced during my second edition of “AI in Ag Podcast”.

This behavioural insight was surfaced in beautiful detail by Preethy Iyer who joined us to share the AI engine she has been building for women farmer collectives at Kai Thota. She was joined by Rhishi Pethe, a dear friend and senior advisor at the Gates Foundation, and Sheriff Babu, who runs an agent-swarm system on WhatsApp for Indian farmers.

India's agricultural AI sector is now large enough to attract serious capital and serious policy attention. Sovereign dialect models, smallholder advisory tools, autonomous implements, voice agents, WhatsApp bots, are all being built simultaneously, often with foundation or government money or private venture capital, depending on its public or private orientation.

The metric that gates whether these investments continue is the wicked question of impact. If the metric is broken, the entire allocation is broken.

The dominant story in agricultural AI today is that the limit is technology. Better models, better data, faster inference, cheaper compute, more dialects, and the smallholder advisory problem is solved.

That story falls apart at the first field visit.

Preethy described arriving in Kai Thotawith a textbook ag-tech stack: sensors, soil-data collection, a recommendation engine for what to grow. The women collectives she works with looked at it and said “we don’t need it. We touch the soil, we know.”

They had years of context on which the textbook stack had nothing to add. What they did not know was how the city worked, what the urban subscriber wanted, what the market would absorb next month.

The bottleneck was knowledge of the city, not the land.

This inversion shows up across the entire conversation. Sheriff, building from the other end, found that grape farmers reporting yellow patches were universally being told by general models that they had a disease. None of the models identified the much commoner cause, zinc deficiency. Rhishi described a “barbell distribution” of adopters in the sector: a cluster of early enthusiasts and a much larger cohort still asking where to begin, what the ROI is, whether this is just the last decade of agritech disappointment in a new wrapper.

We are in 2026 and the median Indian agritech buyer has not budged.

Now consider how impact gets measured.

A funder wants to know whether its capital is producing better outcomes for smallholders. The cleanest signal is product purchase data. Did the farmer buy the recommended input? Did the seller move volume? Did the advisory tool drive a transaction?

Then ask who, inside an Indian smallholder household, actually executes a purchase.

Preethy described this pattern with absolute specificity. Men make the visible strategic decisions: what to plant, what to spray, what to buy. Men also run the EMI payments on the phone and the bike. Women weed, sow, harvest, run the home, take backpack sprayers into the field, and crucially, take the loans that fund the men’s EMIs.

Men buy whatever the sales pitch recommends, frequently while drunk, frequently because a subsidy exists, frequently with no view on whether the product helps.

This means the purchase-data layer is measuring decisions made by people who are not in the field. The yield-data layer, which arrives two or three years later, is too lagging to course-correct any specific advisory product. The intermediate layer that would actually measure whether the right person in the household received useful advice does not exist in most reporting frameworks.

When the metric counts the husband, the industry builds for the husband.

A Coimbatore startup recently launched a battery-powered weeder for Indian smallholder farms where the operator works it with a joystick, from a distance, never bending down

Watch a woman weed her plot and you can see whom the product was actually drawn up for. She squats, pulls the deep-rooted grass by hand, and composts it, because the grass becomes the nutrient that feeds the next crop. She has already optimized the system. The weeder is solving a problem she does not have.

A different startup brought a lightweight battery-powered weeder to the same collective and asked the women to evaluate it. They tested it, found that walking with it shifted the battery weight in a way that made the weeds fly rather than separate, and handed it back. Their feedback was technically precise and product-killing. They were never the customer the company had imagined.

The misallocation does not stop at the product layer. It runs all the way down to the language layer that every Indian agritech company is currently rebuilding privately.

India has, through Bhashini and several other initiatives at IIT Madras, built some of the most ambitious linguistic public infrastructure of any government in the world. Thousands of hours of emotionally tagged training data across Indian languages, transcribed and verified. Meanwhile, every agricultural AI company is rebuilding its own private dialect corpus and calling it a moat.

The vocabulary of Indian farming changes every 150 kilometres.

A wild berry called sundakkai in a Tamil village becomes chikka badne kai in a Kannada village two hours away. A berry has been reclassified as a brinjal. No general-purpose LLM resolves this, because the data is local, oral, and not on the internet.

The country has the public infrastructure to solve this for everyone as a commons. The industry is solving it a thousand times in parallel.

Preethy wants a thousand Kai Thotas, each focused on its local context, all running on shared public infrastructure. Sheriff estimates the one-time public investment to build a serviceable Indian agricultural foundation model at ₹150 to ₹200 crore.

There is one technical question whose answer reshapes the entire investment case, and the panel disagreed on it openly.

Will general-purpose frontier models eventually absorb enough agricultural context that smallholder advisory becomes a feature inside a horizontal product like Gemini or Claude?

Rhishi assigns this some non-trivial probability over the next five years. His position is that even granting the possibility, the right move is to build for today’s farmer with today’s tools, because waiting is a moral failure when a million advisory conversations can be improved right now.

Sheriff assigns the probability close to zero. He has attempted distilling the agricultural portion of a frontier model and found nothing to distill. His argument is architectural. The transformer’s pretraining diet does not contain the kind of contextual diagnostic reasoning that distinguishes a zinc-deficient grape leaf from a fungal one, and the architecture cannot manufacture that reasoning out of general text on the internet.

If Rhishi is right, every rupee spent on sovereign Indian agricultural models is a depreciating asset waiting to be obsoleted by the next frontier release. If Sheriff is right, every rupee spent waiting for ChatGPT to figure out Indian smallholders is wasted runway, and Indian capital should be deploying into Indian models today.

We do not yet have enough evidence either way. The entire capital stack of Indian agricultural AI for the next decade rides on which of the two views turns out to be correct.

What follows from all of this is a short list of moves that should be obvious by now.

Foundations and Impact funders should retire product-purchase data as a primary impact metric for smallholder agricultural AI. The metric is reading the wrong household member. Replace it with measured reach to women specifically, measured trust, feasibility of acting on the advice given, and observed capability to act on it. These metrics are harder to collect, produce smaller dashboards, and correspond to the actual farm.

Treat the Indian agricultural dialect corpus as Digital Public Infrastructure.

Fund the Bhashini-equivalent for agriculture as a one-time public good. End the parallel private rebuild and free a hundred companies to compete on what they should be competing on, which is the quality of advice and the trust of the woman in the field.

Stop designing implements for the operator who is not present. The next weeder, sprayer, or harvester that enters an Indian smallholder farm should be co-designed with women operators in the room, walking with the prototype, holding the load, and rejecting it freely when the battery placement is wrong.

What three very different practitioners converged on was the same finding, rendered three ways: the models are not the bottleneck; the way we count impact, the household member we count it through, and the feedback we let into the next iteration are.

Krishi.System is a labour of love to discover systems thinking in food and agriculture.

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) with your email in the comment. I will enable access immediately.

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Agriculture is perhaps the last valiant sector that refuses to kowtow to the juggernaut of digitization. Medicine got medical records, clinical trials, and PubMed. Law got case archives and statutes. Finance got trading data and filings. Engineering got CAD files, simulations, and patents.

And Agriculture?

Field extension manuals that nobody reads, public data that is brazenly manipulated based on the policy that is being professed, clueless machine-generated data sets that are blithely ignorant about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Varietyand an extension officer chain so thin that one officer covers a thousand farm households in better-served Indian states and far fewer in poorer ones.

The non-generalizable knowledge that actually runs farms is oral, local, deeply contextual and embodied.

A grower who grew up on her land knows where the water clogs after a heavy monsoon, which slopes drain fastest, what the mango orchard needs in its third year versus its seventh. An elephant visiting the farm in the elephant corridor has better prediction engines that tells him when the jackfruit is going to be ripe for illegal consumption. A grower knows that "jilli" in her dialect of Marathi refers to a caterpillar pest at a specific lifecycle stage on a cotton crop, and that the word means something different in a soybean context three districts away.

None of this is on the internet. None of it is in any training corpus. It was passed on, generation to generation, working and traversing the same land together, day in, day out.

This chain is now breaking in large parts of the world, whether in large holding contexts like US or smallholding contexts in India. The next generation does not want to farm. The knowledge is not being transferred.

“Can AI deliver better advice to farmers?” is not the important question. “What is the AI advice drawn from?” is.

When the knowledge that matters most was never digitized, what exactly is the model retrieving when a farmer asks it something?

Last week, I spoke with Two Desais, Sachi and Pratik to delve deep into these questions and more.

Sachi Desai has spent years at the intersection of large-scale precision agriculture and technology at Climate Corporation and Bayer. Pratik Desai is the Founder of KissanAI and Dhenu model. Both offered two complementary answers from their respective contexts that helped us go deeper down the rabbit hole.

Sachi comes from a world where the information gap is less about farmers not knowing things and more about farmers wanting confirmation before taking high-stakes decisions. A soy farmer in Illinois calls her advisor not because she is uninformed, but because farming is capital-intensive and irreversible, and talking through a decision is how she builds confidence to act.

Pratik comes from a world where neither the extension officer, nor the model is present in any meaningful way. When KissanAI trained the first version of Dhenu in 2023, they used approximately 1.5 million farmer conversations as training data because the way a smallholder farmer phrases an agricultural question is almost nothing like the way it appears in any text online. We are dealing with insane amount of context-gleaning skills here.

A generic large language model can only give a satisfactory answer to someone who does not know better. A farmer who knows cotton will immediately identify where the answer falls apart.

The model has not been trained on how farmers speak. It has been trained on how agronomists publish. Can you imagine how divergent the answers could get?

To discover the pathway of convergence, perhaps, its important to peel the business model layer that underpins these systems.

Both Sachi and Pratik operate on a B2B logic: AI advisory tools deployed to agribusinesses, input companies, and retailers who then surface them to farmers. The farmer interacts with an AI that has been configured, constrained, and calibrated by a business whose commercial interest is not identical to the farmer's.

I am turning on the paywall here as we get into the more juicy details.

Krishi.System is an endeavour to discover systems thinking and build the world’s largest community of changemakers in food and agriculture systems.

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) with your email in the comment. I will enable access immediately.

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Raj Seelam is one of the Bhishma Pitamahas (read as pioneering doyen) of the organic food retail movement in India.

A serial entrepreneur whose journey spans three very different ventures—a dotcom-era CRM startup, a high-security number plate manufacturing business, and then 24 Mantra Organic—India's pioneering organic food brand. He is also the founder of the Association of Indian Organic (AIOI) Industry which aims to work towards building a USD 10 billion Indian Organic Industry by 2030.

Since there were a lot of chatter post the ITC acquisition of 24 Mantra Organic, I decided to side-step that narrow sliver and document his entrepreneurial journey, warts and all, especially for the second and third-generation organic food entrepreneurs.

This is a deeply personal conversation.

Raj's entrepreneurial convictions weren't born in a business school classroom or a VC pitch meeting. They were seeded watching women farm workers sing folk songs during rice transplanting in his village near Nagarjuna Sagar, sharpened by witnessing farmer suicides in the early 1990s while selling fertilizers at EID Parry, and hardened by his father's cancer diagnosis in 1999.

Raj Seelam is a man who doesn’t mince words and he dropped some powerful truth bombs that stir the status quo’s hornet nest. He also provided a lot of refreshing clarity on some of the vexing problems that afflicts the organic food ecosystem in India. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited takeaway from the conversation for those who don’t have the patience to go into the greyness and nuance we explored in the conversation. Always remember: The Map is not the Territory.

Venky Ramachandran: Raj, if we could start from the very beginning—your village, your childhood, your first brush with farming.

Raj Seelam: My village is about 100 kilometres from Hyderabad, on the way to Nagarjuna Sagar. We don’t get water from Nagarjuna Sagar other than for drinking in the recent past. We come from a drought-prone area—average rainfall of about 530mm, and we hardly get two rainfalls post-monsoons. Life is tough.

We grew up in Hyderabad for education, but we’d always go back to the village during holidays. We actually looked forward to it. There’s where the fun was, with family, with grandparents.

My fondest memories are of summer holidays when harvesting would happen. My father would make sure we went to the field, supervised the harvesting. It was very labor-intensive those days. I’d go in the morning, get lunch to the farm, and be there till 6, 6:30 in the evening. And transplanting—my memories are of all these women workers singing folk songs. That was fun. And of course, no water bottles—you’d drink directly from the well.

Dusshera would always coincide with the harvesting of dryland crops—that’s why it’s more popular in Telangana. People have some money, or expect some money shortly. Sankranti was more a coastal Andhra festival, because of irrigated agriculture. Telangana was rain-fed, not much money, but whatever little people had, they’d always buy new clothes.

Venky Ramachandran: You never had the early inkling that you’d work in the agriculture sector?

Raj Seelam: My father always encouraged us to move away from farming, saying it’s very difficult to have a good standard of living. We weren’t small farmers—from our context, we were reasonably well-off. But you still couldn’t afford any of the luxuries a city offers. Every good meal a day, a nice house to sleep in—that’s it. Not much savings.

But I was still very much interested in agriculture. I did my graduation in agriculture, then went to IIM Ahmedabad for an MBA. There, I chose the agribusiness specialization. About 25 of us were in it, and except 2 or 3, everyone took up other jobs. I was one of the very few who stuck to agriculture.

Venky Ramachandran: And then from campus, you joined EID Parry?

Raj Seelam: That was a bit of an odd choice. It was the lowest-paying salary—no one wanted to join, given the pay. But I read this article in Business India about a 200-year-old company on the verge of collapse that turned around. I’d done my summer training with some multinationals, and I didn’t find it exciting—everything is set, there’s nothing much for you to do other than follow a set process.

I said, this must be fun. That was my first and last job—from 1988 to 2000. Fertiliser, pesticide, and seeds. My last assignment was with the seeds business, where we converted our seed business into a joint venture with Monsanto.

Venky Ramachandran: Being in the agri-input industry and then developing a conviction for organic—that’s an unusual transition. People in agri-input companies typically dismiss organic as a fad.

Raj Seelam: There were what I call moments of truth. The first was in the early 1990s, working with farmers. Farmer suicides had started happening. They’d borrow money for fertilizer, not be able to repay. A farmer might have a good season once in four years, average once in four years, and two bad years. When you have a good season, prices aren’t there. Borrowing money for fertilizer and pesticides makes it worse. And the practices of agri companies aren’t great—they just want to sell at any cost, not really provide solutions.

Coming from a farming family and a certain value system, I said I should do something about it whenever I get the chance.

The second moment was practically seeing pesticide being used—farmers dipping produce in pesticide before sending it to market because people didn’t want insects. That’s when I stopped eating a lot of things—cabbage, cauliflower, quite a few things. That’s when I made my first note: I should do something about this.

The third nail was my father’s cancer diagnosis in 1999. When I was researching treatment options, I realized the incidence of cancer had gone up quite high—better detection, yes, but also food, lifestyle, pollution.

And fourth—my father would use half the dose of fertilizer, grow greens, hardly use one round of pesticide, and still get the best yield in a 100–150 kilometre radius. That convinced me that doing away with fertilizer and pesticides is definitely possible.

Venky Ramachandran: Take us through the entrepreneurial ventures before 24 Mantra Organic.

Raj Seelam: My first venture was iwantareply.com—a third-party customer portal with a few friends. We developed the portal, then the dotcom bust happened. No one was willing to fund us. We pivoted to CRM software, implemented it for a Dubai radio channel. Then 9/11 happened—we never got paid. We tried consulting, then realised knowledge doesn’t pay. People take your ideas but don’t pay for it.

Then this thing about high-security number plates came up. We tied up with a German partner. One competitor had tried to trademark the Ashoka emblem—we brought it to the government’s notice, they cleaned it up. We bid in 15 states, set up the factory. I had no knowledge about engineering, but we were the first company to get all approvals from the Automotive Research Association of India.

But these were government projects, and at some point, you have to compromise. Payoffs and other things—my value system didn’t agree with it. I convinced my partners and we sold the business. We were the only guys who made money in that business. That was in 2003.

Venky Ramachandran: And the organic idea had been simmering since 1992.

Raj Seelam: It was always at the back of my mind. When I exited, that was the first time I had my money—because my entrepreneurial journey started with about 1.5 lakh rupees, my gratuity savings from Parry. That went off in the first business. Second business, we managed somehow.

One thing I learned: learning is continuous, you don’t have to get stuck in one field. I’d gone from agri-inputs to software to light engineering. So I had this money, and I was exploring options, but organic was always pulling me.

All my research told me I’d be a fool to start anything connected with organic. No one knew what organic was, and apparently no one cared. But I had this gut feeling—incomes were increasing, people were looking for healthier options. We might be a little early, but not too early.

One of the learnings from my first business: staying power. If you’re too early and the market takes time to mature, and you don’t have the money, you lose out.

And I learned from watching Monsanto—pioneers don’t always succeed or make money. They might create impact, but a lot of missteps and a little arrogance can undo them. I didn’t want to be another dinosaur.

That’s why I didn’t want partners. I knew it was a long shot. I didn’t want anyone to lose their money. Let me begin with my own thing—whatever I earned, I reinvest it back. We incorporated the company in March 2004.

Venky Ramachandran: What was the initial market hypothesis?

Raj Seelam: I spent about a year going around—meeting pioneering farmers like Nammalvar, visiting farms in Gujarat, going abroad, visiting small organic stores in Chennai and Bombay.

Two fundamental realisations emerged. First, availability has to be continuous—otherwise, why would a customer switch? Second, people wanted to know that if they choose to switch, they can fully switch or substantially switch. So having a wide range of products became important.

From the farmer side, it made sense too—a farmer produces multiple things. If you say you’ll only buy one thing, why would they do organic for you?

From day one, we had about 120-130 products from farmers already growing organic.

My goals were threefold, very clear, written down as my vision statement before starting the company: create better livelihoods for farmers, ensure pure and unadulterated food, and do a little bit for the ecology.

Now, one challenge with organic is that pesticides—you can’t see them, can’t feel them. You can’t get any immediate benefit from consuming organic. People have to consume for a long time before they realise the difference. So we focused on culinary experience—taste, bite, mouthfeel, aroma.

We realised that a lot of newer varieties give good yield but from a sensory experience, they’re not great. So we went back, identified old varieties. In many cases, we had to find retired breeders, get seed from them, multiply, and give it back to farmers.

That created stickiness. I’ll give one example—we were one of the first companies to do brown rice. Customers came from us, then supermarkets started offering cheaper brown rice. For a couple of months, we lost those customers. Then they started coming back, saying: “We tried, but this is something different. The taste is not the same, the cooking is not the same.”

Venky Ramachandran: Working capital has been a perennial challenge. Most of your capital went into managing inventory rather than into losses.

Raj Seelam: That’s right. We had to buy everything, stock for the entire year, and sell as and when. Most investors don’t want to invest in ventures where working capital is very high—it affects your free cash flows.

Today the system is more mature. We work with companies like Star Agri for storing material. We experimented with warehouse receipt systems—that worked well, but RBI intervened because of fraud elsewhere and restricted banks from doing it.

One interesting thing we tried: some farmers said they didn’t want money immediately. They wanted it over a period of time at a higher price, and we worked that out.

For new organic entrepreneurs, my advice: if you’re profitable, raising working capital from banks is easier. If not, you’re pushed to NBFCs at 17-18% interest, which doesn’t work. So develop products where the raw material cost is a smaller percentage. And build profitability first.

Venky Ramachandran: We now have second-generation organic players like Two Brothers Organic who’ve raised venture capital and are putting out plans to reach 1000 crore.

Raj Seelam: Today, if you look at Two Brothers, most of their products are not organic. They give an impression of organic, but they’re not really organic. So obviously they don’t need to have this kind of working capital pressure. That’s the ecosystem challenge—the certification system seems broken.

Venky Ramachandran: Amul has democratized the organic space with significantly lower prices. How do you see that?

Raj Seelam: Amul cuts marketing costs through sheer distribution power. They source mostly from intermediaries—not direct farming. And they’re not looking at making money from this right now, perhaps even in the future, given government pressure.

That puts private entrepreneurs at a disadvantage—they need ROI for investors. But if price were the only factor, everyone should have disappeared by now. Amul has been in the market 5-6 years. Obviously they’re facing sourcing challenges too—they can’t get enough quantities. Unless you invest in farmers and farming, this is not scalable. Today the game is more about a document and a test report.

Venky Ramachandran: The organic certification system has become incredibly complex. Process-based certification is the premise, but it’s been taken for a ride. If you had a whiteboard to reimagine this from first principles, what would you do?

Raj Seelam: Today, if I restart, I would not even get into certification. I would set up my own process—whether it’s a testing system or whatever. In first principles terms, it’s about soil, it’s about biodiversity. Focus on that. Create a brand, and say this is what it is. Let consumers check and verify.

The certification system has become a nightmare. For every fraud they discover, they create 10 new rules. It exponentially multiplies. People who want to comply find it a nightmare. People who don’t want to comply still manage.

I think it’s time we move beyond labels. Organic, natural farming, PGS, residue-free—all these certifications. Focus on the basics. Soil and biodiversity. If you do that right, you can easily avoid pesticides, and your produce will be healthier in nutritional values.

Any certification system is primarily there to build trust. I’m not sure, given the complexity in this country, how easy that will be. One way is to go back to the drawing board, make it very simple, and make penalties very heavy for violators. But it has to be simple enough for farmers to understand. It shouldn’t require a big company to take it up.

Venky Ramachandran: You started the Association of Indian Organic, and I saw the goal is to reach about $10 billion by 2030 for the entire industry. What is the kind of ecosystem work you are attempting to do there?

Raj Seelam: We started the Association in 2014-15. That was a time when organic was growing 15-16%—around when Sikkim was declared an organic state. But then came 2020, and the issue with the EU happened. The government didn’t manage it properly—it was more about certification agencies and their supervision systems, not individual companies.

The last five years since 2020 have been only about battling heavy regulation. I couldn’t talk about building the market, or farmers, or anything. Five years just gone waste.

Bureaucrats, for every issue, try to make it more complicated. More rules. It’s never-ending. And all said and done, no system is going to be perfect. If you get 70-80% right, it’s there—let consumers choose.

Venky Ramachandran: What’s next for Raj Seelam—the 4.0 thesis?

Raj Seelam: A few things we’re working on. One is our Purity Prakruti retail stores—bringing down the cost of products to consumers, making it D2C first. We’re building the tech stack now, should launch in a month or two.

I’ve been experimenting with organic eggs. And I’m seriously interested in whether we can create a platform for scaling up innovative agritech technologies. A lot of solutions exist but none can scale because of various reasons.

Fourth, we’re setting up an R&D centre for nutrition products—both premium and accessible to the bottom of the pyramid.

But the whole thing is still about how we create social impact—whether at the farming level or the consumer level. Let’s see how many of these go from ideas to products or businesses.

Venky Ramachandran: Any final message?

Raj Seelam: You’re doing a great job of connecting everyone, and then pushing the agenda. Please do keep it up.

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Abraham Chacko is 70 years old. He has farmed cardamom in the high ranges of Idukki, Kerala for over four decades. In that time, he has witnessed three distinct eras of Indian agriculture play out on the same thirty acres of sloped forestland: the pre-chemical indigenous phase his grandfather practiced, the Green Revolution’s assault on soil fertility, and what he now calls the biological turn.

His story is not one of romance or ideology or jumping onto the latest fad. It is an honest, empirical account of failure, observation, and recalibration. As he candidly shares with us in the podcast, he was considered a “gone case nut” by his community during the transition period. He nearly gave up.

When I spoke with him, what struck me was not the success he has achieved in selling premium organic cardamom to foreign buyers at double or triple the market price. What fascinated me was his articulation of a systems framework that connects all the way from photosynthesis to soil carbon to indigenous seed varieties to Vasudeva kutumbakam (through holobiont)

It was the perfect place to do the second of my post-AI age podcast serieswhere I sketch systems principles live in whiteboard while talking with a wide range of experts. It was also the first podcast I recorded after I rebranded Agribusiness Matters to Krishi.System

This conversation was also high-stakes: The son of a conventional cardamom farmer listened to us patiently all along and shared his challenges in convincing his parents to transition towards regenerative practices.

And that’s the reason why I keep these conversations unedited (of course, I am lazy) with all its messiness. I want to keep things raw and real. You will in fact hear one listener wondering if I would turn off the recording when we get to talk about the real challenges.

Here are few fascinating systems learning principles we unearthed through the conversation.

1) Carbon as Currency

Air contains 80% nitrogen and only 0.04% carbon dioxide. Yet nature does not allow nitrogen to accumulate as an element in soil. It actively works to remove excess nitrogen through denitrifying bacteria. Carbon, however, can persist in soil—as dead microbial mass (what scientists call necromass), as organic matter, as the structural glue holding soil particles together.

Soil carbon holds eight times its weight in water. When carbon depletes, soil loses both its water-holding capacity and its aeration. Without water and air in the soil matrix, aerobic microbes cannot survive. Without microbes, plants cannot access nutrients locked in mineral form.

The system collapses.

Not from a single point of failure but from a cascade of interdependent failures.

When Chacko started applying synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1980s, yields initially increased. But each year required more inputs. The soil hardened. Pests proliferated. Costs mounted. He was stuck in a reinforcing feedback loop running in the wrong direction: More nitrogen → denitrifying bacteria proliferate → soil carbon consumed → microbes die → plants stressed → more inputs needed.

The lesson took fifteen years to internalize: we were treating symptoms while accelerating the underlying disease.

2) Photosynthesis as Communication

Around 2000, Chacko encountered the work of Subhash Palekar and later the wonderful videos and writings of Christine Jones. What he learned transformed his understanding of plant biology.

The conventional model taught in agricultural colleges treats photosynthesis as a plant’s way of making food for itself. Carbon dioxide enters leaves, sunlight provides energy, glucose is produced, the plant grows.

This model is incomplete.

What scientists discovered only after 2000—through technologies like isotope tracking and confocal laser scanning microscopy—is that plants exude 30 to 40 percent of their photosynthetic products directly into the soil through their root tips. They are not leaking. They are transacting.

These root exudates are liquid carbon: dissolved sugars, organic acids, amino acids. They flow into the rhizosphere (the zone immediately surrounding roots) and feed a specific community of bacteria and fungi.

In exchange, these microbes are happy to be your unpaid interns and perform services the plant cannot do for itself: fixing atmospheric nitrogen, solubilizing phosphorus bound to soil minerals, chelating micronutrients and delivering them in plant-available forms.

Now when you supply synthetic nitrogen to a plant, you break this communication channel.

The plant no longer needs to negotiate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. It reduces its photosynthetic exudation. Less liquid carbon flows into the soil. The microbes are fired from their job they were willing to undertake. The mycorrhizal networks that connect plants underground—what some researchers call the “wood-wide web”—collapse.

The farmer thinks she is helping the plant. She is actually severing the plant’s supply chain and immune system simultaneously.

3) Microbes as Employees

Microbes are employees of the plant. The plant manages them through exudates the way a company manages staff through compensation. Different microbes specialize in different tasks. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria handle nitrogen. Phosphorus-solubilizing bacteria handle phosphorus. Potassium mobilizers handle potassium. Each element in the periodic table that exists in soil has a corresponding microbial workforce capable of making it plant-available.

The elegance of this system is in its self-regulation. When a plant needs nitrogen, it exudes specific compounds that feed and signal nitrogen-fixing bacteria. When it needs phosphorus, it changes its exudate profile to recruit phosphorus solubilizers. The plant is not passive. It is actively farming the microbial community around its roots.

But there is a deeper layer to this relationship that science only described in 2018. James White at Rutgers University documented a process he called the rhizophagy cycle.

In this cycle, bacteria enter plant root cells at the growing tip, lose their cell walls, get partially digested by plant-produced reactive oxygen species (effectively the plant is eating part of the bacteria to extract nutrients), then surviving bacteria are expelled through root hairs back into the soil where they regain their cell walls and continue foraging for more nutrients.

The mechanism is documented across dozens of plant species. Plants are not just transacting with microbes—they are farming them, consuming them, and releasing them in cycles that may repeat every few days.

This is not alternative agriculture. This is now mainstream soil biology.

4) The Microbiome Travels in Seeds

During our conversation, Chacko argued that indigenous varieties carry what he calls their “core microbiome” within the seed itself. When such seeds germinate, they arrive with a pre-adapted microbial community that has co-evolved with that variety over generations. These core microbes then interact with the “associated microbiome” already present in the soil.

High-yielding varieties that have been bred for yield alone, he suggests, may lack this core microbiome. The plant arrives in the field without its evolutionary partners. It cannot establish the microbial relationships necessary for resilience. Hence it requires external inputs to survive.

I approached this claim with skepticism. The science, however, partially supports it. Seed-transmitted endophytes are well-documented. Plants do pass microbial communities vertically through seeds. Whether the specific high-yielding cardamom varieties Chacko references lack beneficial endophytes compared to indigenous varieties would require controlled comparison studies I have not found.

But the hypothesis is testable. And it offers an explanation for why varietal selection matters beyond yield metrics: we may be inadvertently selecting against microbial partnerships when we select solely for production capacity.

6) Traditional Knowledge as Encoded Systems Understanding

Chacko aligns his planting calendar with the traditional Malayalam agricultural almanac. Cardamom planting begins on Medam Pattu (and Kanni irupaththi aaru), the day the sun is closest to Kerala on its journey between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. His workers—carriers of generational knowledge that predates Green Revolution—told him that planting on this date produces yield within one year. Planting two months later delays yield onset by an additional year.

He does not know why this works. He suspects it is connected with photosynthetic intensity: when the sun is closest, light energy is maximum, exudate flow is maximum, microbial establishment is optimized. The hypothesis is plausible but unverified.

Chacko treats traditional knowledge as encoded systems understanding that he is working to decode. He does not accept it uncritically. He seeks mechanisms. But he also does not dismiss it as superstition simply because the mechanism is not yet articulated.

The Economics of Transition

During our conversation, Chacko shared numbers that back his principles and discoveries. Chacko claims his per-acre production cost is ₹15,000 to ₹20,000. Conventional cardamom farmers in the same region spend ₹1.5 to ₹3 lakh per acre. His yields are lower: approximately 100 kg per acre versus 500 kg for intensive chemical operations.

But his cost structure is inverted. He spends perhaps 10% of what his neighbors spend. When his premium buyers pay double or triple the commodity price for certified residue-free cardamom, the math works.

Of course, we have a long way to make each of these principles emperically tamper proof. Some soil scientists argue that the “liquid carbon pathway” framework oversimplifies carbon cycling. The precise contribution of mycorrhizal fungi to soil carbon is debated. Whether seed-transmitted endophytes are agronomically significant remains an open question in many crop systems.

What Chacko has demonstrated, at minimum, that one cardamom farmer on thirty acres in the Western Ghats can transition from chemical to biological systems over a multi-decade timeframe, achieve premium market positioning, and articulate a coherent theoretical framework for his practice that aligns with emerging scientific literature.

That’s a great place to start!

Instead of asking “what inputs do I need to supply this crop,” can we ask “what relationships does this plant need to thrive?” Instead of maximizing yield per hectare, can we optimize for resilience per rupee in an age of climate chaos?

Krishi.System is a labour of love to dream of better agrarian futures for producers, healthy futures for consumers and ecological futures for our children..

P.S. Supporting this work doesn’t have to come out of your pocket. If you read this as part of your professional development, you can use this email template to request reimbursement for your subscription.

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How do you reinvent podcasts in the age of AI? When AI eats information asymmetry by commodifying intelligence, how do you reinvent actionable intelligence through the live-player medium of podcasting ?

I’ve been feeling restless to push the medium of podcasting beyond just getting a bunch of people to dialogue and share knowledge. In this second round o…

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Agripreneurship journey in smallholding contexts is not for the faint hearted. In feudal countries like India, you set out to build a business where culturally, agriculture is not treated as a business.

Lokesh Singh is currently in his third agripreneurship journey and has navigated both for-profit and not-for-profit worlds. Earlier, he rode the MFI (Microfinance Industry) wave of 2011-12 and the Agritech 1.0 Wave.

This is an extremely moving conversation of honest acknowledgement of failures (technically speaking, failures are no longer failures when its learnings have been composted back into the soil), hard won lessons and a relentless quest to explore what constitutes innovation in smallholding agriculture.

Although I hate takeaways, here is an edited takeaway from the conversation for those who don’t have the patience to go into the greyness and nuance we explored in the conversation. Always remember: The Map is not the Territory.

Venky Ramachandran: If you were to look in the mirror and ask yourself who is Lokesh Singh, what would be your most honest answer?

Lokesh Singh: I would not call myself a born entrepreneur. I was an accidental entrepreneur. I was born in 1980 in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, where there were only two choices, either become a doctor or an engineer. I chose engineering because I was afraid of dissecting a frog. When I graduated in 2001-2002, most jobs were pure coding at Infosys, TCS, Wipro. That wasn't my calling.

So I decided on an MBA. I knew about IIMs, but I wanted a low-cost option. That's how I ended up at IRMA. And IRMA changes you.

Venky Ramachandran: They do something magical. They evangelize people towards impact.

Lokesh Singh: They have this induction fieldwork where you stay with a village family for seven days. You can leave after that and get your fees refunded, but most of us get transformed. I stayed in a tribal village in Gujarat's Dahod district where only one family had steel utensils. Everyone else ate from earthen pots and leaves.

IRMA asks for three years of your life. I said okay, three years. It's been 21 years now, and I'm still in the same field.

Venky Ramachandran: Tell us about your first venture into microfinance with SKS.

Lokesh Singh: After IRMA, I joined Nandi Foundation doing water projects in Krishna district, Andhra Pradesh. But I had to resign when my boss arbitrarily transferred me without logic. I was unemployed for one and a half months when someone told me about SKS Microfinance. This was December 2004. Vikram Akula wasn't there yet; he came back in 2005.

They didn't have an opening, but they liked me and created a position: "Manager Planning and Monitoring." I was their first Hindi-speaking staff. They got their NBFC license in January 2005, and when Akula returned from McKinsey, he asked me to start Karnataka operations. I went to Bidar, then Maharashtra, creating the blueprint for expanding microfinance into new areas.

But after they raised private equity from Sequoia in 2005, everything changed. The condition was to either go for IPO or get acquired in four years. They started expanding at breakneck speed, diluting the culture. Our daily allowance jumped from 80 rupees in 2006 to 1200 rupees in 2007. The working environment went for a toss. That's when I decided to exit in 2007.

Venky Ramachandran: That led to your own microfinance venture. Tell us about that journey and its eventual shutdown.

Lokesh Singh: I saw how microfinance could create instant impact. You give money, someone starts a business, if they're good at it, money comes back home. Unlike other interventions, microfinance gives very quick results.

I started discussing with my IRMA batchmates. We raised about a crore in eight-nine months from friends and family, purchased an existing NBFC license, and started operations in November 2008 around Lucknow. We made several innovations. Group sizes of three to six instead of the standard five, male groups alongside female groups, short-term three-month loans instead of one-year loans for working capital needs.

Venky Ramachandran: Even today, male groups aren’t trusted.

After a year, 40% of our loans were going into dairy, so we started a separate dairy company with 50 lakh rupees. We bought milk, processed it manually into khoya and paneer, sold it through 17 pushcarts along with vegetables. Fixed prices, digital weighing machines. We innovated there too.

But then came 2011 and the AP crisis. RBI's Malegam committee recommended minimum 5 crore capital for NBFC-MFIs. We were at 2 crore. We couldn't raise the additional 3 crore because the market knew we were in a dire situation. We tried merging with similar-sized NBFCs, selling the portfolio separately. Nothing worked.

Venky Ramachandran: That must have been incredibly stressful.

Lokesh Singh: Those were the most stressful days. Looking back, I think I was depressed, though I didn't realize it then. Every day someone would call asking for their money back. People who had invested 5-10 lakh rupees started saying, "We gave money in your name, now you need to repay personally"

I lost my own money, my relatives' money. I had to mortgage my house. We lost almost 1.25 crore out of the entire venture. Some people are still angry; we don't talk anymore.

Venky Ramachandran: What was the key lesson from that failure?

Lokesh Singh: Never mix friendship and business. When you ask for investment, be very clear: they are investing in the business, not in you. If the business does well, they get their money back threefold, fourfold. If the business fails, that business is going to lose. You are not going to repay personally. That's a very fine line people miss. When things go well, everyone's happy. When things go bad, they start saying "I gave money to you" as if it was a loan, which it wasn't.

Venky Ramachandran: Given your experience in both worlds, what's your view on for-profit versus non-profit approaches to agriculture and rural impact?

Lokesh Singh: I'm very biased toward for-profit. My first reason against not-for-profit is accountability. If it's someone else's money, you can be frivolous. If it's your own money or people who will question you, you make decisions more suitable to the business.

There might be areas unsuitable for for-profit businesses, like places with market failure. Those obviously need to be not-for-profit, but then that shouldn't be your career option. You should only be in that if your heart beats for that cause, not looking at it from a money-making point of view.

My grudge against the not-for-profit sector is that you say you're in it for the greater common good, but then you try to make money through other perks. Setting up training centers your wife runs, employing relatives. I'm against that.

IRMA taught us that if it's business, it will be sustainable. If it's not business, you'll always be asking for money. Resource mobilization is a very tedious activity you need to do day in, day out. But if it's a sustainable business, you don't have to do this.

Venky Ramachandran: Today we're seeing significant challenges in microfinance again. Delinquency rates rising, over-lending issues. If you were to meet RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das tomorrow, what three-point reform would you suggest?

Lokesh Singh: First, understand the history. There have been crises every three-four years since 2006. After every crisis, RBI has been reactive, not proactive. The real disease was always over-lending, not interest rates. Interest rate difference between lowest and highest is 6-7%, which on a 10,000 rupee loan translates to just one or two rupees per week difference.

Who can do over-lending? The larger NBFCs, not smaller ones. But RBI's diagnosis was that smaller NBFCs created the problem, so they mandated 5 crore minimum capital. This killed innovation because innovation comes from new entrants trying to break into saturated markets through something innovative.

Now you're left with only large players with deep pockets. 200, 300, 400 crore equity. They have deep pockets for lending but don't know restraint. You'll find 13-14-15 NBFCs working in the same village, lending to the same 40 people who've become conversant with the policies.

My three suggestions: First, household-level credit bureau checks rather than individual-based, because the challenge is household-level debt. Second, differentiation in loan products. There's no innovation now, everyone does the same vanilla product. Third, make investor exits longer-term rather than the current 2-3 year horizon, which pushes for quick returns over sustainable practices.

Venky Ramachandran: You also had quite a journey with Farmart in the AgriTech wave. Walk us through that story.

Lokesh Singh: In 2015, I was with MicroSave consulting firm. Alekh (now CEO of Farmart) was in my team. We were in Hyderabad waiting for an Ola cab, tracking it on the app. We started discussing. If we can track Ola, could there be something similar for farmers?

Both of us had farming backgrounds. His grandfather was a farmer, my uncles are farmers. We knew tractors were a problem. Our market research showed 91% of farmers depend on someone else for agricultural operations because they don't own tractors.

We got a company registered in 2016, started pilot in Saharanpur district. We enrolled tractor owners already in business, told them: "Whatever business we generate, you keep 90%, we take 10% commission. We'll generate orders and collect money."

The pilot seemed successful. We pitched to Indian Angel Network in July 2016, got commitment for 1.6 crore at $250K for 25% equity. Money was supposed to come by November, I was to join by January 1st. Then demonetization happened on November 9th. One anchor investor developed cold feet, saying farmers don't have money to pay us now. We were in a lurch.

Venky Ramachandran: How did you navigate that crisis?

Lokesh Singh: First two months, no salary. We were putting money from our pockets for almost a year. Then through divine intervention, Manish Khera came on board. I thought he might invest 5-7 lakh rupees, but when I said the gap was 35 lakh, he sent a mail the next day saying he'd invest the entire amount.

But then we realized our core assumption was wrong. We thought after demonetization, digital money would be prevalent, farmers would pay us digitally through apps. It never happened. Most farmers are 50+, they're not using apps. The digital connection might exist in the family through a college-going son or daughter, but not with the actual farmer.

This robbed us of our USP of being completely digital. We had to set up physical centers, call centers, collection teams. Very similar to microfinance operations. After one and a half years, we did business of 80 lakh rupees, our commission was 8 lakh, but monthly expenses were 5 lakh. We'd burned 75 lakh and earned only 8 lakh.

Venky Ramachandran: That led to a pivot?

Lokesh Singh: We went back to investors honestly saying this model isn't working. They asked if we wanted to pivot. We asked farmers: "What's your main challenge?" They said they don't have money when they need it.

So we built a digital credit card. Farmers could use their phone number to go to any network partner (shops selling pesticide, seeds, or tractor owners), get work done without paying immediately, pay us after harvest. It was a beautiful closed-loop system with OTP verification.

It was going well but wasn't very scalable because it was still very physical. We tried raising equity but could only raise a small round from 500 Startups. We were almost breaking even when pandemic happened in 2020. First lockdown hit right when wheat harvest was supposed to start on March 24th in UP.

We had to innovate again, developed an app for retailers to broadcast messages about products and prices. Omidyar got interested but said they'd only invest if we did commodities. I wasn't interested in commodity business. That's just vanilla trading, no innovation. That's when I made my exit in May 2020.

Venky Ramachandran: What was your core disagreement?

Lokesh Singh: Commodities is a business everyone's been doing. You take a commodity and supply it to someone else. I went into this business looking for innovations. Our first innovation was the app for farmers, second was the digital credit card. But commodities isn't innovation, it's pure vanilla business that's already happening.

You're not doing anything new, just solving maybe a working capital problem for traders by giving them money to buy from farmers and pass to someone else. That was my disagreement point. It was a smooth exit though. I'm still good friends with Alok and Mehtab, meet them whenever I'm in Gurgaon. I'm proud that the name "Farmart" was given by me.

Venky Ramachandran: Your story reflects broader challenges in the Agritech sector. Do you see a way out of this cycle where innovations get forced into trading models?

Lokesh Singh: There's no risk capital in India. It's always whatever the trend is, you get capital for that. People who fund you aren't truly venture capitalists. Most have earned money in IT jobs in the US and call themselves VCs. They haven't created businesses, haven't seen failures. If they had, they'd be more tolerant of failures.

My theory is when you raise capital for innovation, either you hit break-even before capital gets over or you're bound to fail anyway. There's no point pivoting just for the sake of pivoting. You should cut your losses and get out rather than staying in ownership dilemma that "I created this business, it's bound to be successful."

All successful startups go through four-five near-death experiences. How you come out depends on the team. If the team doesn't believe in each other, you'll fail in the first or second experience. In Farmart, we had immense faith in each other. That's how it survived and is where it is today, even if doing something completely different from what it set out to do.

Venky Ramachandran: Looking at the macro picture, if someone like Vinod Khosla gave you unlimited capital (I know he won’t bet on Agriculture, given his investment genes) to transform Indian agriculture, what three areas would you invest?

Lokesh Singh: First is cold chain. Everyone knows this but I'm not sure what the solution is. I discuss this with my father-in-law monthly. He's a large farmer growing sugarcane because that's the staple crop in Western UP and he doesn't know anything else. What if he starts growing mushrooms? Who's going to sell those? Where?

We know Indian agriculture isn't profitable for small-scale farmers with staple crops. You can't grow staple crops on one acre and be profitable. There needs to be land consolidation, but that's a larger policy issue.

My background in MicroSave suggests doing away with all subsidies. MSP, fertilizer subsidy, agriculture electricity, everything. Just go for direct income support, not per acre but per individual or family basis. Make it universal, maybe 50,000 rupees per person.

What that would do: the person with only one acre gets 50,000 rupees, his livelihood is secured, he'd look for some other job. That takes him out of unproductive agriculture. Someone in the village might take that plot on rent. There's your land consolidation. Once there's consolidation, you can go for mechanization and staple crops.

Those left with smaller plots should go for fruits and vegetables. For that, you need cold chain.

Second area is building marketing cooperatives similar to Amul model for fruits and vegetables. Third is policy reform around direct income support replacing the current subsidy maze.

Venky Ramachandran: What advice would you give to a 20-year-old wanting to embark on a career in agriculture?

Lokesh Singh: I see scope in agriculture as a service. Right now labor is a big challenge across India. If something similar to what Farmart tried with tractors could happen with labor. People who can do pesticide spraying, hired on a service basis rather than permanently.

We need to make agriculture cool again for the next generation. Otherwise, agriculture is greying completely. Only 50+ people are doing it, and youngsters who do it are those who couldn't do anything else. My pet theory was that in India, people who can't do anything else go into teaching. But agriculture comes even below that.

This shouldn't be the case. We need to make it at least one of the life choices, not just the last resort. For that to happen, you have to take away the pain points. Labor shortage is a very big pain point. Farmers don't get people on time, while others in different villages might be unemployed. How do you bridge that gap?

But don't do it as a pure gig economy model like Urban Company. That takes away the dignity of labor. Don't treat them as resources you can move around. Maybe do it as subscription-based or treat them as business partners with dignity. They're doing important work.

Venky Ramachandran: Any final thoughts on the future of Indian agriculture?

Lokesh Singh: We need to document what's working and what isn't. We need to celebrate failures and normalize them.

Venky Ramachandran: The current ecosystem often creates more impact middlemen rather than actual impact organizations.

Lokesh Singh: The key is building sustainable businesses that can run without constant resource mobilization. Whether for-profit or innovative cooperative models, the focus should be on creating real value for farmers while treating all stakeholders, including labor, with dignity and respect.

So, what do you think?

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State of Bioenergy with Mateen and Ashwin

India has been the third largest emitter (if you measure GHG emissions) in the world since 2019, although per capita share is way lower than world average. In his address at COP26, Prime Minister Modi pledged that India will increase its capacity of non-fossil energy capacity to 500 GW and meet 50 per cent of its energy requirements through renewable energy by 2030.

These are heady times for the Indian bioenergy sector, riding on Indian Government’s mandate. CBG players like Gruner Renewable energy have seen their revenues jump 40X. Maize craze is currently gripping India as we speak, thanks to ethanol demand spiking off the charts to meet 27% blending target by 2030.

How to understand the potential of bioenergy sector? What can biofuel sector learn from the evolution of the automotive sector?

Can bioenergy ride the scaling wave amidst ongoing fodder crisis in India? India has approximately 1,108TWh of biogas potential, according to an analysis conducted by World Biogas Association. What is the potential for biohydrogen in India? What are its scaling levers?

How do we transcend messy food vs fuel debates ? To explore these questions and more, I spoke with two agripreneurs, Mateen Abdul (Grassroots Energy) and Ashwin Save (Biofuel Circle). This conversation was recorded in November 2024.

Here is an edited excerpt that focuses on the crucial pointers of the dialogue:

Venky Ramachandran: Mateen, you've been in the automotive sector for quite some time. How did you transition into bioenergy? Was this always part of your plan?

Mateen Abdul: Thanks for setting the context, Venky. You're right. I started my career in automotive, building businesses in large companies. I wanted to move into clean energy, though it was quite early back then. I realized sustainability would be a key focus area going forward. After spending time at a startup understanding the challenges, my colleague and I formed Grassroots Energy about seven years ago. We deliberately avoided solar or wind because of their limited local impact. Bio offered a multi-pronged approach impacting communities locally while providing solutions to stakeholders including corporates. That was our motivation.

Venky Ramachandran: Ashwin, you and I share a technology background who got into agriculture. I've heard wonderful things about Biofuel Circle's journey from your investors at Spectrum Impact. How did you get into this trajectory?

Ashwin Save: I actually started as a crude oil trader. I'm a mechanical engineer and MBA by training, but I've been coding ever since I was a kid. I spent several years trading crude oil, naphtha, and petroleum products with HPCL, then moved to a software company focused on energy trading and risk management.

When my co-founder Suhas and I got together in early 2020, we were struck by a fundamental question: there's so much potential in this space: Why hasn't it been tapped yet? We felt the farm-to-fuel supply chain had significant inefficiencies ripe for digital intervention.

My background in commodities, technology, and energy commodities, combined with Suhas’s experience in growing companies, seemed to connect perfectly. Biofuel Circle was created in June 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic.

We believe we're at a perfect storm—the convergence of widespread smartphone adoption, data availability, improved payment ecosystems, conducive policy frameworks, and growing awareness toward alternative energy. This allows us to tap into the estimated 235 million tons of agricultural residue that goes to waste annually in India.

Learning from the Automotive Sector

Venky Ramachandran: Mateen, coming from automotive to bioenergy, what insights from the auto sector are obvious there but we've yet to learn in bioenergy?

Mateen Abdul: It's worth noting that the automotive sector took over 100 years to evolve, and it's not just one sector—it's multiple subsectors. While bioenergy has had instances here and there, several things are now coming together.

There are three critical pillars for any sector to grow: policy, pull, and push.

Policy: We now have granular policies—for ethanol, pellets, feedstock aggregation. The G20 Biofuel Alliance has expanded this to a global canvas, moving beyond single countries to multiple nations collaborating.

Pull: This has really taken off in the last 2-3 years. Large corporates have signed up for carbon-neutral goals. In India, the top 1,000 companies must now voluntarily disclose their carbon emissions—this may become mandatory over time. There's also ESG pressure from stakeholders and shareholders.

What's exciting is that many of our solutions are now cheaper than existing fossil fuels, creating financial incentives beyond sustainability. Most importantly, many solutions are drop-in fuels—requiring minimal capital expenditure for customers to switch over.

Push: This is where entrepreneurs like us come in. A range of technologies are now available across solid fuels, gaseous fuels, with significant investments flowing in. We're seeing opportunities for hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, and high-value products like biopolymers, sustainable packaging, cosmetics components. It's not just restricted to fuels anymore.

The Energy Transition Challenge

Venky Ramachandran: Ashwin, how do you frame the thesis for energy transition, given the enormity of our energy needs?

Ashwin Save: You have to look at it as not "either-or" but "both-and." Fossil fuels will take time to phase out. There's already massive capital invested in fossil fuel infrastructure, including our personal automobiles.

The approach will vary by geography. Brazil, with excessive sugar production, can choose the ethanol route. For India, and this brings up the food-versus-fuel debate, we've seen interesting dynamics. India recently shifted from being a net exporter of corn to a net importer when the government reduced sugar allocation for ethanol, making corn more lucrative for manufacturers.

You'll see these bumps in the transition process. We need a framework combining markets and policy. Markets should drive direction with prices governed by supply and demand, but we need guardrails.

For example, if you're cutting into food supply, temporarily relax blending requirements. We talk about food for humans, but we should also consider the massive fodder crisis we've faced since 2020. Food for animals matters too.

If you notice disruptions and have good governance mechanisms tracking them, you might pause aggressive targets temporarily until markets correct and find equilibrium.

For a country like India, biogas might be more appropriate since it can be made from agricultural waste like paddy straw, which isn't great fodder anyway.

Venky Ramachandran: We've also evolved technologies like Napier grass as well.

Ashwin Save: The key is not blocking any pathway. Let ideas evolve and let markets find equilibrium.

Technology Focus Areas

Venky Ramachandran: Mateen, biohydrogen seems like an interesting area that hasn't received much attention compared to BioCNG. What potential do you see there?

Mateen Abdul: Hydrogen can be generated through diverse solutions. The popular one is electrolyzers which get media attention. But hydrogen can also be produced from agricultural residues and industrial waste through two broad categories: gasification (burning at certain temperatures) and fermentation, which is our focus.

Similar to biogas production, we can produce hydrogen through fermentation. This is one of the most cost-effective, energy-efficient, and water-efficient solutions compared to electrolyzers. It's still early days, definitely lagging behind electrolyzer-based solutions.

If we can make higher value-added products like hydrogen—which is three to five times more expensive than bio-CNG—everyone benefits. Once we showcase a few pilots, commercial capital can be unlocked. We're currently in the development phase.

Managing Complexity in Feedstock

Venky Ramachandran: Ashwin, you deal with 59 varieties of residues in your ecosystem. How do you manage this complexity, especially given India's decentralized acquisition challenges?

Ashwin Save: Biofuel production will necessarily be decentralized. The conversion facility must be close to where agricultural residue is generated. Scale varies—solid biofuel plants making briquettes and pellets are smaller units, so they're even closer to rural areas. Bioethanol or compressed biogas plants might afford slightly more travel distance due to scale, but their catchment areas won't exceed 50 kilometers.

Our early realization led us to adopt a participative model. This helps realize the socio-economic impact biofuels can deliver. Unlike solar or wind farms that need minimal human involvement during operation, biofuels necessarily involve humans starting from farmers.

We involve local communities in collection, making them stakeholders by giving economic value to residue. For a country where farms are typically small, this participatory mechanism is necessary. In the US or Europe with 500-1000 acre farms, there might be more machines than people, but for us, the participatory approach is appropriate.

Venky Ramachandran: Can you double-click on this? How do you manage quality when residues could easily pile up from different sources?

Ashwin Save: This depends on the pathway. For methanation (bioethanol/biogas), you have limited sources. It's more controlled acquisition from origination.

For solid fuels and biochar, I'll use a cooking oil analogy. When you buy cooking oil, there are safety organizations certifying it as "fit for human consumption." It could be made from groundnut, safflower, sunflower, or rice bran, but it passes quality checks.

We need similar standardization for solid biofuels, defined by fuel properties like gross calorific value (energy content) and non-combustible matter. Once we establish proper classification based on fuel properties, various feedstocks can meet those standards.

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Dinesh Kumar is an internationally known water resources management specialist who has spent about thirty five years studying Indian and global water systems.

This water systems masterclass podcast was special as it was my first time I hired a studio to shoot a podcast, thanks to Farmart who graciously agreed to support the production of the podcast.

I am looking for podcast sponsors for upcoming ambitious podcasts I have in mind. If you want to support, do reach out.

Agribusiness Matters facilitates systems change in food and agriculture systems through agritech ecosystem engineering.

Water is a subject that’s always with us, yet its complexity often eludes our grasp. My appreciation for water systems has grown immensely through years of working at the intersection of food and agriculture systems. This podcast conversation with Dinesh gave me a deep appreciation of system thinking principles that apply in the context of water systems.

What made the conversation deeply fascinating was that we delved into many of the cobwebs that had been clogging in my head. Heck! I also discovered that hydro schizophrenia exists!

Dinesh beautifully demolished many of the unnecessary binaries that often dominate water debates—centralized versus decentralized, surface versus groundwater, rainfed versus irrigated, tanks vs ground water—and why these compartments often hinder more than they help.

He also delved into why Paddy deserves a deeper relook for its crucial role in Indian Agriculture and why Maharashtra and Tamizh Nadu are better suited to grow sugar cane. We explored a lot of policy nuances ( with a surprising discovery of how agency problems clog water systems as well) that could help India’s water ministry address a lot of governance challenges in its ambitious goal to provide clean drinking water to every Indian household while ensuring farmers have the adequate amount of irrigation to have a prosperous agrarian future.

Dinesh brings a refreshing clarity to many vexing complex water topics focusing on the underlying insight where water management is placed in a spectrum of interlocking systems, not a set of silos, and that everyone has a role—from the state bureaucracy to civil society, from local communities to individual farmers.

We had a master class discussion on systems thinking principles that apply in the context of water systems. I have listed down the key principles we delved into in this podcast.

Water Systems’ Systems Thinking Principles Explored in the Podcast:

• The role of Committed and Uncommitted Flows.

• The role of Open and Closed Basins.

• Interaction between Surface-level Irrigation and Ground Level Irrigation

• Increase in Gross Irrigated Area doesn’t mean decrease in dependence on monsoon. It rather implies increase in dependence!

• Reliability of rainfall is much higher in a high-rainfall area while the reliability of rainfall is much lower in a low-rainfall area. Those areas which have rainfall occurring in more rainy days have lower variability in rainy days. Those areas which receive rain in fewer showers have more variability in rainy days.

• We confuse market instruments with privatization. We start with water rights before we promote markets.

• Water is a social good, economic good and environmental good simultaneously.

• We can’t talk about water without talking about electricity. We can’t talk about electricity without talking about water. You can price electricity based on consumption while providing subsidy.

• The moment you talk about water, it is politics!

• Water Consumption will change through behavioral change.

• If you are using drip irrigation to reduce percolation losses in shallow water table areas, you are not reducing any losses. You are simply shifting the water.

• Resource Management and Resource Allocation Go Together. We need to distinguish between Resource Management, Resource Allocation and Resource Appropriation.

• Agency Problems in Irrigation: Resource Agency and Service Agency have to be kept separate. The same team cannot do Resource Allocation and Resource Management simultaneously for there is a conflict of interest.

• Crops Don’t Distinguish Between Ground Water and Surface Water

A Quick Summary of the Conversation Trajectory:

01:29 Dinesh’s accidental foray into studying water systems

11:54 The civil society paradigm that favors decentralized water systems vis-a-vis the mainstream water bureaucracy that favors centralized water systems.

18:22 Too much of centralization becomes a problem and too much of decentralization also becomes a problem.

20:57 A Case Study of Saurashtra and Decentralized Water Management

24:57 Systems Thinking in Water Systems

26:07 Understanding committed and uncommitted flows.

28:35 Open Basins and Closed Basins

31:07 How do you understand the balance between surface water irrigation and ground water irrigation?

33:46 A Case Study of Narmada and Wells

35:47 A Case Study of Telangana and Lift Irrigation

37:00 Hydroschizophrenia

39:55 How do we measure irrigation progress in our country?

42:40 The false notion of dependence on monsoon

45:00 The false binary categorization between rainfed and irrigated regions

51:00 Policy Universe’s binary notions of Irrigated and Rainfed regions

52:14 Definition of Rainfed Region is Flawed.

54:35 How did India become the world’s largest user of groundwater? Did Green Revolution cause it?

58:17 We have increased our dependence on water.

59:21 Whenever some one purchases a piece of land, ground water rights are de facto rights. The role of water markets

1:00:42 How is privatization different from promoting markets?

1:01: 35 Unbridled Informal ground water markets in an institutional vacuum.

1:04:00 Is Water a social good or an economic good? How to prioritize between various lenses of water? Why is public and private good problematic?

1:09:43 The dilemma between expanding access and equity in water systems. When does equity become compromised? What about surface irrigation?

1:14:10 The Nexus Between Water and Electricity

1:14:59 Energy Metering to Save Groundwater. The case of West Bengal

1:17:00 Pricing Electricity based on Consumption.

1:19:21 River Basin as a Unit of Water Planning Vs Agroecology as an Unit of Planning

1:22:48 Drinking Water Security for humans and animals

1:27:00 Reservoir based schemes instead of single village water schemes. How to prioritize between drinking water and irrigation in national water policy?

1:29:09 The problem of quality in water irrigation. Resource Management to make Jal Jeevan Mission successful. Why Water Supply Department Don’t Own Reservoirs?

1:31:30 Why are ground water levels rising in Jodhpur?

1:33:04 Food security and nutritional insecurity

1:36:57 Why do Farmers Grow Jowar and Paddy and the Myths around Climate Resilient Agriculture. Why is the water foot print of Paddy slight lower than Jowar?

1:41:04 The role of Land in Food Security: The case of Jowar

1:42:30 Understanding water productivity of Paddy and Sugarcane

1:44:30 The Myth About Micro Irrigation Saving Water In Indian Agriculture

1:45:10 The Missing Link In Micro Irrigation in Israel.

1:46:02 Paying for Water in Agriculture. The problem of over irrigation.

1:49:46 The importance of reducing non-beneficial evaporation. Why have orchards in arid regions become the biggest consumer of micro irrigation tools?

1:52:27 Jevons Paradox in Micro Irrigation and how to address rebound effect?

1:54:54 What can India Learn from Other Countries’ Water Systems (save Israel)?

1:59:50 Banning Borewell Machines

2:00:03 What can India Learn from Netherlands in Non Point Pollution Control Method? Point Pollution Vs Diffuse Pollution in Nitrate Pollution Control

2:02:40 We’ve reached saturation point in micro irrigation in India.

2:03:57 Dinesh Reflects On His Learning Journey Further

2:07:22 Can Traditional Water Systems Knowledge Manage Today’s Challenges?

2:08:22 Why Tank Irrigation Has Declined In Indian Agriculture? How Ground Water Has Altered Tank Water Hydrology

2:11:06 The prohibitive costs of well irrigation. The role of well irrigation in the decline of tanks

2:13:07 Revisiting Civil Societies Vs Water Bureaucracy debate in the context of Indian Knowledge Systems

2:14:53 Who controls the hydrology of tank systems? Elite Capture in Water Systems

2:16:59 Emerging Technologies in Water Systems

2:18:08 Climate Change and Water Systems

2:22:21 Closing Thoughts on Future of Indian Agriculture

Articles Referred in the Podcast:

• Dinesh Kumar’s EPW Article on Chasing a Mirage: Water Harvesting and Artificial Recharge in Naturally Water-Scarce Regions

• Dinesh Kumar’s LinkedIn Article on Monsoon Matters Too Much Now in Indian Agriculture

• Prof. P.R. Pisharoty’s famous paper on Indian Monsoon

• Dinesh Kumar’s LinkedIn article on Jowar

The nature of water is such that it breaks boundaries and I experienced the liberating feeling when some of the previously held categories were challenged. It truly changed my mind! I hope you enjoy this podcast as much as I did:)

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Agroecology Agribusiness Dialogues

In the first part of Agroecology-Agribusiness Dialogues, we talked about what it takes to bridge Agroecology with Agribusiness. The central metaphor I explored in documenting the learnings involved two Systems - System B and System M.

Agribusinesses today have built their scale-driven broad-gauge production and post-harvest systems (System B) across the country that are unsuitable for scale-invariant meter-gauge (System M) production and post-harvest systems meant for Agroecology.

For all the promise agroecology and regenerative agriculture hold, it hasn’t yet built sufficient alternative market structures and hence ends up beaten up black and blue inside the market structures that have been built for the industrial agriculture paradigm.

In Part-2, we explored the messy pathways walked by those brave souls who are building those bridges.

Vijayalakshmi Kalyanasundaram shared about the authenticity crisis she is grappling with in System M while conserving 171 rice varieties and making them market-friendly. When every red rice is sold as Mappilai Sambaor Kattu Yaanam, spurred by volatile social media diet fad trends that often lead to crash of prices, the consumers are left in the lurch without any reasonable means to authenticate the rice varieties at display and figure out the best rice varieties best suited for their bodies.

She talked of the challenging journey in transitioning from a non-profit to for-profit while supporting 23 farmer producer companies, besides wholesale and retail marketing, gifting rice packets to pique curiosity and teaching consumers the art of cooking several forgotten traditional rice varieties. Her agroecological transition approach, in short, spans from seed to market to table.

The market response has been encouraging. In Chennai alone, 15 to 20 traditional varieties are now regularly available on organic shop shelves. Yet challenges persist, particularly around consumer psychology. Why have we programmed Indian customers to step out of a Mercedes-Benz and balk at paying ₹150 INR per kg for rice, while spending ₹5,000-10,000 INR without a wink at restaurants?

Ramanjaneyulu GV has spent two decades in supporting the organic transition of more than 30,000 farmers, with FPOs reaching 32 crore INR turnover (~ 4 Mn USD) and CSA PGS regional council becoming largest PGS organic certifier with over 300000 acres in several Indian states.

I asked Ramoo how he sees the next twenty years in building the bridge between System M and System B. He shared an uncomfortable prognostication that left me revisit the complexity involved in strengthening farmer livelihoods: Even if the agroecological transition were to happen (with natural farming growing from 2 % to 20% over the next ten years), we wouldn’t have addressed the crux of farmer livelihoods. Farmer incomes would still be a challenge.

While farmers are expected to make complete transitions from conventional to organic farming, public policies continue supporting conventional agriculture through massive subsidies.

When policy systems support System B, when business models are designed around System B, when cropping incomes only contribute to 30% of farmers’ incomes, we are dealing with a wicked problem of facilitating agroecological transition.

Ramoo also shared a scathing critique of India's extension system: lack of accountability for outcomes. When extension workers' salaries and promotions aren't linked to farmer well-being, the system becomes "a bureaucratic system to deliver subsidies or to mobilize farmers for politicians' meetings".

India's public extension system reaches only 6% of the country's 119 million farmers, despite its extensive network. When success stories do emerge, they typically come through women's self-help groups or FPOs where staff are employed, valued, and paid by the communities they serve.

I asked Shashi Kumar what would accelerate agroecological transition amidst investors who question the ROI of the farmer infrastructure support work undertaken by Akshayakalpa.

While acknowledging Brahma Nirasana (ಭ್ರಮನಿರಸನ) - disillusionment - in moving the needle for the betterment of farmers, he addressed the two ends - value creation and value realisation. He talked about Akshayakalpa’s model in enabling farm-level diversification (producing milk, eggs, vegetables, coconut and honey) that helps farmers with multiple revenue streams from the same land.

Akshayakalpa farmers average ₹1 lakh per month in income, with 30-40% having reverse migrated from cities back to farming. This isn't just about premium pricing—it's about operational efficiency achieved through diversification. As Shashi notes, "the gross margin profile can only be created if there is a stability in the supply". How do we build stability in pricing systems is the key question.

Soil organic carbon levels on Akshayakalpa farms have increased from an average of 0.32% to 2.44% over a 10-year period. Shashi also shared glimmers of hope in how the investors are understanding the need to give back further to the society. He acknowledged the limited success so far and warned against repeating mistakes of agricultural consolidation in the West, urging a focus on small farms and sustainable models.

Ramveer Singh Rajput shared the importance of bridging production with consumption while working on agroecological transition. Ramveerji’s work in tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh highlights both the potential and limitations of current FPO models. He shared fascinating insights on caste labour dynamics, reviving barter systems through the grain-for-rice exchange schemes and bio-input resource centers that could contribute towards building System M infrastructure.

Shivam Srivastava talked about Terviva’s efforts to revive Pongamia Pinnata as a multipurpose crop, focusing on community investment, women’s entrepreneurship, and value addition to maximize its potential.

Terviva avoids monoculture by limiting Pongamia to 10% of plantations and promoting agroforestry systems with diverse intercropping. They have created nine different product streams from pongamia, from biodiesel to fertilizer to food ingredients.

Is there a risk to food security when we do agroecological transition?

The greatest risk perhaps lies not in transitioning towards agroecological systems, but in failing to do so. Depleting soil health, water scarcity, and farmer indebtedness pose far greater threats to the future of Agriculture than the challenges of transition. Can we reframe the familiar debate - hoary cliches of fears of food security - to focus on food safety, resource sustainability, and farmer livelihoods?

Our ideas of transition are far strongly cultured by sudden shifts, rather than gradual shifts. Can we work with a twenty year horizon, do continuous experiments, cross-pollinate ideas with the ecosystem and build resilient rural economies?

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Amidst the illicit romances we often hear in the Ag Overton Window under the garb of “Regenerative Agriculture”, let’s get this straight: Agroecology and Agribusiness have largely been unfriendly with each other.

The former hates the latter for pushing soil health as a tertiary problem while the latter hates the former for subsisting on doles and nonprofits without a clear demand curve from regular, cost-conscious consumers.

Can the two get back to talking terms? Can the levers of scale and branding operate without sacrificing biodiversity? How do we facilitate this partnership into a mutually beneficial one?

Yeah, you are right. Easier said than done.

The nearest analogy (I can think of) that could accurately paint the complexity are the Meter gauge and Broad gauge railway tracks in Indian Railways.

When you visit old forests of India, you will discover meter gauge railway tracks that were abandoned once broad gauge became the de facto norm. In 2015-16, according to one estimate, Indian Railways had approximately 60,510 kilometers of broad gauge (1.676 m) track and 3,880 kilometers of meter gauge (1.000 m) track.

That more or less tallies with the distribution of Agribusiness and Agroecology in the country.

Agroecology today, practiced in the real sense of the word, is as isolated as the meter gauge tracks that have been kept aside for heritage purposes in Indian Railway. The meat of the problem is this: Agribusinesses today have built their scale-driven broad-gauge production and post-harvest systems (System B) across the country that are unsuitable for meter-gauge (System M) production and post-harvest systems meant for Agroecology. When you build high-density System B production systems for, say, banana, your marketing and logistics costs have been factored based on the velocity of these production systems. Your traders and buyers know to come during the harvest and collect everything at once.

And so when you transition towards low-density (albeit high-resilient) System M production systems, your marketing, post-harvest and logistics systems have to be redesigned completely from different first principles.

How do we build the enabler post-harvest System M for Agroecology and strengthen the infrastructure that can compete with the System B?

Few moons ago, I hosted a couple of Agroecology-Agribusiness Dialogues to tackle this complex challenge with a bevy of diverse panelists working in the realms of agroecology, technology, policy, social entrepreneurship and grass-roots change maker organizations.

The panelists of the first dialogue were

• Pallavi Shigwan, Lead Marketing, Godrej Agrovet

• Rangu Rao, CEO Safe Harvest

• Manish Kumar, CEO Utopia Ville

• Shameek Chakravarty, CoFounder Farmizen.

The conversation was a fun ride, traversing through the uncharted waters where Agroecology and Agribusiness could share the same boat. I discovered these fascinating insights through this dialogue:

1/ System M operates on host-centric microbiome- centric approaches to plant nutrition. When farmers who have been habituated to System B experiment with System M, they expect fast results and are willing to consider only when economics take a front seat. It takes a strong behavioral shift to help them acclimatize with the transition.

‘We are present in big retailers as well as e-commerce platforms, and our product basket is available in 16 cities in India. Our topline is growing year on year, and our projection is that we will be profitable in the coming two financial years.” - Rangu Rao, CEO, Safe Harvest in a recent interview

2/ Safe Harvest recently pivoted from offline to online retail: Their product basket shifted towards high gross margin products, which also carry the advantage of being low inventory in the marketplace. Safe Harvest is working hard to bridge the trust deficit inherent in System M when they expect consumers to pay premium for the “pesticide-free” promise their brand carries.

3/ Utopia Ville is working to arrest distress migration. Manish shared stories from Bihar where farmers are shifting en masse from Paddy to Tobacco, using 2500-10000 kg per hectare of Urea in an act of desperation to boost incomes. Utopia Ville is building rural tourism infrastructure to help farmers diversify their incomes.

4/ Farmizen focuses on demand driven logistics and subscriptions to mitigate the risks of building System M from ground up and reduce wastage. System B is optimized for price, availability and convenience, especially with the advent of quick commerce. System M should ideally be optimized for consumer health, farmer incomes and planet health. With the rapid scale of System B, it’s evident that we have been optimizing for wrong parameters.

Farmizen Academy aims to educate consumers to address this gap and more importantly share the burden among consumers and farmers. Isn’t it far more reasonable instead of entrusting farmers with the complete burden of transitioning from System B to System M?

5/ How is agribusiness marketing changing in persuading farmers to transition from System B crop nutrition products to System M crop nutrition products? Farmers opinions typically tend to depend on government institutions, distributors and influential farmer influencers and competitions could help in convincing the actual potential.

6/ How do we design better credit products for farmers transitioning from System B to System M ? Rangu shared his experience facilitating FPOs with low-interest funds through farmer financial institutions (NAB Kisan) and NBFCs. It is difficult in System M context as the marketable surplus is low.

When aggregation becomes a challenge for smaller FPOs, debt works better (in the absence of working capital), especially with an informal arrangement among channel partners to keep the debt in their books, while passing the cost of the debt to Safe Harvest. Safe Harvest has been able to crack this model (shifting from Term Loans to Cash Credit Loans to Infrastructure Loans with bank guarantees) to formalize this arrangement between them and their channel partners without lock-in arrangements for FPOs. This model has helped farmers take calibrated risks.

7/ Uttarakhand, Kerala, Rajasthan have been driving the rural experiential tourism trend in India and other states like UP are keen to follow suit. Rural Hygiene is a challenge while acculturing rural organisers to urban guests’ cultural norms.

8/ How do you educate consumers on the merits of building System M? Brands like Akshayakalpa are taking the lead. We haven’t had the equivalent of FoodPharmer for the world of agriculture. We haven’t studied the experiments of technologists turned farmers. How do we make their experiments profitable?

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Indian Agrifood Systems carry the best and worst of worlds.

On one hand with a fork, we have economists like Tyler Cowen singing hosannas for India’s Food Being the Best in the World:

“Why is the food so good? I have several overlapping hypotheses, most of them coming from my background as an economist. Interestingly, India’s culinary advantages can be traced to some good and some not-so-good aspects of Indian society.

First, food supply chains here are typically very short. Trucking, refrigeration and other aspects of modernity are widespread, but a lot of supply chains are left over from a time when those were luxuries. So if you are eating a vegetable, there is a good chance it came from nearby. That usually means it is more fresh and tastes better.” - Tyler Cowen

On the other hand with a knife, we have a legion of hungry agripreneurs chasing bold futures of Indian Agrifood systems with fire in their belly to attack the shadows of the system that made them best in the world: Fragmentation, informality, and middle-men have long characterized India’s agrifood systems.

While Indian Agriculture remains unsure whether it is a business or not; where time remains the biggest leverage, the past often ends up becoming the heaviest albatross in distorting our agrarian visions of the future.

Can we keep aside our baggage of past and boldly envision the future of Indian agri-food systems?

Can we engage in this exercise with two agri-founders (Alekh-Farmart, Rikin-Digital Green) working on traditional agrarian contexts, albeit dreaming of newer technological possibilities?

Alekh recently shared his goal to “elevate the consciousness of the Food & Agri industry" and also his fundamental conviction when it comes to AI: “The more I think about building companies in the age of AI, the more I believe that low-margin, not-IP-led businesses will have the strongest moats.”

Rikin dreams of Digital Green elevating farmers’ voices thereby engaging with markets with greater equity in 2030.

How do we strive for these bold futures? In the golden words of William Gibson, The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. Can we see these emerging, unevenly distributed futures in smallholding contexts?

This conversation was interesting for many reasons. I threw in many googlies and both the founders gamely played on.

• How do you articulate a 20-year vision as a founder when investors with ‘impatient capital’only have a 4-6 year time horizon?

• How to navigate the identities of non-profits and for-profits while building technological solutions for Indian Agriculture?

• Is Farmart building the next-gen ITC or is ITC busy building the next-gen Farmart?

• When you're chasing a big, hairy, audacious problem like extension services in Indian agriculture, how do you navigate the maze of working with the Indian Government and make the necessary trade-offs?

• How do you ensure that the company you are building doesn’t end up becoming the centralizing monopolyentity we love to b*h about?

• How do you reconcile that AI may eliminate information asymmetry, yet real-world asymmetries would continue to persist in agriculture?

• Does the fear of commoditization or trust deficit affect you when you expose your business through DPI to AI/digital layers?

• How do you respond to concerns from agri-tech startups about DPI commoditizing their businesses?

We touched on all the hottest topics right now in the world of agricultural technologies: We talked about agentic paradigms that are reshaping the online world for everyone including farmers; We talked about Digital Public Infrastructure, We talked about digitizing FPOs and Cooperatives; We talked about policy recommendations, Capital Stack and lot more.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did:)

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Chronologically biologically speaking, I turn forty this year and I must confess that I belong to the technology romantic generation. I grew up reading Clue Train Manifesto as a gospel during my heady twenties, raved over Google’s meaning of open, and dreamt of a cybernetic future beautifully encapsulated in the opening words of Richard Brautigan’s poem.

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It was around September 2024 when I started immersing in the world of Digital Public Goods/ Infrastructure (DPG/DPI). That was the time when phrases like “Population Scale X” began to hover around me.

Now that I have spent a few months dealing with the messy challenges involved in unlocking value curation between smallholding farmers and agritech platforms, I invited Rajeesh Menon and Sriram Bharatam to reorient my vision to look at a bird’s eye view once more and re-energize the possibilities.

As I had expected, working closely on the ground, I had accumulated enough cynicism about the challenges involved in organizing farmers and agritech platforms together.

“When everything becomes fungible then one loses to objective of creating mega companies. if no one can make a monopoly, duopoly, fragmentation just kills the enterprise nature of capitalism. socialism gets hold, and then we keep repeating subsidies and freebie culture” - An agritech entrepreneur while sharing why he was bearish about DPIs in Agriculture.

I had several fundamental questions to navigate and thankfully I could bring all of them to an interesting cohort of experts who closely looked at the process underpinning the value creation journey and the actors who are best suited to drive these value creation journeys.

Rajeesh has spent several years ‘planning, designing and costing’ several DPIs and DPGs across different sectoral contexts and Sriram has had an interesting journey in cross-pollinating learnings from Africa to India and back again to Africa to build a micro-learning platform, thereby incubating one of the largest networks of agricultural entrepreneurs who remain the trusted agents in the last mile, whether in India or Africa.

These are interesting times.

Agriculture, driven by technology, goes through cycles of centralisation and decentralisation. Thanks to India’s faith in Digital Public Infrastructure, the decentralisation wave has reached a critical threshold.

What would it take to critically examine this faith? What would it take to translate this faith into a possibility followed by lived reality? These are the set of questions I set out to answer in this podcast conversation.

While I will leave it to you to judge if I could get answers to those questions, the conversation was deeply enriching and left me with a lot of hope about the possibilities that exist when the networks are ‘carefully curated and coordinated’ to unlock ‘population scale solutions’.

While I hate takeaways, if you are the kind who gets satiated by them, here are a few broad-level nuggets from the conversation:

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)

• A foundational digital layer that enables:

• Identity verification

• Trust mechanisms

• Widespread access

• Decentralized networks

• Multi-stakeholder participation

Creating Networks around Youth and Village-Level Entrepreneurs

• Focus on creating trusted last-mile agents

• Democratizing scientific knowledge

• Building platforms that empower local entrepreneurs

• Creating economic opportunities in rural areas

Government and Private Sector Collaboration

• Importance of collaborative governance models

• The government's role in creating guardrails and foundational infrastructure

• Private sector driving innovation and transaction layers

• Avoiding centralized control while enabling ecosystem growth

Fundamental Meditations on DPI:

• DPI is not a one-size-fits-all solution but a flexible framework

• Trust is the fundamental currency of digital ecosystems

• Patience and long-term vision are crucial for systemic change

• Decentralized, locally-adapted solutions are more effective than centralized approaches

Future Vision:

• Creating agricultural "pods" or nodes in a larger national grid

• Enabling seamless information and transaction flows

• Empowering farmers through technology and trusted intermediaries

Do check the complete unfiltered conversation where I navigated my way through several fundamental dilemmas which led to a lot of clarity around the possibilities of digital public infrastructure in smallholding agriculture.

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

💗 If you like “Agribusiness Matters”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

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India and Pakistan may be two warring countries that gained their respective political identities by the negation of the other. However, when siblings from both these countries speak in one room about agriculture, conversation flows like music and harmony pervades the air, even when they talk about the climate crisis and the shared destiny that awaits them.

This podcast was several months in the making and I had a total blast! If you listen to this podcast, the first-ever cross-border collaboration between neighbouring siblings who are passionate about agriculture, you will perhaps agree.

At the time of India’s Partition and Independence, many agrarian scholars were concerned that the well-irrigated parts of the country had gone to Pakistan. Today, seventy-seven years later, it is fascinating to observe the predicament of both countries.

On one end, India is reeling with the unintended consequences of land reforms done successfully, and on the other end, Pakistan is reeling with the unintended consequences of not pursuing land reforms. Unlike the case of India where 86% of the farmers are small and marginal farmers, in the case of Pakistan, 2% of farmers own 45% of all agricultural land while the remaining 98% own the remaining 55%.

In the case of Sindh, the "haari system" (feudal tenant farming system) has created perverse incentives where land owners who have inherited 100s of acres have no incentive to invest in modern practices since they will remain wealthy due to forces of scale. Their tenants who typically don't have more than a few acres cannot afford to invest in new technology and hence their income remains abysmally low.

This is further buttressed by a deep state whose characteristic was succinctly captured by the late scholar Stephen Cohen: “While nations had armies, Pakistan was an exception. This was a country in which the army had a nation.”

At the end of the day, Pakistan’s problems are more political than agricultural. Stefan Dercon summed it up beautifully in a recent lecture on Pakistan’s future.

Even if the political forces are conditioned to foster hostility, the shared climate crisis faced by both countries unites them, whether it is the urban parts of India and Pakistan suffering from poor air quality or Pakistan becoming more prone to drought and flooding with a higher climate risk than India.

Can the emerging era of Digital Public Infrastructure bring forth a partnership between the two countries to cope with the climate crisis?

Unlike India, Pakistan remains particularly vulnerable to water challenges. Pakistan withdrew over 70% of its freshwater resources each year, in contrast to India and China, which withdrew more water every year than Pakistan, but only 21% and 36% of their freshwater resources.

When you listen to the podcast conversation, you will discover that we touch everything under the sun. Every small and big issue from tax reforms, climate change impacts, the rise of corporate funding, and government policies was discussed. Panelist Ghasharib summed it up best: Pakistan is in the midst of a "Confused Transformation in Agriculture".

It would be fascinating to see how Pakistan would evolve alongside India. Here is a quick TL;DR summary if you are too busy to miss out on the fascinating in-depth conversation that was almost impossible to summarize.

Historical Context and Challenges

• The Indus Water Treaty of 1960 continues to impact water distribution between India and Pakistan

• Pakistan faces challenges with water management, agricultural productivity, and climate change vulnerability

• Land reforms have been limited in Pakistan, leading to a concentration of land ownership

Agricultural Economy and Production

• Agriculture contributes significantly to Pakistan's economy (around 38.6% of GDP)

• Pakistan has higher yields in some crops (e.g. cotton) due to canal-based irrigation

• The country is dealing with issues of food affordability and water resource management

Agritech Ecosystem

• There's growing interest and investment in agritech startups and innovations

• Corporate investments are increasing in agriculture, often focusing on supply chain security and diversification

• The agritech sector is maturing, with a shift from venture capital to more strategic corporate investments

Challenges and Opportunities

• Pakistan faces issues with policy inconsistency and lack of coordination between government departments

• There's potential for export growth, particularly in niche products like tropical fruits

• Climate change poses significant risks, including droughts and floods

Structural Issues

• The feudal land ownership system creates challenges for modernization and tax collection

• There's a need for better water pricing and management to address scarcity

• Political interests of large landowners can hinder agricultural reforms

Future Outlook

• There's optimism about the young population (average age 24) driving innovation

• Increasing corporate involvement could lead to more mechanization and technology adoption

• Climate change preparedness and water management will be crucial challenges to address

Do give a patient listen and share your feedback!!

Consider becoming a paying subscriber if you wish to help me make such podcasts!

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Prof. Ashwini Chhatre straddles the world of research and action with aplomb.

He specializes in the interplay between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad.

When I learned about Prof. Ashwini Chhatre’s efforts at the Initiative on Forest Economy (courtesy my friend Vishal) to ‘upscale the recognition of Community Forest Resource (CFR) Rights and community-led governance for the protection and management of forests in India’, I was intrigued.

I reached out to Prof. Ashwini and he shared his paper where he has built a framework for organizing the forest economy with community forest ownership as a fulcrum, focusing on building aggregation economies that are both equitable and sustainable.

We decided to do a podcast on his paper and the fascinating work he has been doing in the context of forest governance, whether it is leveraging technology for forest rights through 'Abua Bir Abua Dishom Abhiyan (My Jungle My Country) campaign or CommFor App which collects data for evidence-based forest policies.

“Organizing the forest economy”, at first blush, brings in a wall of resistance, or might sound like a paradoxical statement (how can you organize forest economy when forest as an entity is unorganized), especially, when the intent is spelt out as, in Prof. Chhatre’s words in a podcast, “make forest economy visible, one small step at a time”.

However, Prof. Ashwini’s interesting journey carries enough seeds of wilderness that makes me open to possibilities.

”Between my BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and the start of my PhD at Duke, I spent 11 years working in different parts of India, mostly as a community organizer and social activist working on issues related to natural resources like land, forests, and water.” - Prof. Ashwini Chhatre from his Linkedin profile introduction

We don’t have clarity about what constitutes the definition of a forest in India.

While international organisations like Global Forest Watch (GFW) have reported that India lost approximately 23,300 square kilometres of tree cover between 2001 and 2023, the government claims a marginal increase in forest cover.

In his radical forest futures paper, Ashwini envisions that, based on secure tenure, community-based enterprises will be able to manage forests sustainably with support from industry and technology partners under the watchful eye of the forest dept. Is this feasible? How do we implement this vision, while staying true to the intent?

The conversation was a blast and Prof. Chhatre gamely responded to my cynical hat and shared fascinating insights to each of my questions. With eclectic examples from the India’s tryst with women equality rights, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and India Electricity Act, the podcast was a masterclass on India’s political economy, forest economy and how we need to rethink our relationship between agriculture and forest and reimagine plantation sector in an age runaway Climate Change.

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Hello!! My name is Venky and I thank you for reading Agribusiness Matters, an endeavour to discover systems thinking in the real world - crumbling food and agriculture systems in an age of runaway Climate Change. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe and receive exclusive perks - invitations to join ABM Townhalls, special discounts on ABM Publications, Global Agritech 101, 201 cohort courses, and more.

Get to the bottom of food and agriculture systems in an age of runaway Climate Change.

Dear Friends,

Here is the recording of the overview webinar I conducted last Thursday on the Unified Agriculture Interface after kickstarting my new project on driving the Unified Agriculture Interface with a pilot in Nashik, where the future of Indian agriculture is unevenly playing out in fascinating terms.

In building the Unified Agriculture Interface, as my friend Shashi put it, we are mindful of three structures that trigger three different behaviours.

• Ecosystem

• Network

• Distribution

What is an ecosystem?

a) An ecosystem is a structure as well as a process for interaction b) through which various sets of complementary agritech platform players are c) linked to an aligned purpose to d) co-create various forms of shared value.

Today, many agritech players are networked without necessarily being a part of an ecosystem with an aligned purpose and so end up paying higher costs for distribution, locking their customers in silos, fostering a Stockholm syndrome that benefits neither the technologist nor the grower.

This problem has become further pronounced with data becoming “stateless’ and “anarchist”, thereby not respecting any protocol we put in place to deal with the behaviours enabled by the Internet.

Here is a sample usecase: How do you evaluate the efficacy of a cold-pressed seed oil, or any food and agriculture product with contentious nutrition claims? Who determines the protocols that determine the veracity and efficacy of the product you are using?

How do we design protocol-led networks which are unified by a purpose, thereby acquiring a meaning, as Gordon Brander beautifully puts it, that comes from the system surprising itself?

This is no easy task and I would be lying if I told you I know how it is going to be built in a domain like agriculture where zero-sum mindsets often take over in the absence of underlying protocols and infrastructures, leaving farmers and growers, the weakest link to bear the brunt of systemic issues that no one is addressing.

We are clear about this - We are designing a local, community-led open network with the farmer at the centre. UAI will be the hyperlocal arm for other beckn-enabled networks like ONDC.

As I explain in my presentation, borrowing from Dr. Pramod Verma’s presentation at Open Agri Network, we will approach each of the identity elements; map them with the assets and link them with networks.

How to think about this? How to talk about building an underlying network powered by a protocol? Should this be understood by a mental model of a “super app”? Would this also be overtaken by smallholding gatekeepers who insulate farmers from technology? In building a network, are we building an app or a platform? Would this devolve to become LinkedIn for farmers? How can we standardize procurement done on the basis of grading and quality for farmers?

The whole idea of doing this webinar was to seed questions which he hadn’t thought of yet. While we don’t have answers to all the questions, we are figuring it out. If you would like to be a part of this pioneering experiment, fill up this form and we will reach out.

Cheers

Venky

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What happens when you bring together investors who have funded FPOs; agribusiness founders who have embedded cooperatives in their organisational structures and have received external impact capital; bankers who sit on the boards of FPOs and FPO financing organisations and last but not least, eminent scholars who have been diligently studying the emerging model of farmer producer organisations all in one room?

Can this wicked challenge be collectively addressed with an eminent panel with a rich biodiversity of mental models and experiences to not just discuss the challenge at hand, but also seed possibilities of creating pathways of investment?

This was the experiment I attempted last week in the most recent ABM Townhall.

Panelists:

1. Rahul Rai, Partner, Incofin India Investment Management which led the capital round for Sahyadri Farms, India’s First Farmer-Led Organisation;

2. Emmanuel Murray, Investment Director Caspian and someone who sits on the boards of several FPOs and farmer finance organisations.

3. Shambu Prasad, one of the finest scholars from IRMA - which has a rich tradition of studying farmer organisations in India- recently co-wrote a terrific book, “Farming Futures, Reimagining Producer Organisations In India” along with Ajit Kanitkar.

Guests:

• Krishnaiah Kodimela from Pasidi Panta which has received funding from Upaya Social Ventures and managed to incorporate a mutually aided cooperative society in his organisational structure.

• Mariappan Ramarathinasamy, Ex-Practice Head, NDDB

• Eminent Scholars who have been studying FPOs from the Managing Sustainable Transitions Community

• ABM Members Vivek VS, Bharati, Saumya Sen

At one level, as Rahul nicely put at the start of the panel, what stops from taking the leap is largely the fear of the unknown. This is not to belittle the challenge at hand, given where Farmer Producer Organisations are today in their infancy stages.

If one image could sum up a thousand words on the current state of Farmer Producer Organisations in India, this annotated image (below) from the Indian epic Mahabharata could be a strong contender.

Would you like to hear a story?

An elephant was chasing a man in a forest. With no place to hide, he climbed a tree. He slipped unfortunately and could thankfully manage to hold on to a branch.

He looked up and found that the elephant was waiting to devour him and two rats, one black and one white, were slowly nibbling the branch he was hanging on to.

The branch would soon fall to the ground.

As the man looked down, he discovered that there were many snakes. Suddenly a drop of honey fell on his face.

He licked it.

There was a honeycomb atop the branch he was holding. As he held the branch and shook it in fear, the bees were enraged and were out to sting him. Albeit, he got to taste the honey oozing from the comb.Could this be the precarious predicament of farmer-producer organisations in India, tasting the eternal cooperative spirit that has been taken for granted, although with political machinery working its way to break the traditional political fiefdom of rural India, creating two separate policies of Farmer Producer Organisations and Cooperatives, while envisaging M-PACS (Multipurpose Primary Agricultural Credit Cooperative society, further highlighting the growing chasm between cooperatives and farmer producer organisations in a microbiome of competitive federalism that is constantly seeding conflict between the Center and the State?

Given India’s agrarian DNA, Farmer Organisations have co-evolved with India's political economy. If you don’t mind my proclivity to use Bollywood Matinee Amitabh Bachchan as a motif here, you could broadly categorize the evolution of cooperatives in India into three phases.

Until the nineties, India had a strong cooperative movement. After India's 1991 liberalisation moment, the stronger need to integrate markets with farmer organisations led to the birth of farmer-producer organisations - the intrepid love child of private companies and cooperative societies.In the "Doubling Farmer Incomes Report" which marked a seismic shift towards focusing on farmer incomes to renaming the Department of Agriculture to include farmer welfare, there were 280 references to "farmer producer organisations".In 2021, keeping in mind the reversal of globalisation and the rise of neo-local economies, cooperatives are coming back to the fore with the Ministry of Cooperation aiming to create multi-purpose, multi-state Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACs) that will be digitised and monitored closely from the top.With the Indian agritech ecosystem at an interesting juncture where private investors are unable to find good ventures to back on, can the funding be redirected towards FPOs?

So what did I learn from this ABM Townhall? Here are some of the insights I learned from this eminent panel. All the pointers below have been paraphrased from the original conversations that emerged during the ABM Townhall.

• Whether it is Rabobank or IFFCO, global and Indian cooperatives have always had private companies as subsidiaries and have partnered with well-known institutions in creating these subsidiary structures.

• When FPO becomes a holding company, on the FPO end, they manage the farmer organisation and back-end creation, including inputs and loans, while the subsidiaries focus on the commercial side of the business.

• Addressing the conflict of interest between the subsidiary organisations and the FPO is crucial, besides installing guardrails and transparent mechanisms on pricing for a farmer joining an FPO and what the farmer would eventually get out of an FPO.

• Restricting share capital contribution only to farmer members has limited the capital structure of FPOs, especially those which have the potential to scale quickly. Even the legislation doesn’t have provisions for subordinate debt, preference capital and other kinds of equity structures.

• Opening up FPOs to private equity while keeping cooperative principles intact and the question of exit hasn’t been deeply addressed so far in the policy discourse. When it is time for an investor to exit, who will buy out the investor's stake? It’s important to remember that the nature of capital is unlikely to be inclusive.

• Every FPO need not become an MNC. It could remain a member of another entity which does things for which an FPO has limitations. Not all FPOs are going to be large corporates, many of them will remain localized institutions. (Do check my counterpoint: FPOs as Corporation and Corporation as FPOs for more nuance around this)

• Linear models of scaling producer organisations are largely unnecessary, especially when they could be small and participate/network with others.

• Debt products and debt structures haven’t yet been designed appropriately for FPO businesses. Guarantees are hypothetical. While institutional equity-based investors are limiting themselves to managing the execution risk, in the case of debt, lenders are largely limited to safe lending.

• If a startup is burning cash like mad and still is investable, why an FPO which has a marginal loss is not debt-fundable? Conventional finance metrics (including CIBIL Scores for evaluating FPOs) need to be rethought for funding FPOs.

• When dealing with FPOs, it is important to get the typology right. On the one hand, as Prof. Tushaar Shah pointed out, there are swayambu (sui generis) FPOs such as Sahyadri. And the other end, you have milk-producer companies that have followed, as Prof. Tushaar Shah put it, “Anand Patterns” with power not so much with the members as much as with the professionals.

• It is important to distinguish between Type 1 FPOs and Type 2 FPOs. The latter could be a federation of FPOs or a joint venture between FPOs and private entities working on slightly different design principles.

Primer on Type 1 and Type 2 FPOs:

“It is necessary to design at least two different types of FPOs with different mandates, business models and organisation designs. The institutional structure and evaluation parameters for these two types of FPOs will also need to be different. Type 1 FPOs could consist of 300 to 1000 members (in tribal areas the Gram Sabha could double up as type 1 FPO). These FPOs will deal with the production or wholesale procurement of seeds and other inputs, providing agri equipment on rent, extension activities for various agriculture operations for relevant crops, and promotion of individual or group enterprises for activities like bioresource input production. They will also undertake aggregation of output, quality checking, and primary processing like grading, cleaning, packing and selling to large buyers or Type 2 organisations. These Type 2 organisations will buy from type 1 FPOs, store, process, export, brand and sell in B-to-C format or in B-to-B format depending upon the commodities. Potentially these Type 2 organisations could be larger FPOs or Federations but also social enterprises like Safe Harvest, Earthy N Green, Manyam grains etc.” - From Shirish Joshi and Shambu Prasad’s Blog on Type 1 and Type 2 FPO Typology

• How do we design the new generation cooperatives in India? Are FPOs the new generation cooperatives? The discussion in agricultural cooperatives in the US and other countries has many mechanisms to address these questions. We have hardly scratched the surface in India to explore these possibilities among farmers.

• Amul Model cannot be mindlessly emulated: Owning the end-to-end value chain happened during pre-liberalized India. We need to be mindful of today’s realities.

• Ideally speaking, we need to move to a certain stage where reverse pitching ought to happen while forming FPOs. Let the farmer members decide whether they want to form a cooperative, a producer company, or a mutually aided cooperative society. Otherwise, we end up creating institutions that are based on the principle of exclusion. No, a farmer need not tie up his life with an FPO.

• Conditions for FPOs to exist, irrespective of form and structure: a) When there is high cost or production on a per-unit output basis; b) when there is a technical type of production; c) when there is deep sociality between members and management with frequent transactions. Is there a commercial rationale for creating additive value, irrespective of formal, informal or FPO structure, that remains fungible and negotiable?

• If you are a producer company, you cannot become a member of National Co-operative Organics as it is restricted as per law. Some of our institutions are not designed for our contemporary requirements. We have to rethink the design principles of building cooperative institutions.

• The FPO movement has led to small farmers expressing themselves more freely in board rooms, unlike the case of cooperatives, where there was significant elite capture.

• FPOs and Cooperatives will coexist, especially with 20-25 % of the FPOs doing well. Policies are working towards federating these institutions while the Ministry of Agriculture deals with the former; keeping hands off from the Ministry of Cooperation which is dealing with the latter.

• Today, CSR Funds cannot go directly to an FPO. How do we change this? What would it take to include FPOs as a potential recipient of the social stock exchange? Grants are typically not used to derisk trade activity. They are used to create farmgate infrastructure.

• Unlike in the case of milk, where milk producer companies can procure all milk and sell it, FPOS cannot do the same. Similarly, FPOs could very well be open enough to service their orders by working with non-members as well.

• Company structure allows the possibility of mergers and acquisitions and the producer company has greater flexibility to change forms depending on business objectives. FPOs also have the potential to use expert directors on the board who may not have voting rights.

• If you do not have a significant turnover, it is probably not a good idea to go for producer company registration and bear the cost of compliance.

FPOs mentioned during the conversation in the context of investments:

• Rang Sutra - one of the earliest cases where a private equity investor came into FPO.

• Chetana Organic

• Ram Rahim FPC,

• Manyam Grains

• Krushidhan Farmer Producer Company

• Ploughman Agri-Private Ltd.

• Thirunelli Agri Producer Company

I hope you enjoy the ABM Townhall as much as I did curating it. Do share your feedback, questions and comments.

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Ruchir Sharma famously once said, “India consistently disappoints the optimists and the pessimists”. The fundamental question remains - Which India are we talking about?

Ever Since Sajith Pai built a strong narrative around his India 1,2,3 framework - building on Kishore Biyani’s "It Happened in India”- to showcase how India contains both Mexico and Sub-Saharan Africa in its belly (speaking in per-capita incomes), India 1, India 2, India 3 have largely become everyday lexicon for many of us who work in the startup ecosystem.

India is large. It contains multitudes.

How to understand these divergent Indias?

Should we drop the limiting binary markers of rural-vs-urban India and replace them with India 1-2-3?

I had great fun exploring these questions in great depth with Mithun Madhusudan, product manager leader of a considerable repute in Indian product/tech circles. (Today happens to be his birthday:) Happy Birthday Mithun!!)

Mithun is also a popular writer of The Indian Pivot newsletter where he has been writing extensively on understanding the non-English speaking Indian rural consumer segment.

This conversation, replete with many interesting digressions, including a political battle of Rajini fandom and random movie vignettes to make a socioeconomic point about India 1 during the 90s, was special for two reasons:

• It helped me paint a particularly idiosyncratic sociological view of Indian consumer behaviour from a product builder’s mindset

• It helped me articulate a rough sketch of the time-evolution theory that could connect India 1,2,3 and its evolutionary dynamics.

Aside:

Is there a linear arrow-of-time theory that could help us connect India 1’s past with India 2’s present and hopefully extrapolate India3’s future?

After all, you could argue that what was reality for India1 during the nineties, is now becoming reality for smaller pockets of India2 and will hopefully become true for India3 soon.

When my wife’s parents were living in Baroda during the nineties, it was quite common to have a local credit account with the neighbourhood grocer. Today, my wife’s parents don’t have a credit account. Likewise, between 2019 and 2024, India2 stopped credit purchases, especially in the sale of agri-inputs, leading to an expansion of cash and carry in rural retail. India 3, in contrast, is likely to still have a credit account now in 2024 as we speak.

By categorizing India3 as ‘unmonetizable users’, based on consumption metrics, are we disparaging the economic potential of rural India, once we address the infrastructural gap they are trying to navigate through to make a good livelihood?

When I asked Sajith this question, he responded,

1) India3 != Rural. There is an India1 in rural Andhra, TN, Kerala, Punjab etc and there is an India3 in Mumbai and Delhi. 2) My lens of India3 not easy to monetise is from a startup perspective. Unilever etc sees a lot of potential in rural areas and India3 separately.

Here are a few intriguing questions we probed in this conversation:

• What are the unintended consequences of the sachetization boom of the nineties, which was marked through frames such as “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”?

• Is India-1-2-3 a better frame than a pyramid because we are not assuming here that somebody has to move from 3 to 1 or 2 to 1?

• Why is it that language (and not income) remains the biggest differentiation between India 1 and India 2?

• Why does India 1 live atomised lives while India 2 thrives and lives communally?

• Should we drop the limiting binary markers of rural-vs-urban and replace them with India 1-2-3?

• Why is agriculture no longer a differentiation marker when defining customer behavioural segments in India?

• How do we make sense of the aspirations of India 1 operating in single-player mode vis-a-vis India 2 operating in a multi-player mode?

• Is India 1 now rediscovering algorithm-mediated sociality to cope with its atomisation?

• Is there a differentiation in social network structures of India 1 vis-a-vis India 2? Can we understand the network structure by mapping the migratory patterns?

• How does trust evolve in India 1 vis-a-vis India 2? How does a consumer acquire status in India 1 vis-a-vis India 2?

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did:)

India 2 Startups and Links Referred in the conversation

• Stage Content

• Sharechat Social Network

• Apna Jobs Platform

• Krishify

• Meesho Horizontal E-Commerce

• Bhavin Turakhia’s tweet on the purpose of B2C products

Pop culture references in the conversation

• Rajini Kanth

• Alaipayuthey scene showcasing India 1’s credit behaviour

• Swades projector scene

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Now wait a minute. Did you sign up for the wrong newsletter?

Why on earth am I talking about Mahatma Gandhi, idealism and meaningful livelihoods in a newsletter titled “Agribusiness Matters” which focuses on discovering systems thinking in food and agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change?

You see, that is the point. That is exactly why I ought to.

One of the alluvial pleasures of writing Agribusiness Matters is that I can pretend to be a philosopher and ask fundamental questions about quality, technology, agribusiness, culture, impact and history of agriculture.

Here is the underlying question that animates this podcast.

Should founders redesigning food and agriculture systems of the future explore a thesis around meaningful entrepreneurship? Is it necessary in today’s uncertain funding/economic climate? If yes, why?

After all, we are dealing with a sector that flirts with “impact” (for good and bad reasons) far more than any other. And if this were the case, how can entrepreneurs design meaningful livelihoods without exploring a fundamental hypothesis of a life centred around idealism?

If you are a founder or investor working in food and agriculture systems, should you have a “sacred” hypothesis of idealism (not ideology) in the first place that you can benchmark against? How would you compute your moral balance sheet? How would you navigate your “inner game” of entrepreneurship with the tensions of idealism?

If you’ve ever wrestled with these questions, this podcast with Krishnan Subramanian, Co-Founder and Director, of Yellow Bag Foundation could be a game changer. Call it it, if you will, a chicken soup for the entrepreneurial soul who particularly works with Nature as a stakeholder.

You see, the contents of what Krishnan is doing at Yellow Bag may or may not be important for many of us

But the context behind why Krishnan is doing what he is doing at Yellow Bag Foundation and the process, as he shares candidly, that unfolds underneath is extremely important for most of us.

In this beautiful podcast with Krishnan where he bravely bares his inner travails and moral dilemmas, I discovered a few fascinating insights:

• Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t a Luddite. At least, in the conventional sense of the word.

• Idealism is never a static target. You hold on to your ideals until it evolves and grows.

• You can never know beforehand when you are ready to take risks in life.

• Interacting with a child is an act of being with nature.

• In the entrepreneurial world, it is sine qua non to distinguish between your central idea and the tools and methods you employ to take your idea forward.

• It doesn’t mostly happen in life when you wake up one day with an idea and stay with it all through your life.

• When you live with nature, your stakeholder changes with time.

• When you have the planet Earth as a stakeholder, you should be doing minimal damage to nature. Agriculture is a volatile domain because planet Earth is the most ruthless stakeholder of your business out there.

• When you play games of entrepreneurship, you have to get comfortable dealing with dharmasankatas -double bind where I am damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

• To create impact, you have to survive. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in the current world. When we set boundaries on what to do, we should also be willing to let go of the benefits that it creates.

• After your survival and that of your immediate stakeholders are guaranteed, you can expand idealism to a larger space.

• Have you made sure that the people around you have a predictable income?

• Tension is bound to be between your idealism and action. How do you discover your balance?

• “End of the day, I want to pursue this journey because this is an experiment. This might fail, this might pass, but this will lead to a lot of learnings of how people would want to live lives, and how we should evolve into a community of people doing things. How do we use our resources? How do we create employment? There need not be one right answer to it. There are different approaches and different experiments to it. Yellow bag is one such experiment. But when I say the word experiment, I am very cautious. There is flesh and blood involved in it.”

• Are we making everything a bet because we are wary as entrepreneurs of taking commitments?

• What does it mean to own a house? Our work is also an expression of discovering our home. We feel morally responsible for the place where we are born.

• “Many a time, you will not have the mental bandwidth to think about what is

my idealism, am I crossing the scope of my idealism or not?”

• What is your last commitment as an entrepreneur?

• When do you say no to an investment?

• How do you differentiate between your product and your story?

• “India is at a very important threshold level where we are dreaming of strong shoulders of entrepreneurs that can lift this country ahead and take forward”.

• What is your dharma as an entrepreneur? How do we create an ecosystem of responsible entrepreneurship?

• Your business has three stakeholders - nature, community, sustainability

Inspirations acknowledged and referenced in the podcast

• Mahatma Gandhi

• Arvind Eye Foundation and Dr. G. Natchiar

• Jeyamohan’s “Stories of the True” and “Action is Liberation (tamizh)”

• Samanvaya’s Ram

• ASSEFA’s Annachi (Shri. S. Loganathan)

• Sridhar Lakshmanan (BASECAMP Social Research Foundation)

How happy are you with today’s edition?

I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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At Agribusiness Matters, my long-term mission is to build a durable body of work that elucidates systems thinking principles from real-world agritech/ agribusiness contexts. Except for my Annual 2023 Agribusiness Matters Report Card, I have never talked directly about Systems Thinking in this newsletter and never invited a guest to talk about Systems Thinking.

Until Now.

Mihir Mathur and I go a long way back in time and share a similar “curve benders” origin story.

He was a finance grad who met a systems thinker serendipitously and transitioned his career from being an equity analyst to becoming India’s foremost applied systems thinker, working on climate change, sustainability, and livelihood issues.

And so I asked him: Why do folks from finance and investing (I can give you so many examples)have a strong predilection to get into systems thinking? What is the relationship between thinking through the lens of finance and thinking in systems?

His answer was fascinating: Only a true atheist can become a true theist

Given Mihir and I started our explorations on Climate Change, Ecology and Systems Thinking together almost at the same time- In 2011, Mihir and I were the only participants from India at an international conference on “Inner Dimensions of Climate Change”- this conversation became a good opportunity to do balance sheet reconciliation of how our opinions and perspectives about Climate Change have shifted over time.

And so I asked him:

How have you reconciled how the system continues to chug along, creating a further mirage of continuity? Do you see that kind of anomaly or does it bother you as an anomaly or do you have a particular theory as to why it continues to chug along?

Mihir Mathur gave an interesting case study of how Cape Town’s water crisis to explain his theory.

This conversation also helped me birth a new word: Systems Washing. Today, everyone is talking about Systems Thinking while continuing to chug along with the status quo and so I asked him: What BS (b*t) indicators could help us distinguish Systems Thinking from Systems Washing.**

At Agribusiness Matters, I have been developing a few heuristics to distinguish Systems Thinking from Systems Washing

• Applying linear causality approaches to cyclical phenomena

• Root Cause Myth in Food and Agriculture Systems

• Faustian Bargain of One-Dimensional Success

Mihir shared how he looks at models closely to evaluate the soundness of Systems Thinking approaches and made a profound, under-appreciated point: Thinking in Systems is far more important than creating models of systems.

While thinking in systems may be fairly important to deal with the larger questions of Climate Change, how do we deal with the current predicament of a post-pandemic world where there is no such thing as a shared sense of reality?

And so I asked him: Are we even existing in a shared world when there is no such thing as a shared reality to begin with?

Mind you, given Trump’s ambitious plans for the Climate Change Denial Agenda when he comes back to power (I have a hunch, he will), these questions no longer carry the luxury of being philosophical and abstract. They have real-world consequences.

Mihir, who has been regularly attending COP events for quite some time, shared an intriguing zen perspective: “Half of the world is sleeping while we are talking...We need to find alignment in small pockets - localized circles of change.”

His interesting response helped me explore one of my inner dilemmas deeply with him: What is the trade-off between a fractal approach to change vis-a-vis fighting against change?

Whether you are an individual or an organisation, when you are dealing with Climate Change, your response could be of these two types: If you believe in the “fractal approach”, you are working in your local contexts, your local community, your local system and pretty much filter out everything else as noise.

As an agritech analyst writing Agribusiness Matters exploring the digital transformation of agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change, I have been helping founders and investors think in systems to prepare ourselves for the future. In doing so, I also strive to motivate several bright young minds to work in agriculture, while the world around them advises them to move away from agriculture. Beyond this, would I be interested in blocking and agitating over a fossil-fuel pipeline?

Most likely never.

On the other hand, there are plenty of activists who find it morally responsible to throw mashed potatoes at Monet’s “Grainstacks” in Germany and “fight” against Climate Change.

Which approach is right? Should we “fight” against the system at large or should we embrace our fractal nature of existence and concentrate only on the fractal system we deal with?

In response, Mihir shared his profound unease with his struggles to buy a home, stemming from this dilemma: If the larger system is unsustainable, does it help if we make the smaller system sustainable? In other words: What is an optimal distance to maintain from the destructive system devouring us and the planet from within?

This conversation, as you can see, was deeply personal for both of us and helped me with a lot of clarity on several fundamental questions of everyday motions that I go through when I work, consult and write on issues of Climate Change and Sustainability in food and agriculture systems.

We spoke about India’s struggles to modernize its systems and the importance of “missions”; how few of us are responding to climate change by not having babies and why children are natural system thinkers; the real difference between Climate Change adaptation and mitigation; understanding the relationship between food, land, water systems and a lot more.

I hope you find the conversation as much precious as I did:)

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Few weeks ago, Rhishi and I conducted a non-technical workshop on “AI for Agrifood Leaders”. It was widely well-received with interesting questions from the audience all through the workshop (as you’ll hear in the recording) and terrific, heartwarming feedback. Since many of you reached out to access the recording, (and I am crawling out of my post-vacation blues), I wanted to share the unedited video here with all of you.

Given that AI (and its precocious kid Generative AI) is currently leading the hype wave with its attendant collective FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) behaviours, for those of us working in food and agriculture systems, it is important to develop a clear-eyed perspective around where the real possibilities exist.

But worry not! Understanding hype waves ain’t that difficult for those of us who have closely seen the growth of weeds in farms.

Much like weeds do a thankless healing job of protecting bare soil that is hungry for nourishing organic compounds and would have suffered soil erosion otherwise, hype cycles are a necessary, thankless mechanism of frenzied over-investment to build underlying infrastructure (digital and otherwise) through ‘productive bubbles’.

Given our collective experience working in agritech across large landholding and small landholding contexts respectively, Rhishi and I earnestly set out to do a grounded context setting for the potential impact of AI in food and agriculture systems.

Given that this domain is rapidly evolving at such pace to make me revisit few assumptions in this video that have aged only for six weeks, I am, nevertheless, sharing this video, warts and all, for you to understand few “timeless” aspects that we think would help you play joyfully with these shiny new tools without getting infected by the half-baked, anxiety virus going around today about the diminished role of humans in an age of exponential artificial intelligence.

In fact, as we argue in this workshop, AI will only accelerate human possibilities when it reaches the apogee of its potential.

Everything else, including AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is fiction. Don’t believe me?

Here is a concise summary of the argument in plain English from scientists and entrepreneurs working in the trenches, from their brilliant book, “Why Machines Will Never Rule the World”

For goldfishes reading this, here is a slidey TL;DR version of our “AI for Agrifood Leaders” workshop, although I would strongly recommend you check out the complete recording, available with chapters in the link below (the meat of the talk starts around the eleventh minute after quiz and context setting), before you form premature opinions based on the summary below.

> What is AI?

“ The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. AI is a computer program like any other – it runs, takes input, processes, and generates output. AI’s output is useful across a wide range of fields, ranging from coding to medicine to law to the creative arts. It is owned by people and controlled by people, like any other technology” - Marc Andreessen

Six Reasons Why AI is here to Stay

• AI is not a technological fad.

• AI is like another software. However, it is not as predictable as our conventional understanding of software is.

• AI will increase the value of training data, (especially in a domain like agriculture where Ashby’s law of Requisite Variety plays out in full blown intensity)

• Everyone will have an AI sidekick.

• AI access will be democratized, thanks to creative destruction.

• AI will increase jobs.

> Two Fundamental Mental Models when it comes to thinking about AI

• Camera, Not an Engine (courtesy Venkatesh Rao from Ribbonfarm Studio )

• Evolution in Reverse (Contrasting Evolutionary Games of Humans and AI)

How to understand the partnership between Humans and AI?

Interesting Use-cases on AI in Agrifood Context

Three Groups of Innovators Betting on AI for Agrifood

Project Types Ripe for AI

Understanding AI Agritech Stack

Adapted from Michael Parekh’s model on Building Value over time in his AI: Reset to Zero publication

>Key Takeaways

I hope you enjoy the workshop as much as Rhishi and I enjoyed creating it for you.

P.S. As you can imagine, we’ve barely touched the tip of the iceberg in this domain. Rhishi and I plan to launch a mini-simulator course soon to let you play with data and AI.

P.P.S. If you are interested in signing up for this workshop or if you want us to do a customized workshop for your agrifood leadership team, do reach out.

So, what do you think?

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Thus spake sufi saint Hazrat Zaheen Taj in one of my favourite poems:

“Pani-Pani rat'te rat'te pyaasa hi mar jaaye!”

Chanting 'water', 'water' endlessly, one dies of thirst

We have been talking about the idea of buying directly from farmers for a very long time, while buying from traders, wholesalers, MNCs and everyone else. Are we now finally entering the phase where this possibility is lot more closer to probability and, ergo, reality?

If you want to bring smallholding farmers closer to consumers thereby ensuring that farmers have great livelihoods to grow great food for consumers, what would be your strategic focus - Value Chain, Technology or Branding? Of course, there is no one right answer. The question is - How do they all add up?

Few weeks ago, along with ABM Members Vishalakshi, Reshmi and Akshay (chiming in to explore quick-commerce collaborations), I organized “State of Direct-to-Farmer Trade Commerce” ABM Townhall with three founders working on bringing farmers closer to consumers from three different vantage points - value chain, branding and technology.

• Nitin Puri, Founder Kisaansay (Branding)

• Ruchit Garg, Founder, Harvesting Foundation (Technology)

• Rahul Prakash, Founder and CEO AmalFarm (Value-Chain)

KisaanSay and Amalfarm have been building the place-of-origin promise marketplaces in collaboration with thriving farmer producer organisations in the country. Harvesting Foundation has been building HFN Mandi to help large number of farmers brand, market & sell their crops and also focusing on agri-input supply chains, building Kisaan Saarthis (Farmer aggregators) across their farmer networks. What are the challenges in sourcing from farmer enterprises? Can we build truly farmer-owned brands that can reach global markets? Why does Amalfarm focus on GI-tagged products? Do farmers get better margins in place-of-origin products? How do we strengthen the ecosystem to make "One District One Product" initiative a success? Nitin Puri, in a chat, once told me that "We're building Amul 2.0 at KisaanSay, and Dr. Kurien & the Amul model are our inspiration". What is Amul 2.0 model? In what ways does Amul 2.0 diverge and converge from Amul Model? A lot of promise is riding over Indian Farmer Producer Organisations (FPO) at the moment. How do we manifest this promise? What is required to make FPO promise deliver better livelihood options for farmers?

After sufficiently exploring each these questions with this wonderful panel, I discovered few fascinating insights that made me ponder deeply about the problem at hand and the solutions we are attempting to bridge this vast chasm between the rural farmer and urban consumer.

• “We somehow divide ourselves into two worlds. One is the typical NGO development sector way of working. And the other extreme is the way market forces work and large corporations work. And because we divided ourselves into two different zones or partitions, we've never been able to cross-fertilize the kind of ideas, thoughts, people, system, processes into one concrete holistic model” - Nitin Puri

• We have food security. We don’t have nutritional security. How do we solve for nutritional security at scale?

• Does buying directly from farmers mean anything to the average consumer who values price, taste, convenience over anything else? Or is there an emerging segment of consumers who are equally tired of false promises of “organic” and large multinational brands offering certified, regulated food with pesticide residues and are eager to figure out alternatives to provide healthy, trustable food to their families?

• When you are want to bring technology to solve problems at farmer village level, the problem statement is this - How to make farmers co-operate without having to form real cooperatives?

• When you are focusing on bridging farmers with consumers, figuring out the model to sell one metric ton is the holy grail to build strong farmgate ecosystems.

• Grading needs to be done at farmgate, especially to ascertain the conversion ratio for primitive rice varieties.

• Logistics is a real pain point - How do we solve for delivery when farmer lives in regions where no courier services are ready to pick up? How do we reach to the 80% of the 19000 pin codes in the country?

• When you want to solve for direct-from-farmer “branding” with the existing value chain infrastructure available in the country, building a supply chain with the trifecta of transparent co-curation, co-branding and co-profit sharing could become a powerful moat.

• For true partnerships with farmer enterprises in the long run, you can’t only do input or output. You have to participate in the entire value chain if you want to control it.

• With GI Crops delivered through direct-to-farmer model, there is enough evidence that farmers are able to get 30-40% more than the traditional model.

>

* Migration among India’s wealthy salaried class has triggered a lot of nostalgia-fueled demand for place-of-origin promise products.

* If the government is serious about taking ODOP produce to the global markets, can the Indian embassy in every part of the word dedicate one resource to promote place-of-origin promise products in every part of the country? Can we do generic branding better, when it comes to Indian products?

* Outside India, several countries have done a great job to such an extent that third-rate products have often been marketed the first class way. In India, on the other hand, first class products have been marketed the third class way.

* India has never been strong on marketing, branding, promotion. That has been our weakest link.

* Several promising initiatives started by the government, including One District One Produce, need to introspect deeply on their return on investment. Rushing to put the label to gain few brownie points without doing the necessary work on the ground will not yield results.

* We need more players like Telangana State Food Processing Society which has undertaken efforts to midwife FPOs with federated demand-led structures and hand hold their sourcing partnerships by building plug-and-play supply chains.

* Common Facility Centers can’t be eighty kilometers away from farmer clusters, if they are serious about small farmers utilizing those infrastructures.

* Government is spending a lot on promotion. Are farmers getting the market access to the market? How can we increase the success of these promotion efforts? How do we bring in next level of transparency to foster a culture of trust? Can you share the customer purchase order with an FPO?

* Can we bring more clarity on the FSSAI licenses FPOs ought to have? How can we make FPOs more accountable with KRAs when a lot of FPOs exist in paper than in reality in India?

* GI tagged products have deeper significance in conservation of native varieties and carry the idea and genetic material forward. It is culturally extremely important for Indians. At the same time, it is important to place checks in balance with validation and proof mechanisms to ensure that bad actors don’t hijack the GI movement.

* Structurally, ONDC is a good concept. But, the user experience cracks at at both hub and node levels. Proper packaging, good images and there is a lot of hygiene improvement needed to make it work. Otherwise, it would limit to being a tool for food entrepreneurs to discover samples from farmers and farmer enterprises.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did:)

So, what do you think?

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Is irrigation tech the bellwether to the emergent servicisation phenomenon unfolding in the global agribusiness industry - whether through leasing, usage-based models, or irrigation hardware equipment-as-a-service or more broadly Irrigation as-a-service and Farming-as-a-service?

Few weeks ago, along with ABM member Reshmi Vasudevan joining us, I organized the “State of Irrigation Tech” ABM Townhall (manel to be precise, my apologies!!) with four amazing founders working on diverse product/service models connected with Irrigation Tech - Solarisation-as-a-Service, Sensing Automation and Intelligence, Water and Fertilizer Management and Irrigation-as-a-Service respectively.

1) Amit Saraogi, Co-Founder Oorja Development Solutions Limited2) Naveen Singh, Co-Founder PhyFarm, AI-enabled Agri-IOT Platform3) Jasveer Singh, Founder and CEO, SICCA Automation4) Srinivas Malladi, Founder and CEO, AgriRain Agro Industries Pvt. Ltd.

After talking with these founders, I discovered few fascinating insights that could sum up the real challenges that bedevil this sector and the possibilities that await us when we discover the best wrapper business model that will unlock the benefits of irrigation technology to smallholder farmers.

• With the pernicious effects of Climate change rubbing on our noses and the advent of servicisation phenomenon at play, farmers might never fully irrigate their farms again. Given the irrigation tech trends we are seeing via groundwater accelerating water scarcity, supplemental irrigation with dynamic pricing (based on piping infrastructure) could very well become the norm. We are essentially talking of irrigation tech that sufficiently address goldilocks dilemma (neither too much, nor too little) and is mindful of Jevons’ paradox

• Crop selection depends on neighbors. Fertilizer selection depends on the neighboring fertilizer shopkeeper. Irrigation depends on convenience.

• Farmers know that they can’t do farming without water and are equally aware that it is not going to add to the income. If you are an entrepreneur, how do you solve for this problem?

• Early adoption starts from high-value crops - grapes, pomegranates, greenhouse cultivation, followed by commodity crops - cotton, sugarcane and corn. There is plenty of room for building the BMW and bullock cart for irrigation tech.

• Business model innovation is not just about machine-use efficiency and figuring the payable atomic unit that could be monetized. It is also a technology problem. And adding more technology doesn’t improve adoption one bit.

• The bulk of Irrigation costs boil down to fuel costs and moving the equipment from Point-A to Point-B. You either move irrigation equipment around or build a larger pump at downstream end that makes it a distribution problem - How far can you distribute the water through a shared infrastructure?

• The Pareto’s Rule of Irrigation Tech - Product-driven irrigation tech is valuable for the creamy layer of the top 20% of the market. The remaining 80% of the market depends on service-driven irrigation tech.

• Why is Irrigation Tech in smallholding countries a no-go-zone for venture capital activity? Domestic Investors don’t want to bet on models that unlock existing technologies. They don’t want asset heavy models. The tides are slowly changing though. Besides climate finance and transition finance and philanthropic capital, institutional investors are now starting to bet on irrigation technologies and other decentralized renewable energies infrastructure.

• Transferring Ownership is a key ingredient for scalability in smallholding irrigation tech contexts. Preferably within 3-5 years so that irrigation equipments have 10-15 years of good, useful life behind them. With agribusiness partnerships, such models can unlock impact for smallholder farmers.

• It helps to solve smallholding farmer livelihood and managing water as two separate problems and tackle them one at a time.

• Technology trade-off in irrigation tech boils down to stripping down the technology to its least common denominator at the customer end and cutting down the overhead costs.

• Solving for Irrigation Tech is a question of timing - How do you manage the window of opportunity for the 15 days when they have a predictable water source?

• Solving for Irrigation Tech is a question of understanding hydrological behaviour - how do you build the infrastructure that underpins irrigation and design technology in which the value of technology outweighs the infrastructure?

• Solving Irrigation Tech in rainfed regions is a double whammy problem solving for lowest affordability rates, poor infrastructure, cropping patterns to arrive at a bottom line that provides livelihood to farmers. Formal water markets possibilities emerge when you understand the combinatorial forces of innovation at play.

• The biggest challenge in building water credits, water markets and building underlying infrastructure is that nothing is formal in a village economy. Building appropriate social technologies with the right set of incentives could bring a shift.

• Discovering the sweet spot between tech and impact in irrigation tech often lies in stripping technology at customer end and ramping technology at the back end.

• Irrigation tech costs are currently computed by computing the cost of electricity as opposed to measuring how much each farmer is using the water. Subsidies don’t help either.

I loved this dialogue for the deep candor the founders shared in tackling such a fiendishly complex problem. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did:)

We are starting the fourth cohort of Global Agritech 101 - May 18th (Evolution Module) - May 25th (Value Chain Module) - June 1st (Tech of Agritech Module). Three Saturdays - 8 - 10 PM IST. You can check out reviews, including from the recently concluded third cohort here and here. Early bird discounts (10%) are closing on 10th May.

So, what do you think?

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Whenever I sit down with friends from the aquaculture industry to corroborate the industry dynamics of aquaculture vis-a-vis agriculture, I am often left wondering: Is aquaculture agritech on steroids?

Few weeks ago, I invited Pavan Kosaraju (AquaExchange), Aditya Dash (Frozen Shrimp Exporter), and Willem van der Pijl (Shrimp Insights) to explore this question and survey the State of Aquaculture in 2024 as part of ABM Townhall Dialogue series.

Our resident ABM community manager Will and esteemed ABM Members Rajneesh and Sreeram Raavi -with whom I had the opportunity to explore “The Art of Happy Agritech Exit” after Nutreco, a Dutch producer of animal nutrition, fish feed and processed meat products, acquired Eruvaka, - also joined us in the dialogue.

At one level, the answer to this question is obvious.

As Aditya rightly points out in this dialogue, the per-hectare value of innovation in aquaculture is much higher when compared to agriculture, and on an animal protein basis, the technology is far more advanced when compared to poultry or goats.

And yet, today, given the extent of volatility in the market prices, a chilli farmer has a far higher likelihood of making money than a shrimp farmer. How do we peel the onion of this predicament?

Early on in the dialogue, Willem peeled the first layer of the onion - what happens when the industry cannot absorb so much growth? For a long time, the prices were relatively strong that anyone could make money even if you had a shitty crop.

“The average value/kg for Ecuador in January and February dropped to $4.36, the lowest ever. For India, the average value fell to $5.67 in January 2024 and $5.38 in February 2024, just above the lowest point of August 2023.”

And when you understand the production dynamics of different markets - Asia, with its smallholder farmer dynamics vis-a-vis plantation-style farms of Latin America - you peel the second layer of the onion.

Pavan shared that this debate of aquaculture vis-a-vis agriculture has been happening across several Indian states - Should an aquaculture farmer get the same perks of subsidised electricity enjoyed by a farmer practising agriculture?

Earlier in January, Pavan had recently raised $6 Million to build and scale a “reinforcement framework, wherein farmers are immediately incentivised for sustainable practices through reduced input costs and higher offtake prices, emphasizing our commitment to sustainable practices in the industry.”

Given the context of where aquaculture is today, I asked Pavan to double-click on “reinforcement framework” to understand the role of technology in fundamentally transforming the economics of production in aquaculture.

Pavan gave a fascinating glimpse into the advanced stage of the evolution of insurance in aquaculture: Farmers were able to claim and settle insurance for disease action.

Contrast this with the baby steps the agri-input biologicals industry is making on bundling with insurance. Didn’t I tell you that aquatech was agritech on steroids?

But why is this the case? Aditya gave a powerful insight into the evolution of aquaculture which plays out almost like the famous Roman meme that has been going viral in social circles.

Aditya summed up the fundamental predicament: While the value chain hasn’t changed, the business model has radically changed over the past several decades.

In this ABM Townhall dialogue, we explored various salivating questions that gave me a deeper sense of the forest over trees in the aquaculture ecosystem:

• How do we understand the evolution of this “young sector” called aquaculture - Would it inevitably go the path of consolidation and vertical integration or would this sector buckle this trend?

• Has there been oversupply in the past? How do we shift the needle in changing the demand curve for the consumption of shrimp (with a case study on the Global Shrimp Council)? What happens when an industry moves from an immature to a mature state? How do we address the concerns raised by recent publications casting aspersions on the quality, sustainability and social responsibility of the Indian shrimp industry?

• Can the shrimp industry learn something from the salmon ecosystem with the top 12 players accounting for 70% of the global production? How to get farm managers to believe that technology will work to their advantage and not to their disadvantage?

• Agritech has been toying with “Farming as a Service” for a very long time. Can agritech learn something from aquatech which has a longer stint of experience with farming as a service model? (Case study on Delos) When benefits of scale are not accruing to small farmers, should aquatech players become virtual consolidators?

• Why is shrimp farming a lot like gambling? How can tech change this perception in the ecosystem, especially among lenders? Should technology be directed towards upstream or downstream in aquaculture? What developments are we seeing in grading and sorting in aquaculture? With its low-cost labour, what role will India play in the aquaculture ecosystem when grading and sorting technologies mature?

• India recently announced a Blue Economy blueprint and there is a lot of hope riding on the blue economy. The targets set by the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY) for aquaculture are:

• Increasing fish production to 22 million metric tons by 2024-25 from 13.75 million metric tons in 2018-19.

• Enhancing aquaculture productivity to 5 tons per hectare from the current national average of 3 tons.

• Augmenting domestic fish consumption from 5 kg to 12 kg per capita.

How do we achieve these targets? What are the challenges in skilling the labour for fish processing? What can we learn from the automation of salmon filleting?

• How did Latin America achieve success in aquaculture through collaboration? How is Ecuador pushing India to strengthen its domestic economy and improve its perception of quality and sustainability? What are the parallels between Ecuador and Brazil in the context of aquaculture and agriculture?

• What are the commonalities in building trust among consumers in the context of aquaculture and agriculture? Who has better incentives aligned to pay for transparency and traceability? How do we understand the parallels in the dynamics happening between farmed shrimp vis-a-vis wild catch shrimp?

• How do we make sustainability practices become self-serving endeavours for farmers? How do we reduce the cost of maintaining records?

• Are we seeing an irreversible shift towards aqua proteins because it’s healthier and more sustainable? How do we understand the behavioural change in urban consumers in the animal protein category? How to adapt shrimp for Indian kitchens? How do we bring a cultural shift in culinary preferences for aqua protein?

• Why do we need to go beyond the frozen and fresh category, when it comes to shrimp to promote consumption? What are the ready-to-eat and convenience-driven market plays in shrimp that are worth paying attention to? Why do China’s margins create an opportunity for those of us in India? What parallels can we draw between grapes and shrimps, in the context of exports?

• Is the market demanding more certified farmed shrimp instead of wild-caught shrimp? How to understand the connoisseur-driven fragmentation and its certification systems for the wild-caught shrimp market?

• How do we address the concerns of Climate change and overfished oceans, courtesy of movies like Seaspiracy? How do we understand the demand for sustainable shrimp? Is the demand for certification coming from retail or regulatory pressures? Would regulatory tech compliance evolve in aquatech as much as we are seeing in agritech?

I learned a lot from this conversation and it was a fascinating exercise exploring the convergences and divergences between agritech and aquatech. I hope you find it equally interesting.:)

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Sachi Desai has had a sumptuous twenty-year career in the world of digital and agriculture that could very well be the perfect synecdoche for the evolution of digital agriculture and where it stands today.

Sachi has worked for eleven years on bringing AI, ML and Signal Processing to the US Army, besides working with IBM, Palantir, and McKinsey on counte…

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“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

Career transitions often happen in those sacred moments when you realize that you cannot be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. The other day, my friend wrote to me this when he joined the Agribusiness Matters community.

"It's a very interesting scenario - students don't think there is a career in it, businesses don't seem to care about the soil or food, consumers don't feel empowered to do anything about it and the government. I don't know enough about what they are doing about it." I ditched my agritech product manager tech career to build Agribusiness Matters precisely to tackle this moonshot goal. How do we bring hope to students that there is a good career to be made in food and agriculture, doing the right things for the soil, empowering customers to care deeply about food and agriculture, building planet-friendly businesses that aren't greenwashing when they talk about caring, backed by investors who genuinely care about soil and food, in collaboration with governments which want to incentivise them for doing so?

On a sunny day, this is a fascinating design problem worth solving.

Few weeks back, I invited an exceptional guest to the ABM Townhall to tackle this hydra-headed question. And the conversation nourished my soul with an intellectual high when it turned out to be multi-disciplinary in the truest sense of the word.

Chhaya Bhanti is Creative Director at VERTIVER, which created Kara Bhara, a snakes and ladders game for communities and farmers to transition towards sustainable agriculture techniques.

Her background echoes my career journey and deeply warms the cockles of my heart.

“Chhaya was a brand designer living the high life in New York when she woke up to the inherent waste and destruction that her industry and own work were creating. She returned home to India, took time out to reacquaint with her country (riding her bicycle down the Himalayas from Ladakh!), and then set up her own communications company to be a positive influence in the world. Chhaya’s advocacy work supports policy change and community empowerment affecting millions of people.” (From one of her podcast intros)

It has taken her team five years of deep immersion to arrive here and when I look at the game, I see immense possibilities. How do we scale regenerative agriculture transitioning efforts? How do we bridge the gap between expectations and reality of transitioning farmers from conventional to sustainable agriculture? As a storyteller, Chhaya approaches this problem as a visual problem and a comprehension problem.”Vertiver is a communications and knowledge consultancy. We help simplify the complexity that underlies issues of sustainability through design & research led behavior change approaches. Vertiver’s researchers, designers, storytellers and passionate environmentalists have successfully engaged stakeholders across policy, science, research & business on issues of waste, forestry, biodiversity, climate action, ecosystem conservation, water resource conservation and sustainable agriculture” (From Vertiver’s Website)

In this fascinating ABM Townhall dialogue along with ABM regulars Vivek and Will, we delved into fascinating rabbit holes - We explored the question of skin-in-the-game, tools for introspection, discovering hot water springs of inspiration in today’s dreary climate chaos, mechanics and mediums for storytelling, glimpses of her projects where she tapped into religion and culture for promoting sustainability, provocative explorations of challenging men’s ego to challenge their role in agriculture that is getting feminized, and ways to move beyond projectitis in the development sector and lots more.

This conversation felt like chicken soup to the soul. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:)

01:52 Her Roots, Her Mum, Raj Bhanti, being the biggest influence in her life

05:36 How do you discover inspiration when humans go through the pendulum of hope and despair, especially when humans don’t seem to be in control over what is happening currently on the planet?

07:26 What does Vertiver do? Her focus on behavioural change across different streams in sustainability?

09:50 The question of skin in the game when designing for behavioural change: How do you make sure that you keep the problem at a very tactile level?

13:41 How Agriculture breaks down the artificial between personal life and professional life. When does change become inward, examining lifestyle choices? What kind of tools do we create that make them introspect? Chhaya talks about Prana Project as a case study.

16:14 Agritech Theater and when does the penny drop for change? The importance of telling evidence with data and anecdotal stories;

19:16 The importance of social cohesion in rural and urban India and how it is eroding; The question of material poverty and poverty that exists in the mind. Breaking the asymmetric relationship between the funder and the nonprofit and the giver and the recipient.

27:26 Moving beyond projectitiis in the development sector

30:22 Vernacular theories of behavioural change and why scale is a wrong metric to chase in impact.

34:45 Breaking through the clutter of organic farming

38:03 Behavioural Change Experiments in Kenya

42:31 The role of Climate Finance

46:07 Challenges in enabling frontline workforce with behavioural change tools.

49:23 How to help farmers make the right decisions when they want others to make decisions for them? Which decisions require training and trade-offs?

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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As an agritech analyst, I’ve been organizing Agritech Townhalls over the past few years on diverse agritech themes including the central question - Is Agritech Party Over - and the divergent agritech futures that await us when we explore this question deeply.

I have further covered subsector themes such as State of Agrifintech, State of Irrigation Tech, …

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If you want to find out how apples, which were once a winter-only fruit in India, became a year-round consumption phenomenon, you must speak to Sumit Saran.

If you’ve entered any Indian supermarket, whether it is Grapes, Apples, Pears, Prunes, Kiwi Fruits, Hazelnuts, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Walnuts, Pistachios, or Avocados, you'd see a lot of international brands making inroads over the last two decades.

Last October, when Ajay TG, General Manager, Westfalia Fruit India, joined ABM Townhall, we delved deep into India’s phenomenal growth story of Avocado. Few weeks ago, I got to speak with Sumit Saran, one of the powerful brains behind several international food brands making a beeline into the Indian market.

Sumit Saran’s illustrious twenty-nine-year career serves as a fascinating window to reflect on the burgeoning aspirations of India’s consuming class.

In this fascinating conversation, we spoke about

0:57 Early Days of Sumit setting up Agribusiness Information Center in FICCI

5:51 Indian Government’s Open General License [OGL] Policy Changes in Importing Foods and how an accidental encounter led to Sumit launching California Grapes in India.

7:51 Sumit’s foray into the Future Group and his encounters with Kishore Biyani

10:20 Sumit’s collaboration with Washington Apples, USA Pears, California Pistachios and starting SS Associates

12:31 How did the transition to OGL happen? Are there lessons from the transition for today’s Indian food tech players? How did a country with the second-largest population, and second-largest fruits and vegetable producer in the world, become the twelfth-largest food market consumer in the world?

15:32: Why the returns to the farmers have been abysmal and what can we learn from Chile and US?

16:00 Seeing the Market from Outside-In View: Why is the Indian Market complex with a ‘high-threat factor’? Figuring out the TAM for each fruit and segmenting the customers.

19:40 How Sumit sees the evolution of Indian markets, given how COVID disrupted food supply chains?

22:04 Why the small neighborhood Indian food retailers didn’t get the recognition they deserved?

23:04 Why the food industry grows 3-4 % higher than the GDP?

24:04 Indian consumer’s foray into healthy eating; ‘If 1 % of India wants blueberries, you are talking of Australia wanting blueberries’

24:45 Trade-offs between local resilience and international competitiveness; Building International Cooperative Groups for Indian fruits; Which Indian products have the potential for global growth? The case of Purandar Highlands Figs being exported to the International Markets

27:02 Hiring Local Resources to Promote International Foods and Why it is the Missing Link for India; The Case of Chef Sanjeev Kapoor and Washington Apples; ‘Which Brit is Talking about Indian Grapes to Britishers in UK’? Why do promotions need to go beyond tradeshows? The need for APEDA to introspect its promotional activities for Indian fruits and vegetables.

29:41 ‘To be successful, you need to be a dot on a buyer’s calendar’. “India is a trading country, not an exporting country, especially in fruits and vegetables”; The case of Grapes and Basmati Rice; The potential to create thirty dots in India

31:25 Recommendations for APEDA to make India an exporting country; Branding India; The case of Assam Tea; The difference between a generic promotion and brand promotion;

33:57 Participating in Fruit Logistica Trade Show and Generic Promotions when the products have already reached the shelves of the retailer;

34:52 The Case of Araku Coffee and Max Havelar Certification; The Case of APEDA ban by USDA; The Missing Link of the Sanctity of the Logo;

36:59 Why the Grape Certification Systems in India is one of the best in the world? The Missing Link of Communicating the Certification to Customers; Difference between Retailers and Countries’ Certification Standards

37:51 Horizontal Trader Companies and Structuring Businesses Differently to Succeed; Creating Brand India;

40:53 Why the world is not a one-way street? Discerning between Company and Generic Promotion; The stagnation in the India Story;

42:56 ‘Indian Farmer is not somebody who needs your support. Let the farmer breathe’; The perils of farmers getting into export promotion and business trying out farming

44:01 The case of India’s food processing story; The Perils of FAIDA (Food and Agriculture Integrated Development Action) Report which gave India the ‘Sunrise Industry’ moniker;

45:39 Why Food Processing and Food Waste are two different problems and must not be conflated; Table Varieties Vs Processable Varieties; Food Processing Margins and Parks; Decentralized Village Entrepreneur Models

48:22 The Case for Creating a Market Buzz for Chittor Mango Pulp; ‘I am a big believer in Indian entrepreneurship.’; The role of Promotion Bodies and focusing on the size of the pie versus the piece of the pie;

50:31 The case of GI-tagged foods and the need to bridge the gap between the trade and the consumer space. Increasing Volumes and Margins simultaneously;

52:01 Farmers’ Share of the Pie and Improving Farmers’ Margins; Importing the most premium products and exporting the lowest products and why we need to reverse this?

54:33 The case of Indian bananas and its export potential; The case of Bhagwa pomegranate and its export potential; The importance of not interfering too much with farmers; Why we must pay attention to the low-hanging fruits and the high-hanging fruits, literally and metaphorically?

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did:)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.agribizmatters.com/subscribe

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How do you respond to a room full of 80 men and women in their vibrant twenties raising their hands in unison to the question “How many of you are poor?” Do you squirm and let the jagged ‘urban savior complex’ nerves kick in or do you step back and ask fundamental questions about who decides who is poor?

Few weeks ago, I was in one such room, listening to the heartfelt aspirations of young men and women who had gathered from the villages of Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpur, Kahdhamal, Ganjam, and Gajapati in the beautiful coastal state of Odisha.

The air was electric with young men and women, full of colorful clothes and pizzazz, eager to share what was happening in their lives with us.

Anshu Gupta, the founder of Goonj, who has been pioneering the concept of Gram Swabhiman [Self Respect and Self Dignity of the Village] kicked off the conversation with a simple question, “What do you need?”.

When someone from urban India asks this question to rural India, it automatically triggers the context of an asymmetric relationship between the giver (funder) and the recipient. And so, naturally, the answers were predictable.

“What are your strengths, your assets?”

Nobody saw the follow-up question coming.

Much like nobody addresses urban India as a ‘ particularly vulnerable’ modern group of people, surviving in densely populated regions with poor air quality, and extreme water scarcity risks, living DINKOD (Double Income, No Kids, Only a Dog) lives, nobody addresses rural India as a tighter knit of people with a unique set of strengths, living superior quality lives than their urban counterparts, albeit with material poverty constraints.

It took a while for the kids to warm up to the question.

“We have the best Angul mangoes”, “We have the best fishes” “We have incredible artisans” and so on. Anshu then asked the question that dragged the elephant to the center of the room. “How many of you are poor”.

The entire room raised their hands!

Can you imagine the extent of conditioning for this to transpire with the same group that talked of their strengths a minute ago?

Addressing this irony is the pivotal challenge we are grappling with, when we try to solve the wicked problem of poverty in rural India. Addressing this challenge animates Kunal and Tanmay, the incubator gentlemen who joined me for this podcast conversation a few weeks ago.

Both of their career trajectories have uncanny parallels.

Both started their journey miles away from agriculture, development and the social sector. Both discovered a powerful moment of epiphany that transformed their lives and switched careers to manifest the vision they set out for themselves.

Tanmay started his journey as an industrial engineer, moved on to Infosys, and later joined his family business, working in the composite business with the leaders of the automotive industry. When his friend passed away during the pandemic, he did a solo trip for 11 days and ended up working with the famous Sonam Wangchuk in Ladakh who invited him to convert his innovations into businesses. He discovered his calling for incubating social businesses and joined Udhyam Learning Foundation as Director- New Solutions.

Kunal started his journey as a User Experience Architect and grew up the ladder in MakeMyTrip to become the Country Head for Accenture. When he turned 30, he was giving interviews, a year away from his Ph.D. at Clemson University. He discovered his calling to come back to India with a bellyful of dreams to build an IDEO equivalent in India. He later joined the corporate sector in India and started traveling the length and breadth of the country. He met Organic farming leaders like Deepak Suchde and started his journey to become a proud ‘50% farmer’. Today, he runs a rural incubator inside a natural reserve in the hinterlands of Madha Pradesh, exploring, in Kunal’s words, ‘Natural Resource Management, Energy Systems, Agriculture, Health Care, Eco-Tourism, Education & Learning, eGovernance, & the Self’.

In this conversation, we talk of

• The turning point which led these gentlemen’s careers on a completely new trajectory;

• How India is a country of small businesses, with 95 % of the country doing micro-entrepreneurship; Why everything is supplemental income in India? The Missing Middle when it comes to building businesses.

• Unlearning that required to approach the incubation of rural entrepreneurship. [Kunal shared a beautiful anecdote about a farmer when Kunal told him that his house was in shambles]

• The irony of material poverty and the poverty of the mind; Why rural India is losing out on young, vibrant talent. How to address the question of aspiration when it comes to abundance? [Tanmay shares a beautiful anecdote of his interaction with a young bloke who wants to run a call center. The importance of incremental action.]

• Why is branding for Rural India 360 degrees different from Branding as we know it in Urban India?

• Tanmay’s work at Udhyam. Building business plans and 4 Ps of marketing for Rural India. Why it is so fascinating to watch how Rural India is playing with YouTube.

• The limitations in current imaginations of Incubators for Urban and Rural India. China’s experiments in revitalizing Rural India. Experiments conducted by Dhirubai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology

• How to approach rural entrepreneurship from first principles. What Colonialism did to India and how Urban India is willy-nilly repeating the same story, colonizing rural India, and exploiting its natural resources. What we can learn from AMUL and Lijjat Papads? What can we learn from the Jagriti Movement?

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did:)

Discover Systems Thinking in Food and Agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change.

So, what do you think?

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Few weeks ago, when I wrote a follow-up to my deep-dive on Inner Plant’s agritech strategy, I spelled out their key strategic tradeoffs.

• The core business will center on traits and not chemistry.

• Because the core business is in traits, the focus is to look at plants and their ‘primary’ response to stress as opposed to looking at the microbiome and ‘secon…

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If you’ve been playing the long game in agriculture, you would know that you can never hermetically seal off politics from agriculture.

Although technocrats of my ilk love to fantasize about depoliticizing the domains of food and agriculture through data, the reality is that politics always dictates how data is collected and used. Algorithms, whether they strive to weed out leakages in welfare schemes in India, or decide how to allocate power and money through the census data in the US, are, at the end of the day, political creatures.

“Politics and algorithms are more entwined than most people realize. Politics are made of algorithmic systems and algorithmic systems are made of politics.”

Why does politics remain an albatross around the neck of agriculture?

When does support hobble farmers and when does it help farmers? How do we navigate policymaking waters when farmers increasingly start to wear, paradoxically, the hat of consumers? Why do governments across the world worry about inflation? Why is farm-gate-price-driven demand agriculture as a tool for reducing poverty a manufactured myth?

To explore these questions and unpack the terranean forces that underpin agricultural technology adoption, I went down the rabbit hole of politics with Ajay Vir Jakhar, chairman of Bharat Krishak Samaj (Indian Farmers Forum).

“Jakhar, comes with a formidable political lineage. He is the grandson of Balram Jakhar, who was agriculture minister in [former prime minister of India] PV Narasimha Rao’s cabinet. His father, now retired, was in politics and his uncle was, till Thursday, leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly-” (From Ajay Vir Jakhar’s Interview in Business Standard)

I’ve found Ajay’s irreverent candor a breath of fresh air. Despite championing the cause of farmers, his perspectives often point towards the elephant in the room and raise questions no one is willing to talk about.

Amidst voices clamouring to make us feel sorry for farmers in the name of supporting farmers, he walks the middle path of bringing policy reforms without losing sight of the fundamental issues that plague Indian agriculture.

When was the last time someone argued persuasively enough to change your mind?

If you’ve been reading Agribusiness Matters, you would know my inclination towards taxing agricultural income in India.

When I met him at a panel in New Delhi in October last year, we started debating about the feasibility of taxing agricultural income in India and we continued that conversation in this podcast as well.

In this fascinating conversation, we explored

• What is the idea behind Bharat Krishak Samaj? How to understand the role of Farmer advocacy organizations vis-a-vis farmer unions?

• Why does politics remain an albatross around the neck of Agriculture?

• Why do farmers not have much say on the policies that affect them despite being a majority vote bank? How to understand this contradiction in a global context where farmers, say, in the US have a bigger say on policies than Indian farmers?

• Why is decontextualized policymaking a bane for Indian Agriculture?

• What is the difficulty of taxing agricultural income in India? [Ajay shared an interesting anecdote based on his interactions with the late Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley]

• According to Ajay, what would ideal farm reforms look like?

• Why should governments focus on human resources instead of infrastructure?

• Why we should document failures in Indian Agriculture? Why is it wrong to assume that fertilizer subsidies are helping farmers?

• What policy changes could steer Indian Agriculture towards an agroecological paradigm and create alternative markets and marketplaces?

• How does Ajay see the clash of paradigms between the Industrial agriculture paradigm and the agroecology paradigm? Is there a clash of paradigms in the first place? How can we build markets and value chains that value the quality of the produce? How can we change the design of the market?

• Why do Indian farmers not prefer to have cows these days? How has the Indian political party BJP supported natural farming paradigms?

I hope you enjoy the conversation:)

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

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Venkata Subbarao Kolli or Dr.Subbarao Garu, as I call him in this podcast, has had an illustrious thirty+ year career that could very well be a synecdoche for the evolution of agribusiness (more precisely the agri-input industry) in India.

When I recently learned that he became an investor-cum-advisor in a bunch of agritech startups focused on the upstream production side of things, after his last role leading the commercial business of Corteva Agriscience in the African Middle East region, I was eager to understand how his rich ground experience would have translated into his bets as an investor.

The conversation, as a part of my ongoing series to profile agribusiness leaders and their diverse journeys, turned out to be a delightful peek into the history of the Indian agri-input market landscape with some sharp perspectives that could emerge only from someone deep into the trenches to think in first principles.

Sample this.

While discussing his advisory investment venture, he beautifully spelled out what never changes in the changing world of agriculture.

“If you look at agriculture, six elements are fundamental. For centuries together, they have been the same. It is only technologies that probably would substitute those. Fundamentally, right?

The first one is you need soil, The second one is you probably need a seed. And third is you need nutrients. Fourth you need something to protect. And the fifth is water and the sixth one is labor, right? I think these are the six elements that are constant, and technology can only either enhance, replace..”

And, on the other end, when I asked him what have been the most significant transformations in the agri-input market landscape, his answers were equally fascinating. (You will have to listen in to find out:))

In this extremely personal conversation with opinionated agribusiness insights that stem from first principles, Subbarao Garu, talks of

• How reading “Social Impact of Computers” changed his mind about the role of technology and how he fell in love with genetics and plant breeding.

• How doing a Ph.D. gave him an edge in the world of agribusiness and the struggles of doing molecular biology in India during the eighties.

• His early days when he joined the seed production business during the eighties and nineties and his early work on GM Mustard.

• What have been the most significant shifts he has seen over the last thirty years in the Indian agri-input market landscape and what he perceives as the gap between “shift” and “transformation” in the Indian agri-inputs market landscape

• His perspectives on Value Selling, the role of Push vs. Pull, and what never changes in the fundamental social relations of farmers in the market.

• Whether Digital Distributors can substitute Distributors in the agri-input channel landscape.

• The Cycle of Consolidation and Deconsolidation among the leading agri-input players

• How the Culture of Big 6 Agri-Input Players have dictated their particular strengths and gameplays

• What was the original idea behind setting up Plowlab ventures?

• How to make sense of the perennial problems that bedevil Indian Agriculture and why is it important to separate man-made problems from nature-driven problems?

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

💗 If you like “Agribusiness Matters”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

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In my last podcast with Ramanjaneyulu GV titled, “The Future of Regenerative Agriculture is Agroecology”, we talked about putting together an organic food branding playbook for regenerative/organic food players and I am kickstarting this series with Shashi Kumar and Ryan Siwinski.

Although Ryan and Shashi come from diverse worlds, there is a fascinating parallel in the work they are doing in the regenerative/organic food space. Whether it is GoodSam Foods or Akshayakalpa Organic, both are mission-driven, focusing more on direct-trade, local-supply chain models, and building deep relationships with farmers and farm partners.Building an organic/regenerative food brand requires a different mindset when compared to any other CPG food brand.Today, most organic food brands build on the narrative of how terrible the food that is produced by conventional agriculture and promise a better saner alternative. This narrative has gained a lot of currency, especially after COVID when people started making radical changes to their food and lifestyle.How can organic food brands take this approach forward?

Organic food branding defies all our conventional ideas about branding and no wonder, consumers often tend to get cynical, as it plays with their deep existential fears about the safety of what they eat. When it comes to organic food branding, less is more, and more is less.

We have seen enough farmers' smiling pics, QR Codes, and rusty packaging that the whole thing, when you are cynical, starts to feel like a charade.When you are selling organic food, you are talking about a living biological entity that changes in response to seasons and weather conditions. In such a case, how do you carry a brand promise that focuses largely on repeatability for the trust to get built?

In this 60-minute conversation with Shashi and Ryan joined by other members and friends of Agribusiness Matters, we explored the following questions.

• In Akshayaklapa calling itself Akshayakalpa -infinite possibilities- what does this organization attempt to do? Why has Akshayakalpa only worked with 1200 farmers over the last thirteen years of operation?

• Is there a tension between building a mission-driven organization (GoodSAM got recently registered as a B-Corp) and building a larger brand that speaks to a bigger mainstream audience?

• For Shashi, What are the things Akshayakalpa will do and will never do? For the direct-trade model GoodSam follows, what are the trade-offs Ryan deals with every day in his ops role?

• How does Akshayakalpa approach certifications? How do you scale trust?

• How to help mainstream conventional farmers transition towards organic?

• How to select the right farm partners for mission-driven businesses, especially when you have to scale your operations?

• How to approach the question of social fairness for mission-driven businesses, whether they are operating in India or in Africa? What are the challenges in building mission-driven businesses that empower women farmers? Why is ecology more important than addressing social inequities?

• How do you approach regeneration at the dimension of economy beyond producing regenerative milk?

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

💗 If you like “Agribusiness Matters”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

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Dear Friends,

On October 9th, I recorded probably one of the most important town hall conversations in the brief history of Agribusiness Matters.

I am not exaggerating one bit when I say this. The visceral impact of the conversation was such that I felt a strong urge to take a break from writing Agribusiness Matters and come back only when I felt ready to write and report this conversation and take my ongoing agritech commentary forward.

In the work I do as an “agritech analyst”, writing the kind of things I write in Agribusiness Matters to agritech founders, investors and executives (all you wonderful people who have gifted me with the possibility of making this occupassion economically viable), nothing felt more important than smelling the coffee and asking an honest, self-reflexive question, “Is Agritech Party Over?”

Sure, it was a provocative question that was meant to turn the heat knob just enough to keep things real and unfiltered, especially when I am dialoguing with agritech industry luminaries like Mark Kahn (better epitomised in his Twitter handle: @agri_technology that dates back to Oct’09) and industry seers like Shubhang Shankar who created a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in agritech circles when he wrote in Aug’20 that ‘there is no disruption in AgTech’.

I turned on the paywall of Agribusiness Matters in Oct’20 precisely around the time when I wrote, “Will the Real Agritech Platform Please Stand Up?”, started chatting extensively with Mark and Shubhang and took on the open, permissionless role of an “agritech Analyst”, or an agritech cartographer to be more precise, writing week after week to document (for future historians) how agritech evolved across the world in smallholding contexts in the nick of time when the digital transformation of food and agriculture systems were unfolding in a warming planet.

And so you can probably imagine how deeply personal this conversation felt to me, anchoring this dialogue to take stock of where things are with the same people I started this journey with, in the first place.

Is Agritech Party Over?

If you look at the numbers, you will perhaps get a glimpse of what it means to be, in Mark’s words, in a hangover of a party that got over a year ago.

Trust the numbers to tell us what it was to ride the highway in 2022 going 150 kilometres an hour.

“India's agri-tech sector witnessed an investment boom in FY22, its most successful year attracting venture capital funding, with investments totaling US$ 1,279 million. This surge was followed by a sharp contraction in FY23, a trend aligned with the broader global slump in agri-tech investments (See Figure 1). Between FY22 and FY23, investments in Indian agri-tech fell by a staggering 45% to US$ 706 million, while global agri-tech investments saw a decline of 10% from US$ 19.6 billion to US$ 17.7 billion between calendar years 2022 and 2023.” - India’s Unfolding Agritech Story Report

Exactly a year ago, in Oct’22, when I did a detailed reality check on the Agritech Hype Cycle, I sketched this Gartner hype curve

One year later, in Oct’23, the Indian Agritech Hype Cycle currently looks like this

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• Why is there a fundamental disconnect in Indian agriculture between reading the signals of production and the market?

• Why is Indian Agriculture so stuck in past, whether it is eulogizing over the green revolution of the sixties or a romanticised ideal of an ancient agrarian past?

• Why is Indian agriculture so fixated on rice and wheat to the extent that we approach other commodities (say oil seeds, pulses or millet) from the lens of rice and wheat?

• What are the challenges in scaling the production of millets? What mistakes are we making in improving the productivity of millets?

• What are the challenges in growing oil palm in India?

• Why have we completely neglected user[farmer]-driven innovation ecosystem in Indian agriculture?

• Should we grow foods in polyhouses in tropical countries like India? Do we need hybrids for cotton and paddy in India?

• Can political boundaries be reconciled with ecological boundaries? How can we transform production and cropping systems while respecting ecological limits?

• What are the second-order effects of lift irrigation schemes in the southern state of Telangana? How Telangana could have become a leader in the production of oilseeds, pulses and millets?

• What agricultural solutions can work for small and marginal farmers for their future in agriculture?

• What are the three major strengths of India when it comes to agriculture?

• What are the second-order effects of growing rice and wheat and distributing them via public distribution systems?

• Why is Indian agriculture stuck between the market and the government, sending distorted signals to farmers?

• How do we deal with the operational challenge of bringing trust and credibility to organic/natural/regenerative farming across production and market dimensions? How do we build sustainable production systems for farmers practising agroecology and help them move away from fertilisers?

• Why the notion of ‘safe pesticide’ is problematic? How feasible is ‘organic farming’ for a typical profile of an Indian farmer?

• How our collective understanding of soils is outdated? How can farmers transition to ‘agroecology’ while carefully managing ‘yield loss’? What are the steps involved? Why are local microbial preparations essential when compared to buying biofertilisers prepared in a lab?

• How to move beyond the trust vs certification conundrum to bring credibility to organic farming? What are the three levels of trust in the context of ‘organic farming’? What is the state of regulation?

• Why did India adopt the PGS and NPOP group approach to manage the costs of certification and manage data-based evidence to verify claims of trust?

• Why did Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) fail to scale among organic food retailers in India?

• How did certifications come under WTO’s non-tariff barriers and why did it break down? How have private companies’ labels for regenerative foods further increased the complexity, passing on the costs to the consumers?

• How did Indian farmers lose the opportunity to transition from PGS to NPOP within one year in India, thanks to APEDA and NCOF? How can we design a progressive layering of certification systems for organic foods?

• How can modern food retailers in cities adopt interoperable organic food certifications to bring trust and credibility all the way from aggregators to farmers? (Case Study: Organic laddoos for Tirupati Balaji temple)

• Is a third-party certification body more trustworthy due to a conflict of interest?

• How does a consumer bias of ‘high price = quality’ affect the organic food supply chain?

• What are the challenges in making ‘organic food’ affordable, keeping costs of managing trust low?

• Why is it unfair to compare the price of organic food with regular market prices in a country like India?

• How do we manage the high water productivity of rice cultivation in India while managing labour costs?

• How can we create a guild of retailers to minimize the costs of aggregation instead of attempting to control the supply chain?

• Why farmers’ markets cannot be trusted in certain cases? Why ‘single origin millets or pulses’ is a misnomer?

• Why do we need to invest in financial systems that help farmers manage the agroecological transition and help retailers hold the product around the year?

• Why did CSA come up with a partnership with Rangde to create an investment fund?

• How can we create financial instruments for cluster-based investments in infrastructure along with FPO to buy back the infrastructure at a later stage?

• How do we create investments and streamline the supply chain to solve depressed prices for tomatoes and onions?

• How adopting the ecosystem approach is better than being an exploitative agritech entrepreneur who wants to control the supply chain?

• What were some of the failure stories in managing ecosystems? How do we create mechanisms to create trust among various players for quality assurance?

• How can we connect native villages along with farmers with consumers?

• How can DPGs help in creating platforms for trust coordination between farmers, retailers and consumers?

• Why FPOs need to focus on systems instead of training?

• Why is CSA setting up an academy for agroecology with a community of practitioners to create new forms of knowledge and foster partnerships?

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If you ask me, two trajectories of collectivisation are currently at play in India.

1) Corporate FPOs in states like UP, Odisha, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, and Jharkhand, especially in rainfed farmer contexts.

2) Industrial Agriculture in states like Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, especially in irrigated tenant farmer contexts.

How will these trajectories of collectivization play out? Would they subsume into each other? Or, given the complexity of land reforms in India and smallholding contexts, can we expect both these trajectories to evolve in consonance with the dynamics of their respective contexts?

Historically speaking, Corporate FPOs are a tricky subject in a country like India where we’ve seen the nexus between corporations and FPOs often discussed in profane terms. Historically, corporations have been wary of farmer collectives and farmer collectives have treated NGOs as partners and corporations as adversaries

In such a scenario, how do we strategise building corporate FPOs?

In my recent podcast conversation with Ravishankar Natarajan, he spelt out an epiphanic insight: If we are serious about building corporate FPOs, the point is to flip the frame and start strategizing for FPOs as corporations.

Ravishankar started his agribusiness journey in 1980, five years before I was born, and brings a breath of fresh air of optimism that belies his white hair and thirty-five years of agribusiness experience.

In his most recent avatar, along with other agribusiness veterans, he founded FPO Market Linkages Foundation which aims to institutionalize an operating Build-Operate-Train-Transfer model to build corporate FPOs.

Few weeks back, he wrote a detailed paper on the same and I invited him to a podcast to discuss his paper in detail and explore the question of building corporate FPOs in Indian market conditions.

What excited me to invite him to the podcast was precisely this paper: It was a fairly concise step-wise approach to building Corporate FPOs and more importantly how to enable FPOs to access capital markets and explore mutual funds to explore investing in Joint Ventures of market-facing apex FPOs.

In this podcast, we discussed

• How does Ravishankar see the evolution of agribusiness from 1980 to 2023?

• Why is it difficult to enforce safeguards in a domain like agriculture (Bonus Case Study: How Bt Cotton suffered with no mechanisms to enforce safeguards?)

• Why is it important for regulators to enforce fair trade norms in agriculture?

• Why do we see more anti-India bias among global agribusiness professionals and why we don’t see AMUL outside milk?

• Why are FPOs so caught up with an undue focus on capacity building and the limitations of farmer training?

• How can we bridge the organisational structure of cooperatives in line with FPOs? What is the limiting constraint for FPOs in becoming corporations?

• What went behind Kurien’s vision of letting farmers remain producers and bring professionals to run agribusinesses?

• Why have the outcome expectations changed for FPOs in comparison with farmer cooperatives?

• BOTT Model and the importance of viability gap funding in building corporate-focused apex FPOs.

• Collectivisation as a solution to prevent fragmentation of lands in smallholding contexts.

• Why Ravishankar created a non-profit Section-8 firm ‘FPO Market Linkages Foundation’?

• Ownership Vs. Management Debate in an FPO Context.

• Why do we need SEBI equivalent in agricultural markets? How can we change the auction process in traditional agricultural markets?

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

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Dear Friends,

Welcome to the second podcast episode from a brand new podcast season of Agribusiness Matters. Irrigation (and more broadly managing water) is a complex subject that carries paradoxes effortlessly in its sleeve.

Flood Irrigation goes back all the way to the Bible and yet, today accounts for 95% of the world’s irrigation.

Although economists love to point out that irrigation tech is a good way to build resillience in farming (instead of depending on the vagaries of monsoon), when you look at states with high net irrigation rates in India, it has been serviced through groundwater.

As much as it is impossible to separate soil from water, when you look at the current irrigation tech trends in context with agritech, biological players are moving towards irrigation tech to offer fertigation as a service and irrigation tech players are moving towards biologicals conversely.

Globally, and more so in small holding contexts, irrigation tech is moving towards Irrigation-as-a-Service model. How do we now understand the potential of Irrigation-as-a-Service, at a time when we have unseasonal rains (wet April) and India is forecasted to run out of groundwater by 2025?

Few weeks back, Ankit Chandra and Nick Brozovic from Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute released a couple of insightful reports on India’s agricultural water ecosystem (Part 1 and Part 2) and I invited them to the Agribusiness Matters podcast last week.

Talking about irrigation tech with Nick and Ankit was like opening the hive mind of global irrigation tech. This was an extremely insightful conversation. Nick with 25 years of rich experience in this ecosystem, has been one of the foremost water economists talking about irrigation-as-a-service in policy circles.

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:53) Nick’s professional background in geology and how it changed the way he looked at the role of water in agriculture

(05:45) The edge researchers bring to the ground when they come with strong entrepreneurial instincts and eagerness to get their hands dirty.

(10:45) The double bind of our moral instincts to water markets and unscrupulous exploitation of groundwater management. Is there a way out of this double bind? How do we examine the problematic relationship between water and markets?

(15:55) The challenge of irrigation tech in India and Africa when upstream infrastructure is a public good and collectively owned.

(16:32) What could be the best elevator pitch to make a strong case for bringing water markets to India to avoid unscrupulous exploitation of groundwater? What is the underyling regulatory infrastructure needed for water markets and water trading? What are its unintended consequences?

(20:10) Informal Water Markets (Lift Irrigation Cooperatives) emerging in the absence of formal water markets. What can we learn from Informal Water Markets across the world? The History of Informal Water Markets.

(23:55) Irrigation-as-a-Service and startups leveraging community structures for Irrigation-as-a-Service. The Business Models Underpinning Irrigation Tech. Why Nick Hates Pilot Schemes in Irrigation Tech.

(26:24) Tackling the Challenge of Irrigation-as-Service. Why is there negligible venture capital activity in irrigation tech? Why there haven’t been many strategic partnerships between startups and industry incumbents in smallholder irrigation tech contexts? Reducing Customer Acquisition Costs in Irrigation Tech.

(29:41) Leveraging Government Schemes to reduce customer acquisition costs in Irrigation Tech and its unintended consequences. The challenge of subsidies in killing the potential of irrigation tech and distortion of market signals

(31:42) Limitation of achieving Product Market Fit through grants. The challenge in making farmers inadvertently take downstream risks. Do farmers understand the value proposition involved in saving water and energy?

(34:47) Is there an appropriate technology for irrigation tech? How do smallholding countries tend to get Irrigation Tech at 40% less cost when compared to their counterparts from US and other markets? The viability of selling software and hardware alone in irrigation. Would Irrigation-as-a-Service be the answer?

(37:11) Irrigation-as-a-Service in South East Asia. Innovations happening with a service business model component. Why technology should work for farmers instead of the current scenario where farmers tend to go one mile further to make technology work for them?

(39:00) Selective perceptions over the macro aspects (water availability) as opposed to the micro aspects (water use efficiency). Irrigation is subservient to market prices. How can we translate the benefits of irrigation tech to farmers? Why bunding is happening in irrigation tech?

(41:57) Why precision agriculture is subsuming irrigation tech as a category in terms of funding? The question of exits in agritech. Innovation happening on corporate venture capital rather than traditional venture capital. John Deere’s investment in Inner plant. How agri-input companies are bundling inputs with irrigation. ChatGPT and Precision Agriculture. The role of knowledge graphs in precision agriculture.

(45:53) Why is it hard to be an integrator in agritech? Bundling irrigation tech and precision agritech. Playing a devil’s advocate for Irrigation-as-a-Service. Do margins increase in irrigation-as-a-service model?

(47:53) Why is World Bank not talking about Irrigation-as-a-Service? Why is Irrigation-as-a-Service the best case that serves both farmers and water entrepreneurs? Ground stories from Rwanda. Economies of Scale in Irrigation Pumps.

(50:45) Why Vertical Integration models will never emerge in Irrigation Tech. Fertigation Models in Agritech. John Deere selling Irrigation Tech ventures to a private equity firm in Israel

(52:20) Why global market for irrigation is small, albeit with outsized influence? The merger of Rivulis with Jain Irrigation. Consolidation in Irrigation Tech ecosystem. Providing value through services rather than equipment.

(55:00)The promise of data-driven agriculture and services model. Experiences from agritech entrepreneurs in Africa.

(56:45) Israel Fetish and the influence of Israel in the development of Irrigation Tech across the world. The role of Israel in Irrigation Tech. Focused solutions in Irrigation Tech from Israel. India and Israel relationship in agritech ecosystem. The value proposition for point solutions. What can we learn from Israel water ecosystems? Technological innovations from highly regulated water access and monitoring

(1:01:15) The Myth around water savings efficiency. The role of regional water balance in agritech ecosystem. Understanding water conservation goals and the complexity involved in enabling these goals through technologies. Tunisia’s water scarcity.

(1:04:00) The role of loss aversion in farmers’ psychology towards irrigation tech. Fluctuation in crop yields. Regulations in wet and dry years. Dynamic regulations and possibilities in managing aquifiers.

(1:08:00) Managing irrigation tech in rainfed agricultural regions. Supplemental Irrigation solutions for rainfed regions. Flash droughts on rainfed regions. Navigating the transition from rainfed irrigation to managed irrigation. The exploitation of irrigation tech in central western India.

(1:12:00) Why Irrigation exists in a continuum. Bringing markets to managing water quantity and quality. Contextual Appropriateness of Irrigation Tech.

(1:15:00) Future Predictions for Irrigation Tech in an age of Climate Change.

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Dear Friends,

Welcome to a brand new podcast season of Agribusiness Matters.

Discover Systems Thinking in Agriculture in an Age of Runaway Climate Change

Talking about survival is ironic. The moment you sincerely ask the question “Why does something survive?”, what you will end up with is least what you expected - an inventory of reasons why it won’t survive.

What does it take to survive as an agritech entrepreneur in an age of funding winter?

Unlike other [X}tech domains in which a sufficient understanding of technology can supersede your insufficient understanding of the [X} domain you are working in, [Agri]-Tech, unfortunately, doesn’t offer you those privileges.

It is a fiendishly tough game for founders and entrepreneurs to crack for an uncanny reason: It is perhaps the last domain with a LIVE system that you have no choice but to deal with.

In most other industries, over a span of say fifty-sixty years, the industry players have a better sense of who the customers are and what they want. However, in the case of agriculture, much to my surprise, even if you talk to veterans who’ve spent decades in the industry, it is pretty much evident that there is much left to understand farmers and the risk-taking lives they lead.

What grade of steel must the nerves of an entrepreneur be forged on to survive and thrive on these challenges?

Much like my previous podcast episode on the art of a Happy Agritech Exit (which transitioned from members-only to a public video on Youtube a few weeks ago), in this podcast episode as well, I cover the inner game of entrepreneurs (with a lot of hesitant “You know” fillers) required to survive under uncertainty.

How does an agritech founder navigate the choices at their disposal to pick their ecosystem among a market of crowded niches? What does it take to build inward focus to prioritize what is important and what is not?

Since this was largely an informal conversation among friends who happened to be agritech founders, you will hear some Hindi phrases tossed around whenever someone talked about anything extremely close to their heart.

In this podcast, I chatted with 1) Sajith Abraham, Co-Founder of Meratractor.com -a phygital farm mechanisation platform 2) Kshitij Thakur, Co-Founder of Agrograde - providing grading and sorting solutions for fruits and vegetables 3) Dean Dutta, Founder, Digicides - farmer communication platform to bridge farmers and businesses and towards the end, Vivek VS, an ex-agritech entrepreneur also joined us with his reflections at the end of the panel.

In this conversation, we cover

• What are some of the contrarian decisions (including “no-gos”) that founders took at the start of their journey?

• What were the darkest moments like when they felt they couldn’t take it any longer? What were their mistakes?

• How is the farm mechanisation ecosystem, farmer communication ecosystem, institutionalized quality and grading ecosystem evolving in an Indian context and what does it take to disrupt entrenched status-quoist behaviours?

• Is Funding Winter a problem or an opportunity? What are the pros and cons of being bootstrapped (in the case of Dean and his startup) vis-a-vis funded ( as in the case of Sajith and his startup)?

• How to manage investor expectations and relationships during a funding winter?

• What does it take to change the “How” in a ‘boring’ traditional sector like agriculture?

I hope you enjoy this heartfelt, candid dialogue on survival as much as I did.

So, what do you think?

How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏

💗 If you like “Agribusiness Matters”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend.

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Dear Readers,

Hi! My name is Venky. I write Agribusiness Matters every week to help us make sense of vexing questions of food, agribusiness, and digital transformation in an era of Climate change. Feel free to dig around the archives if you are new here.

Agribusiness Matters is read by those who seek interdisciplinary perspectives on a multi-variable, multi-agent domain called Agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change.

Dear Readers,

I had a lovely vacation, having ruminated enough about why humans work hard. I am now slowly worming myself into a new rhythm, excited to take more risks and create something new.

After a vacation break of 20 days, I am finally excited to get something out in a new form - audio. As a musician, voice is something very dear to me, and I am excited to try new formats. In this audio commentary/precis, I try to explain the triggers that went behind the article and give you a small flavour of how I put together the framework that went into the article.

To kick things off: here is an audio precis of my subscriber-only article, All Agritech Marketplaces are not created equal.

If you are short of time and money to read my articles, these audio precis posts will give you a flavour and help you decide if it’s worth your time and money. Even if you are a subscriber and you’ve read the article, this audio precis will give you a good tangent to go behind the scenes and understand what led to the framework that created the article.

This is in experimental mode and I created it in one take, and hence please be kind to a newbie podcaster. Do share any ideas/suggestions to do podcasting well.

I hope you enjoy it.

Cheers

Venky

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Dear Readers,

Welcome to the second podcast episode of Agribusiness Matters.

Earlier in Sep’20,I did my first podcast episode on Plantix’s agritech strategy.

This is a 120-min long recording of the fourth edition of the Agritech Samvaad (Dialogue) on Organic Agriculture and Retailing. Special thanks to Saborni who helped with the logistics of the recording.

Agritech Samvaad is an ongoing dialogue series my dear mentor friend Jagadeesh Sunkad and I are hosting in Clubhouse to bridge the yawning chasm between Indian Agriculture and Indian Agritech (Link to my TEDx Talk where I provide an introduction to the divergences and convergences between the two).

Mind you, both share different ontologies, speak two different languages. The former speaks in a native tongue, while the latter speaks in English. Beyond two different world-views, two different ontologies, is it possible to have a dialogue?

And in order to create an inclusive space of dialogue, we and the panelists have switched once or twice between Hindi and English, although the bulk of the conversation is in English.

We had three eminent panelists. 1) Narasimha Nakshatri 2) Vishala Padmanabhan, Consultant Executive Director, PGS Organic Council 3) Shefalika Sharma, CEO, Froots.

We spoke about

The role of Markets and Government in designing the Organic Agriculture and Retail Ecosystem

Why organic retailing is thriving more on informal distribution channels than formal distribution channels?

How does one understand the complex role of certification in organic retail? What is the difference between a certificate and a guarantee?

I earlier addressed the promises and perils of traceability certification in the palm oil ecosystem here

What is the role of FPOs in organic retail? How are they faring currently? Narasimha gave some fascinating data points from a recent study and also shared few interesting anecdotes on the challenges in organic distribution.

What is the role of hydroponics, aeroponics in this ecosystem? Can they coexist with organic retail? Shefalika shared some interesting insights from her business and Jagadeesh made some insightful points drawing from his rich aeroponics experience.

Earlier in the conversation, to set the tone for the dialogue, I shared a myth from Indian History to set the context between conventional agriculture and organic agriculture. Since I narrated the parable in a smattering of Hindi and English, here is the parable for those who may not be fluent in Hindi, but want to follow the conversation.

Legend goes that Alexander once met an Indian Monk (Gymnosophist, as the Greeks called them) while traveling towards the Indian subcontinent.

"What are you doing?" asked Alexander.

"Doing Nothing".

"What are you doing?", asked the monk.

"Conquering the World"

Both smirked at each other, each dismissing each other's stupidity.

If you want to understand what this allegorical tale tells us about organic agriculture, do check out the fascinating podcast episode.

This is an experiment in podcasting. I am yet to get the full hang of it. And so, please be kind:) Do share your suggestions and feedback. I am more than willing to do better next time.

Enjoy your weekend.

Cheers,

Venky

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Welcome to the Sunday Digest Edition of Agribusiness Matters. Welcome to the first Podcast Episode from Agribusiness Matters

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