What is the Agri Stack?

Posted on July 23rd, 2024

The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi, or PM Kisan scheme, is the largest welfare programme for farmers in India. All landholding farmers, irrespective of the size of their holding, get an income support of Rs 6,000 per year – transferred in three equal instalments – into their bank accounts.

Since its introduction in February 2019, the union government has transferred funds to the tune of Rs 2.81 lakh crore ($33.58 billion) through direct benefit transfer (DBT) to 110 million farmers and it costs the government Rs 60,000 crore annually. 

PM Kisan is undoubtedly the flagship government scheme to act as a salve for India’s farmers under chronic economic distress. 

After all, nearly 75% of Indian farmers own less than one hectare of land – barely the size of a cricket field. The average monthly income of an Indian farming household, according to the latest government data, is Rs 10,218. That roughly translates to Rs 340 a day, at par with daily wages unskilled labourers in many states get under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Data deficiency

But the design of PM Kisan raises some fundamental questions. Is the government accurately counting the number of landholding farmers? While 110 million farmers benefit from the scheme, the government’s own estimate of farmers vary wildly. The 2015-16 Agriculture Census pegs the number at 146.45 million. The National Statistical Office (NSO) claims there are about 90 million agriculture households in India.  

In short, we simply do not know how many farmers there are or indeed how many of them own a piece of farmland. 

While the Indian agri sector employs roughly half the country’s workforce and accounts for less than 20% of the economy, there is very little or reliable statistics for policymakers to go by. For instance, state and central governments have patchy information about say the farmers’ intention of sowing onions or tomatoes at the start of a season. The wild price swings of such key commodities is partly a result of poor understanding of the supply.

In a primitive supply-chain market like India, farmers often choose to grow a lot more of a crop if its prices were high in the past season. If millions of farmers decided to grow tomatoes over brinjal because tomato prices were sky high, there would be a glut of tomatoes in the markets, and inevitably the prices would crash. 

The absence of data at every part of the farm-to-plate chain keeps this sector inefficient. 

The kisan JAM 

This is where Agri Stack may help. 

Agri Stack is a public-private partnership that’s trying to create a digital foundation to improve agriculture in India and enable better outcomes for the farmers by using data and digital services. 

Much like the IndiaStack based on Jan Dhan accounts (zero balance universal bank accounts), Aadhaar card based identification and mobile connectivity – often called the JAM trinity – helped in financial inclusion and targeted delivery of welfare schemes, the government hopes that the Agri Stack can do the same for India’s farmers.

Its first task is to build a real-time digital farmers registry and digitized village maps just to be able to know the number of farm holdings. 

In computer parlance, a “stack” refers to a set of software infrastructure, tools and applications that software developers can use to build and innovate. The Agri Stack has been envisaged as a set of open digital infrastructure and tools that government, industry, and start-ups can use to build solutions for agriculture.

In the 2023 Union Budget, the government announced the implementation of this digital reform to bring greater transparency and accountability in agriculture. “This (digital public infrastructure for agriculture) will enable inclusive, farmer-centric solutions through relevant information services for crop planning and health, improved access to farm inputs, credit, and insurance, help for crop estimation, market intelligence, and support for growth of agri-tech industry and start-ups,” said Nirmala Sitharaman, Union Finance Minister in her 2023 Budget speech.

Before we examine the progress of Agri Stack in its first year, it is important to analyze the three reasons why it is necessary for India.

 1. Better targeting of subsidies

In 2022-23, agriculture accounted for 2.8% of India’s Union Budget. The Budgetary Expenditure towards farmers’ welfare was Rs 1.25 lakh-crore, 77% of which is allocated for welfare schemes like PM Kisan, according to this PRS Legislative Research analysis.

According to the Doubling Farmers’ Income (DFI) Committee, headed by Ashok Dalwai, subsidies in 2015-16 on inputs like fertilizers, water, power, and procurements linked to minimum support price (MSP) were Rs 243,811 crore. The corresponding figure in 1990-91 was Rs 12,158 crore – the subsidies on agricultural inputs had grown 20 times in 25 years.

Given the size of the subsidies, the Committee recommended that farmers’ welfare needs to be measured based on the following indicators: both absolute and relative average income; availability and accessibility to social security system – education, health, etc.; and facilitating the farmer in moving up the need hierarchy beyond social hierarchy.

Once the farmers’ income and input management (on fertilizers, water, etc.) is established in a dynamic digital database, the subsidies and welfare programmes can be better targeted at those who actually need it. This is what Sitharaman alluded to in the Budget speech when she spells out relevant information services for crop planning and health, and improved access to farm inputs.

Already, the Economic Survey 2023-24, released on July 22, 2024, states the government’s ambitious plan to distribute the fertilizer subsidy using Agri Stack. “This will ensure that subsidized fertilizers are sold to only those identified as farmers or authorized by the farmer, and the quantity of subsidized fertilizer is fixed based on parameters such as land ownership and prominent crops of the district (comprising at least 70% of sown area in a season),” according to the latest Economic Survey. In 2023-24, the union government budgeted Rs 1.75 lakh-crore for fertilizer subsidies, which was 66% greater than the budget estimates in the previous fiscal year.

2. Better access to farm credit

Based on ground experience, companies like Samunnati have seen a spate of issues that farmers and banks face with respect to agricultural finance. Samunnati works with farmer-producer organizations (FPO), a collective of ten or more farmers that can be run as a private sector company, to help them source inputs at lower costs, find the best markets for their produce, and get financing from banks and non-banking financial institutions.

“Almost 50% of the time, a loan gets rejected for a valid farmer and a valid land because the bank cannot establish ownership in the documentation,” says Raj Vallabhaneni, former CTO of Samunnati, and Founder-CEO of Kalgudi Digital, a software start-up in agriculture. Banks find it hard to gauge the farmer’s repayment record, his farmland, what crops he grows, and their sales potential. In this context, a farmers database will smoothen out lending services in agriculture for banking, financial services and insurance sectors.

Further, large procurers of agri produce will find it easier to do contract farming, Vallabhaneni notes. Indian agriculture is dominated by farmers with small landholdings, which makes it difficult for the private sector in contract farming to assess which farmer owns what tract of land. With the database, the time taken for transactions can be reduced to the mutual benefit of the farmer and agri-foods company that wants to do contract farming.

Without the database, a large number of farmers don’t get access to formal credit, leaving them with the option of turning to moneylenders or the black/ cash economy. This is also why most farmers are excluded from the welfare schemes – they don’t have updated land records to establish their ownership of a farm. And by definition, a farmer in India must own a piece of land. It leads us to the third reason for the farmers’ database: identity.

3. A better definition of ‘farmer’

There are various combinations of problems related to information about a farmer. For one, there is no standard definition, except that a farmer is a farmer if he or she owns a piece of land. The open-endedness of this definition has led to a maze of incomplete information about farmers, which has been further complicated by migration.

“We have a peculiar situation where we have more moonlighting farmers than full-time farmers,” says Venky Ramachandran, an agritech analyst who runs Agribusiness Matters, a newsletter. The average profile of a farmer could be somebody who is working in another part of the country as a migrant labourer or a cab driver, Ramachandran explains. “He would depend on his family to take care of the farm, returning during the season to become part of the activity,” he adds.

Who exactly is a farmer?

Another, crueller aspect of identity in agriculture concerns the cultivator on India’s farms – a tenant farmer or contract farmer who doesn’t own land, but works on farms through the year. Currently, such cultivators – estimated to be more than 100 million people – borrow money from the informal economy to purchase inputs and work as full-time farmers. Yet, they are not recognized by the laws of India.

While the Agri Stack cannot solve the problem, the union and state governments can through legislative changes. If and when that happens, cultivators can apply for welfare schemes, working capital and credit based on their credentials in the farmers registry.

According to Rajeev Chawla, strategic advisor and chief knowledge officer in the union ministry of agriculture and farmer welfare: India has roughly 170-180 million land owning farmers with approximately 850 million parcels of land. So, each farmer owns on average five parcels of land. “If you talk about landless farmers, cultivators and tenants — India has 100 million,” he added, at a fintech event in Mumbai in September 2023.

In 2018, the DFI Committee too called for a legislative review to include cultivators or tenanted farmers.

The DFI Committee points out that a large number of government schemes and programmes become eligible to farmers based on their land ownership certificate. This tends to exclude the landless cultivator, fishermen, nomadic farmers and livestock rearers . To make the condition of farmers better, “they also must be recognized as farmers and rendered eligible to all the benefits under various schemes, programmes, missions, as also institutional credit and relief measures,” the Committee notes.

The question is, can the Agri Stack do to agriculture what Aadhaar has done for the direct benefit transfer in the past decade? To answer that, let’s first understand what the Agri Stack will look like.

Contours of Agri Stack

In the first phase of Agri Stack, the union government is working with 12 state governments to build the farmers registry. The states are Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Assam, Odisha, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh. Most recently, Chhattisgarh has begun to digitize the information related to farmers and landholdings for Agri Stack.

The governments have undertaken to create a Farmers Registry for their respective states. It entails granting farmers of each state a Unified Farmers Service Interface (UFSI) number.

The information farmers share (backed by their land records) will help establish each of their details such as personal particulars (name, gender, age), details related to land and location, crop, health of soil, and benefits they are availing. Accordingly, a Unified Farmers Service Interface (UFSI) number/ code will be assigned to map each farmer on the farmers registry.

The farmers registry system will help government or bank officials determine the identity of farmers, the size and location of their holdings, and what crops they are growing where.   

The core registries of Agri Stack will thus be the farmer registry, the geo-referenced village maps, and the crops sown registry.

“In a couple of years, Agri Stack can do to farmers what Aadhaar did for beneficiaries (of the direct benefit transfer schemes),” Chawla told entrepreneurs at the fintech fest in Mumbai in September 2023.

The Aadhaar Way

The first unique ID or Aadhaar ID was generated in 2010, and the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) has covered more than 97% of residents in India over 14 years.

In 2012, the union government led by the Unified Progressive Alliance introduced the direct benefit transfer. It aimed to transfer benefits and subsidies directly into the bank or postal accounts of beneficiaries. Citizens were incentivized to link their bank accounts with their Aadhaar IDs because it could smoothen the authentication process. For government officials, Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts meant they could accurately target beneficiaries with the subsidies they were entitled to.

At the time, the problem facing India was that banks hadn’t gone deep enough into rural India, even as Aadhaar enrolment was growing at a faster clip. To solve this, the union government introduced the Jan Dhan Yojana in 2014 to ensure every household gets access to a bank account, a debit card, and up to Rs 10,000 overdraft facility from the banks.

The Jan Dhan Yojana is the largest financial inclusion programme in the world. It also completed the two elements required for electronic delivery of subsidies through DBT. One, Aadhaar to identify a beneficiary correctly, and, two, the bank account to ensure the money reaches the intended recipient. “Once the Aadhaar number is added to the database of all social welfare recipients, the government can accurately identify these individuals,” wrote Nandan Nilekani, referring to the electronic payments system in DBT in Rebooting India (2015).  

“On the other side, linking a person’s bank account with their Aadhaar number makes it possible to reliably verify the identity of the account holder. Aadhaar now serves as a link between the government and the people, making it easy both for the authorities to transfer payments to the correct individual’s bank account, as well as for people to easily withdraw money using Aadhaar to authenticate their identity.”

For the Agri Stack, what is needed now is to establish the core registries, just as Aadhaar has done. 

In the Union Budget 2024-25, the government announced a time frame of three years for coverage of all farmers and their lands. To achieve this, it has launched a digital crop survey in the kharif season in 400 districts. “The details of 6 crore farmers and their lands will be brought into the farmers’ and lands’ registries,” Sitharaman said on Tuesday.

Already, the PM KISAN scheme has helped onboard 110 million farmers. “These beneficiaries can enroll for their farmer ID – the process is similar to how citizens apply for their Aadhaar number,” said a source in the agriculture ministry, who requested anonymity. The Agri Stack will then automatically link the farmer ID against the farmer’s name in the PM KISAN database.

“If the central government digitises the land records successfully, they would have solved 80% of the problem,” says Krishna Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Cropin Technology Solutions, a farm intelligence start-up. “You are then able to provide advisory services, and bring financial inclusion.” But this in itself is a huge ask. “When you roll out a digital mission of this scale for farmers, there are many complexities and moving parts,” he adds.

For instance, land boundaries and crops history have to be established, and the data resolution harmonized across states, right down to the district and village levels. This brings in the complexities. For instance, while the land is constant, its ownership and crops sowing patterns change. So, the farm and crops sown registries will need to be live, and constantly updated.

The good news is the government hasn’t taken up such a massive and multi-year project alone. With Agri Stack’s open framework, the private sector has a role to play in the design and implementation from the get-go.

“Even if the central government builds out a national crops dashboard as a base platform, it can share that infrastructure with state governments to build on top of it,” Kumar says. “It can then scientifically build budgetary estimates based on that data.”

For financial credit to farmers, banks need three pieces of information about the farmer: whether a land belongs to a farmer or not, his repayment record, and his crop outlook.

The harder piece of universal banking has been solved for financial inclusion thanks to the Jan Dhan scheme. So, the Agri Stack is well placed to ensure the targeted delivery of agriculture input subsidies, and even become the de facto database because of which farmers can get working capital loans or long-term credit.

Without Aadhaar to ensure farmers’ identity, and the Jan Dhan scheme for Aadhaar seeding of the bank accounts, the government wouldn’t have been in this position of strength. But in terms of sheer impact on the economy, the Agri Stack is perhaps an even more important digital mission than Aadhaar – it will formalize Indian agriculture.

From Udaipur to Okinawa riding on orange peel

Posted on May 5th, 2024

The story of twenty-five -year-old Narayan Lal Gurjar might not be out of place in Bollywood.

The playful experiments he conducted in his father’s small farm as a teenager in Kerdi, a village of 300 with 40 homes in Rajsamand district in southern Rajasthan, is the foundation for his patents and the agriscience startup incubated by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) that has attracted investments from well-known Japanese venture capital firms such as Beyond Next Ventures and MTG.

And all this before he turned 23.

Gurjar’s firm EF Polymer (EF stands for eco-friendly) headquartered in Okinawa with manufacturing plants in Udaipur makes super absorbent polymers (SAP) from orange and banana peel that has the potential to help millions of small farmers in arid and water scarce regions across the world harvest better yields.

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Suck it up

Now, SAPs aren’t new and neither is their use in agriculture. As the name suggests, SAPs are crystalline resembling rock salt or monosodium glutamate used in kitchens that can absorb and retain water a thousand times their weight.  Besides industrial applications, SAPs are commonly used in diapers, sanitary pads and ice-packs.

In fact, the invention of SAPs has agricultural origins. In 1973, Scientists at the Agricultural Research Service in Illinois, part of the US Department of Agriculture married natural corn starch and synthetic polymers to produce a compound popularly known as super slurper capable of absorbing hundreds of times its own weight in water.

The interest of ARS scientists was two-fold. First, the super slurper, thanks to its water absorption and retention qualities could be used in the soil by farmers to reduce the need for water. When temperatures rose, the SAPs would release moisture to the roots. Second, the widespread commercial use of super slurper would create greater demand for the corn US farmers grew in vast quantities since corn starch was one of the few ingredients. Back then cellulose from wood, cotton and other plants was the chief absorbent used in disposable diapers, bed pads, bandages, and surgical sponges. Besides shortage and rising cost, absorbents made of cellulose were bulky to transport and even harder to dispose.

Subsequent advancements in material sciences meant SAPs for agricultural and industrial use could be produced more efficiently and at global scale with petrochemicals. That solved some problems, but created several more. Petrochem-based agri polymers are widely used but their footprint is pretty much impossible to erase. They stick to soil like plastic.

Success at school

 Narayan Lal Gurjar was an incredibly bright student who had read up every book on science the library of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, one of the better government-run schools in Rajsamand, stocked. At 16, while in class 11, his projects and demonstrations swept up awards at school science exhibitions in Rajasthan. Gurjar’s dream was to study at IIT; his teachers were convinced he was destined to get there.

However, his father’s worries were more immediate. Being at the mercy of rain gods in a region with sparse groundwater or irrigation, he had incurred a huge loss, yet again, on his crop of corn. The corn cobs simply had no water in the final third of their 100-day crop cycle. “What use is all your science, when it can’t help poor farmers like me,” he asked of his son. The question stuck in Gurjar’s head.

“He was right. Drip irrigation, sprinklers and costly chemicals were beyond our reach. From that day, the mission of my life was to find an answer,” says Gurjar, a small man with a large forehead, big eyes, a short beard that seem to be fed by puppy fat, and in a slow, halting, almost diffident tone of Hinglish unaffected by his dealings with international scientists or smart global investors.

Father’s SOS

Gurjar’s experiments as a schoolboy involved sticking all kitchen and farm waste such as spinach leaves, okra trimmings and sugarcane straw into soil and recording the impact on seedlings he planted atop. In the process, he noticed that plants on soil beds containing orange and banana peels grew better even when not watered. Dried peels when pounded into a powder and mixed with soil produced even better results.

In two years, Gurjar had learnt from books in the library and the internet that orange and banana peels contained a chemical called pectin that could trap moisture.  The small batches of the sticky, gelatinous stuff he produced by boiling the dried and powdered peel was even better at absorbing water when put to soil. Gurjar knew he was on to something useful, but he understood little about the science or the efficacy of his home-baked methods beyond a little patch of his farm.

Uni money

Gurjar couldn’t crack the IIT exam, but was good enough to secure admission into the engineering programme at the Maharana Pratap University of Agriculture Technology (MPUAT), in Udaipur in 2017, not far from his home.

“In college, students could work on practical projects only in the final [fourth] year. I would be shooed away by the professors when I told them about this field experiment I wanted to conduct. I would stand outside their room for hours to get a chance to convince them about it,” recalls Gurjar.  

The perseverance paid off. SM Mathur, a renowned scientist, headed the department of farm machinery at the university. He was also coordinator at MPUAT for a central government scheme under the NewGen Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Centre that offers financial support to students working on commercially viable solutions for real-time problems. Convinced, of the kernel of potential in Gurjar’s pectin idea, Mathur not only allowed him access to the university lab 24/7 but also a grant of Rs 250,000.

Once the lab doors opened, Gurjar and a clutch of his classmates got to work. After attending classes by day, Gurjar would take maths and science tuitions for high school kids in the evening to top up his income, and at night he would visit juice shops in Udaipur to collect orange peels for free on friends’ two-wheelers to collect the raw material for his experiments at scale.

Natural SAPs from cellulose and starch are environmentally friendly but the process to extract thr polymers from them remains complex and expensive. That’s why scientists preferred synthetic polymers.

“In less than six months, we were able to make a SAP purely from orange peel and test it in local farms. The results were great.  Farmers needed far less water and fertilzers to get to get better yields. India produces more than 200 million tons of fruit and vegetable waste every year. There is an almost endless supply of raw material for us,” says Gurjar.

Professor Mathur helped get the fruit pectin-based polymer tested in government accredited labs and its efficacy ascertained at multiple Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), the apex government research body, plots, especially in water deficient zones.

The results were spectacular.

Recognising the potential, Mathur not goaded Gurjar and his classmates to think of it as a business, and incorporate a company but also helped with articulating the science and its commerce.

“Narayan was a phenomenally driven individual. He could work in the lab for days together without a wink. I have not seen such hunger and passion. But he needed to work on his language, presentation skills, and the ability to convert an innovation into a business,” says Mathur.

Just as in his school days, Gurjar won most international contests on sustainability he entered. Even with grants for research, could this be anything more than a frugal engineering lab experiment funded by a benevolent government?

Go east

In 2018, Gurjar found an advert from Okinawa Institute calling for its startup accelerator programme. The application sent a day before deadline won him not just a financial grant but the opportunity to use the university’s R&D infrastructure and global network.

Gurjar went to OIST in 2019 as a college dropout. “I had access to a research and tech environment that was a hundred times better than what I was used to in Udaipur. With OIST’s credibility and network, I could send my product for testing to the best universities such as UC Davis in California, Europe and Asia,” says Gurjar.

Having passed trials across the world on multiple soil types and crops, Gurjar claims that EF Polymer’s SAP products sold under the brand Fasal Amrit can be a gamechanger reducing water usage by 40% and fertilizers by 20%. An acre of dryland can do with 1.5 kg of the polymer costing less than Rs 700 per season.

With Gurjar’s patented process, the water absorbing bio-degradable polymers can be made on an industrial scale with no petrochemical inputs.

OIST’s accelerator programme lasted only a year, the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions meant Gurjar could not come back to India for two years. He decided to use the the time and OIST’s generosity of hosting him at the university for longer to incorporate the the company in Japan as well and further his research. With OIST’s global industry network, it wasn’t hard to find investor interest.

“EF Polymer is developing products based on original technology idea that meet the social and economic needs of the farmers globally. It has created a low-cost technology that none of its competitors have been able to achieve,” says a spokesperson at Universal Materials Incubator (UMI) a Japanese firm that invests in chemical and material science companies.

According to UMI, there is immense potential for EF Polymer in counties where drought damage is high. “We believe its cost-effectiveness is already sufficient to make farmers turn to it, especially those who grow vegetables that have a high unit price,” the UMI spokesperson adds. to stimulate incentives on the part of farmers, especially for high unit price vegetables.

With the Rs 40 crore investment raised so far, Gurjar’s EF Polymer has put up a plant in Udaipur with a production capacity of 100 tons a month.

“It would have been easy for me to license this product to a large company. But I want my work to help poor farmers like my father. If I can’t do that I’m a failure. I firmly believe Mother Nature has a solution for every problem,” says Gurjar.  

West Africa’s bitter chocolate harvest is a sweet deal for farmers in south India

Posted on April 22nd, 2024

The small, dark godown abutting M Dharmambigai’s large home with a larger courtyard in Kottur, a village 15 km to the south of Pollachi town in Tamil Nadu, has never housed stock so precious.

The value of gunny bags of cocoa beans stacked unevenly, without a great deal of care, is currently more than Rs 12 lakh and almost guaranteed to go up to Rs 15 lakh soon.

The lottery of climate change is such that the misery of farmers in one country is an opportunity to make windfall gains for others in a different continent.

The price of cocoa beans, the primary raw material for chocolate, has more than tripled in the last year. In March 2024 alone, it rose from $7100 a ton to $10455. In fact, chocolate prices now trade higher than industrial metals such as copper.

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Brown gold

The rise is fuelled by crippling shortages in Ghana and Ivory Coast that produce nearly 55% of the world’s cocoa beans. According to the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), a grouping of 51 countries comprising the biggest exporters and consumers of the bean, the West African production decline that set off since 2016 is a combination of cocoa trees infected with the deadly swollen shoot virus disease, illegal mining, which has reduced the number of cocoa farms, ageing trees and prolonged dry and wet spells of weather.

There are far deeper socio-economic reasons why West African cocoa production will not recover anytime soon resulting in chocolate becoming ever more expensive. Despite the global craze for chocolates, the farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana that produce cocoa have remained some of the most exploited and poorly paid in the world.

Terminal decline

According to a JP Morgan report, cocoa is still largely cultivated by smallholder farmers, many of whom struggle to make a living income and lack the means to reinvest in their land — which translates to lower yields over time. “Cocoa is a market where the grower produces a very high-value good but receives a very low share of the actual value chain. As a result, replanting rates are very low and cocoa trees are ageing,” said Tracey Allen, an agricultural commodities strategist at JP Morgan in the report.

In other words, the poor West African farmers have no incentive to take good care of their plantations, or even grow cocoa at all. Many are happy to switch to crops like rubber or sell their land to metal miners.

India’s opportunity

Dharmambigai is a 71-year-old, widowed farmer with no children, who manages her 25-acre holding pretty much by herself. Clad in a pale-green-pink-and-maroon printed silk-cotton sari, wearing large steel-frame glasses, a forehead full of vibhuti and sandalwood paste on the nose bridge, she has no clue about global cocoa production trends. “I’m just happy that my cocoa bean stock of 1.25-1.5 tons is fetching a price of Rs 800 a kg. Some of my relatives have told me not to sell now because prices may go up to Rs 1000 soon,” beams Dharmambigai, speaking in the endearing, singsong western Tamil Nadu accent and manner that includes addressing younger people as ‘kannu’ [darling].  She is one of the few remaining cocoa farmers in Tamil Nadu’s Pollachi region.

India is a lightweight in the global cocoa production landscape. It barely produces 27,000-30,000 tons, far below the domestic demand of more than 70,000 tons. Can Indian farmers like Dharmambigai begin to prosper when those in West Africa give up? It’s not so simple.

A hard nut

The popularity and easy availability of chocolate as a consumer product does not help appreciate the exacting nature of cocoa farming. Cocoa is a delicate, sensitive plant that requires high rainfall, heat, yet constant shade and a great deal of moist air. As a result, their home is restricted to the region 20 degrees north and south of the equator.

In India, cocoa is a shortish tree growing up to six metres with a broad shady canopy and leaves three-to-four times bigger than that of mango. Unlike its natural home in tropical forests of West Africa and South America, Indian cocoa is grown in the shade of vast coconut and arecanut or betelnut plantations as an intercrop.

The coastal areas in Andhra Pradesh’s Godavari delta produce most of India’s cocoa followed by west-central Karnataka’s hill regions and places like Pollachi on the foothills of the Western Ghats in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The cocoa fruit, when ripe and ready for harvest, resembles the papaya. But the cocoa fruit is much woodier, requiring a wooden mallet and considerable force to be cracked open.

Cocoa is an evergreen tree that yields fruits twice a year: June and July is when the big harvest comes after the minor season that lasts from November to January. Yields on a commercial scale are possible only after five years and trees remain productive for up to 30 years.

“My husband planted cocoa seedlings 13 years ago in our coconut farms. He passed away shortly thereafter. Since then, I’ve been taking care of it in his memory, even if there wasn’t not much income from it. Most farmers in our region have cut their cocoa trees because the price never went above Rs 200/kg,” says Dharmambigai, as she conducts the daily survey of her farm on creaking arthritic knees, riding on her husband’s beloved Willys Jeep of the 1960s vintage.

Her own cocoa farm would yield more if she bothered to prune the trees regularly and pay greater attention to them. Another disadvantage of growing cocoa as an intercrop to coconut and arecanut is that cocoa pods become the primary source of food for squirrels and wildlife such as the Asian palm civet. Civets find it easier to drill through the relatively soft fruits of cocoa compared to the rock-hard coconuts.

Harvesting and processing cocoa nuts is labour intensive. In a region that allows both men and women in the workforce industrial employment at Coimbatore’s factories and Tiruppur’s textile mills, farmhands are always at a premium.

A typical cocoa fruit or pod contains 30 to 40 beans and there are about 30 pods per tree.  When the fruit is broken the seeds are covered in a thin layer of mucous-like pulp that tastes like a sugar-free version of sitaphal or custard apple.

Dharmambigai removes the beans from the pods, and stores them in large bamboo baskets covered by banana leaves or tarpaulin. After five to seven days of fermentation in a cool, dark space, the cocoa beans are sun dried for several days. That’s when they get the deep brown colour and the coveted chocolate flavour.  You need about 500-600 dried beans to make a kg of cocoa powder.

Indian cocoa is far more astringent than west Africa’s and therefore needs more intensive processing. African beans have subtler and complex flavours to justify the premium.

“India cocoa farmers have benefited in the short term and they can take advantage of high global prices. As an intercrop to coconut and areca, our cocoa is more environmentally sustainable. We don’t grow it on forest land that has been cleared for plantation.  We have our own climate change problems.  Unseasonal cyclones destroy cocoa flowers in East Godavari district. Poor south west monsoon impacts output in Western Ghats,” says Krishna Kumar HM, the managing director of Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing Co-operative Limited (Campco), India’s largest cocoa procuring cooperative that sells chocolates under its own brand and to multinational firms such as Nestle.

Drone duo that heals crops with pictures from the sky

Posted on March 28th, 2024

Amandeep Panwar, 30, and Rishabh Choudhary, 31, first set foot on a farm in 2015. As students in an aeronautical engineering graduate course at a Lucknow college, farms in a village nearby offered the vast open spaces to fly a drone for their final year project. The friendship they struck up in college has resulted in BharatRohan, a startup with revenue of nearly Rs 20 crore in the frontier space of precision agriculture technology.

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Founded in 2016, immediately after Panwar and Choudhary graduated, BharatRohan uses hyperspectral imaging, one of the most advanced remote sensing tools to capture warning signals about pest attacks, disease outbreaks and nutrition deficiency in crops at a very early and actionable stage. “Remedial action at this early stage helps farmers eliminate crop losses. It can be one of the most important innovations in agricultural early warning systems. The potential is humungous,” says Kondapi Srinivas, principal scientist at Indian Council of Agriculture Research’s (ICAR) National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM) in Hyderabad that incubated the start-up.

The power of precision

Every year India loses in excess of 15% of its farm output worth about $40 billion to diseases, pests and climate related crop stress.

BharatRohan’s drones are fitted with hyperspectral imaging (HSI) cameras that film the farmland every week to ten days. The technology and the firm’s proprietary algorithms can decipher the miniscule colour changes occurring in the plants due to different biochemical changes. For instance, a pomegranate plant infested with bacterial blight develops red-brown spots on the leaves. To a naked eye, these spots are visible only after 7-10 days of infestation. But with HSI, the infestation can be identified in the very early stages, and the problem can be treated with precision without any significant damage.

BharatRohan not only identifies the problems but also suggests the fixes. “The early-stage diagnosis of the biochemical changes in crops helps us create prescription on maps highlighted with the critical zones. An actionable advisory is given to the farmers. Our executives help farmers in its implementation. With precision and early diagnosis, farmers can apply the pesticides in the tract of land. They save on inputs and gain yields,” says Panwar, CEO, BharatRohan.

Filming the farms

Hyperspectral imaging is a technique that analyses a wide spectrum of light instead of just assigning primary colours (red, green, blue) to each pixel. The light striking each pixel is broken down into many different spectral bands in order to provide more information on what is imaged. The unique colour signature of an individual object can be detected. Unlike other optical technologies that can only scan for a single colour, HSI can distinguish the full colour spectrum in each pixel. BharatRohan can currently collect plant level and row level data at 5 cm/pixel resolution.

The use of drones is a big part of the Indian government’s push towards precision farming techniques. Under the Viksit Bharat scheme, the government would fund 15,000 rural women self-help groups (SHG) to the tune of 80% of the cost of a drone. The drones would be operated by trained women drone pilots called drone didis who are part of the SHG. Local farmers would be able to rent the drones for spraying fertilizer, sowing and monitoring crop health.

The interactions with farmers in the days of flying drones over their fields, helped Panwar and Choudhary learn first-hand about the damage caused by pests. They looked for ways to use their love for drones to help farmers. With a bit of research, they zeroed in on hyperspectral imaging, but it was too complex an area for two freshly-minted engineering graduates to venture into.

The mint experiment

The duo made cold calls to several experts in the field in India and overseas. They connected on Linkedin with Keshav Singh, an IIT-Mumbai alumnus and a post-doctoral researcher at University of California, Davis, specialising in the use of remote sensing technology and the use of unmanned aerial systems in precision agricultural applications. Singh was roped in early as partner.

Guidance, mentorship, and seed money came from ICAR’s a-IDEA incubator and CSIR’s Lucknow-based Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic plants (CIMAP). Manoj Semwal, a senior scientist at CIMAP, helped BharatRohan create the spectral libraries for various crops and their diseases, starting with mint, potato and paddy, the three major crops in the Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district. The spectral library is a vast database that includes information about colour changes of a healthy plant grown in ideal conditions and those with specific diseases like the rust fungus in mint. Images from a farmer’s field can be juxtaposed with those from the library to precisely diagnose the occurrence of a disease, its stage and the nutritional status of the crop.

But every crop needs its own spectral library. To add information on a wide variety of crops, the company is working with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), a Hyderabad-headquartered multilateral research organisation that works on millets and pulses that are the mainstay of farmers in the drylands of India and Africa.

The company’s drones can scour more than 10,000 acres of farmland every fortnight. BharatRohan uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based tools to build proprietary models of analysis.

CIMAP introduced the two entrepreneurs to some 300 “progressive” mint farmers in region who were part of its own network. Having won a clutch of entrepreneurship grants from Indian School of Business (ISB), Rabobank and Government of India, BharatRohan began operations as a subscription-based service for the farmers in Barabanki in 2017.

Uttar Pradesh alone accounts for almost 70% of the global mint production. Natural mint oil finds extensive use in pharmaceutical, food and confectionery industries. Boosting yields Rakesh Kumar, an aromatic herbs farmer in the Fatehpur tehsil of Barabanki, a BharatRohan partner since 2017, says he and his fellow farmers were initially dismissive of the two youngsters who claimed to increase yields with the help of drones.

 “After the results of the first 90-day mint crop, we had no doubt that it worked,” he says. According to Rakesh, the income from his nine acres of land where he grows mint, lemongrass, potato and paddy, has gone up 25% to Rs 12 lakh from Rs 9 lakh in the years he’s been working with the firm. Plus, he can save around Rs 3,500 per acre every crop cycle on inputs such as fertiliser and pesticides. For the advisory based on BharatRohan’s technology, farmers would pay 3% of their produce sales to the company.

But Panwar and Choudhary quickly realised that a business that depended entirely on getting farmers to pay might not be sustainable in India. In 2019, BharatRohan changed course to become an agriculture platform company that works with farmers from the sowing stage to post-harvest sales.

Will farmers pay up?

“Currently, we work with 19,000 farmers across 50,000 acres in six different states on a variety of crops. We adopt a farmer-friendly pricing model, charging based on the crop season. For instance, farmers cultivating crops over 3-4 months are charged approximately Rs 399 per acre per season. This approach ensures affordability for the farmers,” explains Panwar.  

Using the data from drones, BharatRohan can offer farmers real advice through Whatsapp chatbots and on-field agronomists on caring for the crops.

The access to highly accurate data on fertilizer and chemical use by the farmers in its network makes it attractive for large food buyers to partner with the company. This also helps farmers with good quality produce that adheres to prescribed pesticide and chemical residue levels command a premium.

“In India, unlike start-ups in other sectors, ag-tech companies, even if they have a strong and scalable technology platform, find it very hard to raise venture capital funding for various reasons. Primarily, it is due to the investor fears about the uncertainties in India’s agriculture. But globally, given the stress on resources, high-tech precision farming is the next big thing. Innovations like BharatRohan will be the future,” says ICAR-NAARM’s Srinivas.

The nutmeg’s purse

Posted on March 6th, 2024

There are few places in Tamil Nadu more fetching and fertile than the region around Pollachi, a town 40km to the south of Coimbatore.

Girded by the Western Ghats, rivers that flow east from its peaks, amply fed by the southwest monsoon, and tropical forests, Pollachi’s soil can grow pretty much anything. It allows farmers to experiment with vanilla and cocoa to latch on to global commodity boom cycles.  The region’s Eden-image was burnished by countless Tamil films that were shot here in the 1990s, and long-term prosperity built around coconut, especially tender coconut.

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In recent years, nutmeg has considerably spiced up farmer incomes, thanks to the efforts of Ranjit Kumar.

Ranjit Kumar, 36, is a mechanical engineer who won the Chevening scholarship to pursue a postgraduate degree in nanotechnology at Cambridge University. When his father was diagnosed with kidney failure, he had no option but to chuck up a flourishing career in engineering design in 2016 and return to Kottur, a village 15km from Pollachi to manage the 60-acre family holding of primarily coconut plantation. While at Cambridge, Ranjit ensured diversification into nutmeg following a few other farmers in the region. It’s an ideal accompaniment to coconut in these parts. Nutmeg loves the shade of coconut.

Flavour bomb

The nutmeg fruit is the size of a table tennis ball and produces two spices—nutmeg and mace. It has a smooth, pale yellow exterior when ripe, somewhat similar to the apricot or plum. Inside the fleshy and aromatic fruit, the seed is clasped in a crimson filigree called mace, that when dried, resembles flower petals. Mace has a more delicate fragrance than the nutmeg. Enclosed within the hard kernel is the actual nutmeg, an oval-shaped marble that looks like the betelnut or supari. Both mace and nutmeg are prized spices. Besides food, the oil extracted from nutmeg is used in the perfume and pharmaceutical industries.

Trees can last up to 100 years and need little maintenance. It is naturally resistant to pests and needs only farmyard manure. Chemical fertilizers eat into the aroma of the spice.

Pollachi is a tiny nutmeg growing region compared to Kerala that accounts for more than 90% of the 15,000 tonnes India produces. Being a secondary production market, the nearly 150 nutmeg farmers in Pollachi with smaller output were at the mercy of a cartel of four traders.

“The farmers didn’t know much about market trends. Traders would tell us that our quality was poor and we took whatever money they offered. If you look at the organized services or manufacturing industry, the vendor and buyer are both informed parties. In agriculture, the farmer who is the vendor is in the dark,” says Ranjit.

In 2019, Ranjit started the Pollachi Nutmeg Farmer Producer Company bringing together 110 local nutmeg farmers.

A farmer producer company or FPC is a social enterprise that’s a hybrid between a cooperative, such as Amul, and a private limited company. An FPC can be formed when ten or more farmers in a region band together. But it must be owned and managed by its member-farmers.  

Creating 10,000 FPCs across the country is a keystone in the government’s plans to increase chronically low small farmer incomes. To develop the FPC movement in the country, the government has made a budgetary allocation of Rs 6,865 crore besides a raft of other schemes to increase the access to money and markets for such companies. The power of collectivization through FPCs helps farmers negotiate better prices both when buying inputs like seeds and fertilizers or selling their produce to traders.

Understanding value

Instead of farmers selling small lots, the FPC pools more than 40 tonnes of nutmeg and two tonnes of mace from the member farmers across 50 villages.

Nutmegs are sorted by the farmers and graded in three quality tiers. All the produce is brought to a marriage hall in Pollachi and sold within ten days. Not only is their bargaining power better, the FPC can focus on marketing and attracting more buyers. As a result, farmer incomes have gone up almost 50% and the FPC has a turnover of Rs 2.5 crore.

A nutmeg tree starts yielding in about five years. A fully grown tree in Pollachi produces 400-450 nutmegs a year on average compared to a 1000 in Kerala. But in a wetter Kerala, the nutmegs are more susceptible to fungus.

Mace fetches a better price when it dries out turning yellow from scarlet while retaining its flower-like shape. “Due to the weather in Kerala, this process takes longer. Also, the nutmegs here have better flavour because the plantations are not as dense as in Kerala,” says Ranjit. A better understanding of the market and the value of their own produce is helping farmers convince the traders to offer a premium.   

Farmers make up to Rs 180,000 a year in profits with 50 trees as an intercrop with coconut. Last season, one of the farmers in the FPC sold nutmegs worth more than Rs 20 lakh from his four acres. A kilo of nutmeg during peak season sells for more than Rs 450. When farmers sell small lots to traders, the average price can be as low as Rs 275.

Ranjit wants to replicate the success of nutmeg in coconut as well. That’s the big but elusive prize. It was easy to unite farmers through nutmeg because it is a high value commodity. The biggest crop in Pollachi is tender coconut—so big that most farmers have now lost the skill to grow anything else. In summers, the price of a nut goes up to Rs 35 and in winters farmers barely get Rs 10. “Our next target is to find a way to create a supply chain for tender coconut that keeps farmers profitable year-round. If you are not working collectively as farmers, you are moving in the wrong direction,” he says.

The young entrepreneur from Jharkhand who wants to simplify spiky jackfruit for India

Posted on February 17th, 2024

Like most young people born and raised in Jharkhand, Aman Chhabra, 31, was determined to find the escape velocity required to pull out of the state’s dark gravitational forces that could ground even modest ambition.

Being a bright student, he managed to attend Delhi’s prestigious Shriram College of Commerce. Post graduation, when he was expected to become a part of the family business running a hotel in Ramgarh, a town in central Jharkhand, Chhabra chose a career in event management instead. 

His small but profitable startup organized flashy weddings for the super-rich in Mumbai and Delhi where A-list artistes performed and fine wine flowed from faucets. But the business couldn’t survive the crippling effect of Covid-19 in 2020. The search for a business idea that could survive such unforeseen shocks, and in sync with his own newfound life-motto of minimalism drove him to seek shelter under the copious, cool canopy of the jackfruit tree.

Under the jackfruit tree

Chhabra has joined the burgeoning corps of food entrepreneurs that wants to rekindle India’s love for the spiky, smelly, latex-laden sticky jackfruit.

His latest startup Kathalfy, seeks to simplify the consumption of jackfruit, called kathal in Hindi, in the form of ready-to-eat vegan packaged foods such as patties, keema masala, jackfruit makhni and assorted Indian curries.

Even if Chhabra had successfully plotted his way out of a state whose brazenly corrupt polity is a graveyard of entrepreneurial activity, memories of childhood were harder to shed.

“I grew up amidst jackfruit trees. Jackfruit was staple food. When I was researching sustainable business ideas, I realised India wastes almost Rs 2000 crore worth of jackfruit simply because we don’t know what to do with this abundance,” says Chhabra clad in a tight white Chinese-collar shirt, buttoned down to the wrist, a pair of denims and white sneakers, and hair cropped so short and sharp as to make his square jaw lend a rectangular shape to his face.

In recent years, jackfruit’s stock as a ‘superfood’ has skyrocketed globally.

There is increasing scientific evidence of jackfruit’s health benefits. A 100g serving of steamed, raw jackfruit has 40% less carbohydrates and up to four times more fibre than chapatis made from the same amount of wheat flour. The seeds in the jack pods contain a great deal of protein.  

But even in India, the home of the jackfruit, the biggest tree-growing fruit in the world, Indians find it a nasty fruit. North Indians hate the ripe fruit for the smell they find unpleasant and, erm, reminiscent of excrement. In the south, jackfruit has an exalted status. According to ancient Tamil literature, it is part of the divine troika of fruits alongside mango and banana; its wood is used to make the mridangam. Yet, India wastes more than half of its two million tonnes of annual jackfruit output that leaves farmers with no option to treat it as a weed and chop the trees down.

Chhabra travelled around every major jackfruit mandi in India from Panruti in Tamil Nadu to Tumakuru in Karnataka to understand the fruit’s supply chain. He met up with scientists at the India Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) and Central Food Technology Research Institute (CFTRI) working not only on developing new varieties of jackfruit but also processing to make it more industry and consumer friendly.  While their work such as making chocolates out of jackfruit seeds that was called ‘Jackolate’ (we’ll leave you to judge branding) was interesting, no entrepreneur or business was keen on licensing the products and taking them to market.

Even if jackfruit grows prodigiously across peninsular India, especially along the coast, it is only Kerala that understands its many uses from the raw to ripe form, and has the capacity to process it at scale.

In Kerala, thinly sliced and steamed raw jackfruit is sometimes used as a healthier, fibrous carbohydrate alternative to rice.

Not surprisingly, James Joseph, another Kerala entrepreneur, has built a venture selling raw jackfruit flour under the brand Jackfruit 365 based on its ability to help diabetics.  

Raw jackfruit chunks in the hands of a clever cook can be made to mimic pulled pork, or meat in a biryani. Chhabra’s quest for a contract manufacturer who could make ready-to-eat jackfruit products to his recipe brought him to a giant 20-acre food processing hub in Kerala’s picturesque Kolanchery town 30km to the east of Kochi.  

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Synthite, a large and local private firm with a long history of trading in spices grown in the Malabar coast, has set up what in marketing-speak it calls a ‘Taste Park’ in Kolanchery amidst ageing rubber plantations, a church at every bend of the hill-tract, and giant granite bungalows whose owners prefer to stay in Dubai or Denver, Colorado, US, than here. The dry January air can transmit the smell of instant noodles masala to anyone within a 3km-radius of the ‘Taste Park’. And for good reason. Synthite and its subsidiary Symega operating out of the ‘Park’, that makes Chhabra’s ready-to-eat jackfruit gravies, also produces spice blends, sauces, mayonnaise, and savoury processed foods for any major multinational brand you can think of.  

According to Santosh Stephen, the managing director of Symega foods, a Rs 500-crore food processor, jackfruit-based, vegan ready-to-eat kebabs and curries is a huge market for his company globally. While a startup like Chhabra’s Kathalfy is merely seeding the market in India, large supermarket chains in US, Europe and Canada already sell seekh kebabs, samosas and cutlets made and packaged by Symega.

During the peak processing season for raw jackfruits between December and June, farmers can make up to Rs 30 a kg. While a ripe jackfruit can weigh as much as 15kg, the the raw form its only about a 3kg at best and its easy to transport, handle and process.

“The market for jackfruit products is huge globally. We have set up a dedicated division for plant-based foods made of jackfruit for our global customers,” says Stephen, a loyal Montblanc customer who uses the German luxury brand’s flagship Meisturstruck 149 fountain pens, belts and wallets.

For Chhabra, though, this seems the right time to make the abundantly available jackfruit more relatable to Indians without forcing them to change their palate.

“This can be a win-win for consumers and farmers. Why should we follow the West, when we have the raw material and knowledge to make jackfruit into the next big thing,” says Chhabra.

The humble jack might need government-led marketing campaigns like for millets for lift-off.

Tamil Nadu acid limes that basically offer a good deal without getting neighbours salty

Posted on February 2nd, 2024

Puliyangudi in Tamil literally means ‘tart territory’. Fittingly, the big boss in this Tamil Nadu town 140 km to the southwest of Madurai, on the foothills of Western Ghats bordering Kerala, is a sour fruit called acid lime that bears the scientific name Citrus aurantifolia.

While Puliyangudi acid lime’s application for the geographical indicator (GI) status is pending, it clearly commands a premium in the market.

With a paper thin two millimetre peel, the Puliyangudi acid lime has 50-55% juice content and is packed with flavour. A tiny nail-scratch on its surface is enough to make the juices and fragrance burst through. More importantly, it has a citric acid content of 8% compared to 5% in other lime varieties. Prices therefore can go up to Rs 500 a kg when demand peaks.

This small region’s tropical climate and red soil allows around 2500 farmers to produce nearly 10,000 tonnes of acid lime on 7500 hectares. Puliyangudi itself has become a large single commodity trading hub whose inhabitants take incredible pride in it being billed the ‘lemon town’. The proximity to a large consumption market in Kerala next door and the year-round demand for lemons in a hot country helps.

Even accounting for such factors, Puliyangudi’s acid lime-fame is arguably built on the base of a pioneering farmer and innovator called V Antonysamy. Now 83, Antonysamy is credited with developing several high-yielding varieties of acid lime that the region’s farmers have benefitted from.

His work not just on limes, but increasing sugarcane and rice yields through sustainable methods, has won him national acclaim too. With a 300-acre landholding, Antonysamy would rank among the wealthiest farmers in a country where farmers own less than two acres on average.

Antonysamy is a burly man with a round, chubby face, bald head and loads of, what locals consider, “attitude”.

Besides the white pick-up truck he drives, and the air of authority that occasionally creeps into his voice, there are few visible signs of prosperity that would make him an outlier in his surroundings.

After a breakfast of kambu koozh (a gruel made with bajra and buttermilk), Anthonysamy spends most of the day examining every tree and soil bed.  His small eyes seem to be getting smaller with age, but the ability to spot something odd, here or there, remains intact.

“The farm wasn’t offered to me on a platter,” he says, clad in a white shirt, veshti and a typical farmers union green towel around his neck, trying to follow deer footmarks on soil made butter-soft by recent rains, to ascertain the damage done by nocturnal visitors.

Antonysamy joined his father’s farm in 1962 learning about Nature’s ways, the native science of soil management and weeds that helped and hampered the crop.

In the late 1980s, he developed a new lime breed from locally available varieties, by grafting and trial and error, that could almost triple the output.

That led to Puliyangudi’s acid lime boom and its demand in the food processing industry in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

On average, acid lime cultivation can fetch farmers a net profit of Rs 200,000 per acre a year, accounting for seasonal price fluctuations.

“In the last decade, acid lime productivity has increased 25-30%. Farmers now get more than 1000 fruits a tree on average compared to 700-750,” says Palani Kumar, Head (Horticulture), Citrus Research Station and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Sankarankovil.  

However, climate change is proving a party-pooper.

Every morning, with his lunch packed in a steel tiffin box, 62-year-old Abdul Wahab rides a 100cc TVS moped to his acid lime orchard in Konandoppu Aaru village in the Puliyangudi region. It’s a big improvement on the bicycle he used until a decade ago.

By December, his lime trees should have bunches of pearl-white flowers. But the northeast monsoon rains, delayed by almost two months, that battered southern Tamil Nadu, have knocked the flowers off. The unseasonal deluge has also resulted in citrus canker, a bacterial disease that devours citrus leaves. Wahab needs to prune several thousand afflicted branches carefully to ensure he has any marketable output during the April-May harvest season. The interest on the money he has borrowed from a local loan shark would grow as fast as the weeds around his acid lime.

“Better farm management with increased use of organic manure, mulching and pruning can overcome such issues,” says Antonysamy.

A GI tag for Puliyangudi acid lime can only make farmers’ prospects better.  

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar is a business, technology, food and environment writer based in Chennai.  

How an Indore agripreneur couple is using moringa to fight malnutrition

Posted on January 31st, 2024

Moringa or drumstick and sambar is a match made in food heaven. Yet, it struggles to cross the Vindhyas into India’s north. The green, ribbed sticks floating in a bowl of sambar offer a puzzle. The perfect way to deal with drumstick is to first suck up its juices like marrow from the bone, then poke an end with the index finger to split it open, scoop out the jelly like flesh with three fingers, scrape it clean with lower incisors, and finally chew it up until the piece of drumstick resembles a spent sugar cane at a juice shop. Of course, all of it can seem savage for those uninitiated in southern culinary culture!

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In the ancient Tamil tradition of Siddha medicine, the moringa tree is has the status of a superstar.  Its leaves, flowers, bark and the drumstick itself are believed to be a cure for impotency to anemia and several other ailments in between. A moringa tree in the backyard was thought to be guarantor of good health. While drumstick as a vegetable remains under appreciated, there is now huge interest globally in harnessing the tree’s benefits in fighting malnutrition and lifestyle diseases, especially post-Covid 19.

The ‘miracle tree’

Pallavi and Sanjay Vyas, an Indore based agri-entrepreneur couple, too, is betting big on the ‘miracle tree’ called moringa. Their firm Shanta Farms sells moringa based cattle feed, human nutrition supplements and even a patented, chocolate-flavoured based moringa milk additive beverage called Morvita positioned as a healthy substitute for popular malted wheat brands such as Boost and Bournvita.

It’s a business opportunity they discovered almost by accident.

The Vyases ran a thriving organic dairy business focusing on indigenous cow breeds. The farm at its peak spread over nearly 40 acres with more than 200 cows. A chance meeting in 2015 with Giriraj Singh, a BJP MP from Bihar’s Begusarai and currently the Union Minister for animal husbandry and fisheries introduced them to moringa. “Nobody knew anything about moringa here till a few years ago. Even now it is hard to convince people to grow or eat it. When Giriraj Singh visited our dairy, he asked us to try out moringa as cow fodder,” says Pallavi Vyas, the a 45-year-old cofounder of Shanta Farms.

The advice seemed to work. Using moringa leaves as fresh fodder, silage and dried showed a 30% increase in productivity in six months. “Moringa was a nutrition dynamite. It helped prevent diseases like mastitis, fertility of cows went up, our veterinary bills fell sharply and we could completely stop spending on multivitamins and supplements for cows,” says Pallavi.

Being native to India, moringa can be grown pretty much in every part of India. It is especially adaptable to arid regions with poor rainfall and soil.

Over the next few years, the Vyases worked on dehydrating and processing the moringa leaves as a human health and immunity booster.

“In granulated form, moringa has ten times more vitamin A than carrots, 25 times more iron than spinach and nine times the protein in yoghurt. Following ayurvedic principles we developed a process for granulating moringa to fight anemia and malnutrition for which we have received a patent,” says Pallavi Vyas. During Covid-19, the couple worked with anganwadis and local government schools in Madhya Pradesh on pilot basis where children were given moringa supplements. “It was highly effective in tackling malnutrition with even the most stunted children gaining 200-300 grams in a month,” says Vyas.

A big business opportunity

According to Pallavi the company has pretty much shut down it’s dairy operations and is now focused on taking moringa products national. “With organic dairy, we found it hard to create a pan-India business. But with moringa, we see an opportunity to create a Rs 500 crore brand. Currently we make animal fodder, supplements for even carnivorous zoo animals and human nutrition products. We’ve barely begun work of moringa-based beauty and cosmetics products which is a massive opportunity,” she adds.

This young woman CEO fights hard to make farmers richer in Tamil Nadu’s remote corner

Posted on January 16th, 2024

In the arid region of Thoothukudi, a coastal district at the chin of Tamil Nadu 600 km to the south of Chennai, it’s not just the buildings but also tempers that get corroded quickly by the salty air.  

At around 11 am on a late December morning, when the sun beats down without baking the skin, an agitated mob of a dozen farmers has gathered at the basketball court-sized office of Vilathikulam Pudur Pulses Producer Company (VPPPC), a farmer producer company (FPC) in Vilathikulam Pudur, a panchayat town 60 km from Thoothukudi.

The angry farmers who are members and shareholders in the company demand to meet Bavithra Jagatheshkumar, the CEO.

A farmer producer company or FPC is a social enterprise that’s a hybrid between a cooperative, such as Amul, and a private limited company. An FPC can be formed when ten or more farmers in a region band together. But it has to be owned and managed by its member-farmers.  

Creating 10,000 FPCs across the country is a keystone in the government’s plans to increase chronically low small farmer incomes. To develop the FPC movement in the country, the government has made a budgetary allocation of Rs 6,865 crore besides a raft of other schemes to increase the access to money and markets for such companies. The power of collectivization through FPCs helps farmers negotiate better prices both when buying inputs like seeds and fertilizers or selling their produce to traders.

Farmer anger

The grievances of the group of farmers who have accosted Bavithra are many. Some of them have not received the bag of fertilizer they had ordered. But there’s a bigger problem. Rumour has it that Bavithra has not paid up the monthly installment for the bank loan the FPC has taken on behalf of its members.   

Thirty-one-year-old Bavithra, a stocky woman clad in grey salwar-kameez, hair tied into a bun, wearing a rudraksha bead around the neck and vibhuti, or sacred ash, that runs across her forehead temple to temple, offers them tea in little steel tumblers and assurances in mellow tones, referring to the farmers as anna (brother) and appa (father), that no bank dues are pending.

Matters of caste lend a sharper edge to the confrontation. Farmers in this group are overwhelmingly Kambalathu Nayakars, a community classified in Tamil Nadu as ‘most backward’.  Veerapandiya Kattabomman, an 18^th century local chieftain who rebelled against the British Raj by refusing to pay taxes, belonged to this group. Kattabomman was played by Tamil star Sivaji Ganesan in a classic 1959 film.

While Kambalathu Nayakars are numerically tiny in the state, this region is one of their few strongholds. Bavithra on the other hand is a Thevar, one of the most influential backward castes in the state, but a small minority here.

When bank challans and other documentary evidence don’t work, she offers them Rs 2000 to hire a van to go meet the bank manager in person, to diffuse issue.

“Most meetings with farmers are like this only,” says Bavithra, mustering a girly smile. Without Bavithra’s tenacity to stand up to caste and gender prejudices, skills of diplomacy and a single-minded vision to improve the economic prospects of 1500 shareholder-farmers in the FPC, it wouldn’t have been possible to turn around a failing company with no income in 2019 to one with Rs 14 crore in revenue and a profit of around Rs 25 lakh today. 

 VPPPC was among the 57 FPCs promoted by the agricultural marketing department of Tamil Nadu in 2016 under the National Agricultural Development Programme (NADP) scheme with a mandate to improve the livelihoods of the pulse producers in the region. Today, only 12 have survived. VPPPC which Bavithra runs is widely considered a role model.  

Low cash flow

Thoothukudi is a relatively prosperous district in Tamil Nadu with a per capita income of Rs 2.04 lakh compared to the state’s Rs 2.4 lakh a year. Its economy is built around the sea port, small and medium manufacturing firms and trucking. Agriculture in the region is almost entirely rainfed. All farming activity is restricted to a few months before and after the north east monsoon in October-November. Dryland crops such as chilli, coriander, pulses, lime and millets dominate the landscape.

The FPC in Vilathikulam Pudur was promoted by the government to collectivize farmers and help them get a better deal through economies of scale when they purchased inputs such as fertilizers or sold their produce.

Bavithra is a graduate from the College of Agri Technology in Theni, a town 80 km west of Madurai on the foothills of the Western Ghats best known for producing Tamil film icons such as composer Ilaiyaraaja and director Bharatiraaja. When she was appointed the CEO of the company, it was pretty much defunct verging on closure.  

Bright, young agri graduates such as Bavithra are often hired by organizations that promote FPCs to run them.

Bavithra built up the business at breakneck speed opening a millet and grain processing unit, mushroom farms, breeding livestock, manufacturing cattle fodder and retail outlets selling farm inputs. A small slaughterhouse and modern meat packing unit aimed at modern trade and export markets with an investment of Rs 10 crore will be up soon.

Gaining trust

“Her ability to understand the context of the region, its people and business, and make the business thrive is phenomenal,” says R Narayanan, chief marketing officer, Samunnati, a Chennai-based company that finances FPCs, creates market linkages for them and offers advisory services.

The first problem Bavithra identified was the very nature of farming and its economics in Thoothukudi. In this rainfed region, farming is a remotely gainful activity only for a few months of the year around the north east monsoon season, there is no money supply in the agri system for the rest of the year. If farmers diversified into mushroom cultivation, poultry and goat rearing it would improve the flow of cash. “She convinced Canara bank to lend farmers Rs 10-12 crore through the FPC so that they could start off diversifying. VPPCL went door-to-door disbursing loans to the member farmers and they would queue up to repay. It is astonishing that Bavithra’s FPC has a near-zero delinquency rate on loans,” adds Samunnati’s Narayanan.        

When Bavithra was appointed VPPPC’s CEO in 2019, it had only about 800 members and teetered on the brink. Its two remaining employees were ready to quit because they hadn’t been paid for six months.

She persuaded them to stay on by paying almost all the money due to them from her pocket. With them in tow, she visited the 61 villages under VPPPC and met the farmers in person. She patiently explained she had come to improve their livelihoods and that VPPPC was planning to work with them in a mutually beneficial manner. She needed more members and their co-operation to make it sustainable. She chose the board of directors (BOD) for the company to carefully ensure fair representation of various caste groups and geographies within VPPPC’s catchment area. Three of the five BODs are women.

“Her patient communication and determination worked. From 823, the membership rose to 1500,” says Sudharani. M, a local farmer.  

Having galvanized membership, Bavithra started looking for avenues to build on their capacities and resources for generating more revenue. At that time, VPPPC’s operation was limited to running an agri input store with few things to sell.

“Male farmers often try to put me down. They say, ‘what does this papa [girl child] know about farming.’ I’m from a family of farmers and studied agriculture but have grown up in a big city like Madurai. I have a fair understanding of farming and business. It is not difficult for me to ignore the sexist barbs and do what is good for farmers,” says Bavithra in a tone that’s utterly unsentimental.

Loan lifeline

In 2019, before the year’s cultivation season commenced, through the Kisan Credit Card (KCC) scheme, Bavithra signed the guarantee for sanction of a Rs 3.5 crore loan for 350 farmers in Vilathikulam Pudur. With a track record of poor recovery, KCC was a widely rejected scheme; none of the banks was ready to reboot it. With Bavithra’s persistence, Canara bank agreed to facilitate the loan. The first disbursement at the rate of Rs 1 lakh per farmer with a one-year tenure was made for those who were ready to sign a bond with her. Without any hassle, the cultivation was wrapped up on time and the farmers repaid the loan soon after.

This helped Bavithra gain the farmers’ trust.

“Bavithra has succeeded because she has great management skills. As a long-time member of VPPPC I will fully support her and her initiatives,” says A. Murugavel, a farmer-member of VPPPC from a village called Muthusamypuram.

In 2020, at the peak of Covid-19 lockdown, the state agricultural marketing department enlisted VPC to organize mobile carts to supply villages in the area with vegetables sourced from Madurai and Aruppukottai. The demand for essentials during the crisis was such that Bavithra  added groceries too to the mobile carts. VPPPC’s sales skyrocketed from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 60 lakh. “For us, it was an unexpected boom in the time of tragedy,” recalls Bavithra, now married to a local taxi fleet operator and a mother of two young boys.

Hedging bets

She applied for grant funding under the Mission on Sustainable Dry Land Agriculture (MSDA), a government scheme aimed at helping dryland farming. Bavithra bagged the Rs 20 lakh grant. With an additional working capital of Rs 5 lakh in the form of loans, she invested in millet and oil processing units. The unit started generating daily income by milling flour for the local population.

As part of a private firm’s Covid-19 relief drive, the FPC bagged a big order to supply oil sachets to the poor. To fulfill the order, VPPPC procured sunflower and groundnut seeds from farmers, initially on credit basis. Close to 8000 litres of oil production brought in further revenue of Rs 60 lakh.

The farmers were ready to take the pulp and seeds left after crushing to feed the goats and sheep. Identifying the demand for feed, VPPPC set up a cattle feed shop. A veterinary pharmacy followed.

With a productive, profitable portfolio in hand, Bavithra approached Samunnati for a working capital loan to expand the agri inputs business. In three months, sales doubled helping her open a supermarket called Marudham selling mostly local produce.

Thoothukudi district has the right agro-climatic conditions for breeding kodi aadu, a type of country goat that has long legs and lanky appearance, reared for meat. But the rate of mortality was high. As an experiment, Bavithra purchased six baby goats and reared them at a farm owned by one of the BODs. When the number multiplied to 13, a goat farm was set up in a rented establishment. Today, the farm buys farmers’ goats and also sells healthy foals to them. Now there are 250 goats in the farm that are ready for sale.

VPPPC has successfully created better market access for farmers, helped them tap various state and central government schemes, and trained them to tap opportunities for value addition.

“Bavithra’s committed approach has transformed the farmers’ enthusiasm to collaborate and grow,” says A Balamurugan, a state agriculture officer in region.

Despite her successes, Bavithra’s ambition is to become an officer in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Perhaps it’s a desire that stems from her struggles to bring change without the State’s backing. “I will have more power to implement ideas that are good for farmers. They will listen to me more readily,” she says.

“Look, Samunnati or any private sector company in the agri sector would hire Bavithra without batting an eyelid with her skills of leadership and the ability to execute ideas,” says Samunnati’s Narayanan.

Government’s gain would be a big loss for Vilathikulam’s farmers.

Vijayalakshmi Sridhar is a business, technology, food and environment writer based in Chennai.

MS Swaminathan was an inspiration and hero to scientists the world over

Posted on October 8th, 2023

In the annals of India’s agricultural history, one name stands out brilliantly–MS Swaminathan, popularly known as MSS. His passing away, at the age of 98 years, on September 28, 2023 in Chennai has left a void that can never be filled, but his indomitable spirit and vision will continue to inspire generations of young scientists and shape the course of agriculture for years to come.

International impact

Born on August 7, 1925, in Kumbakonam, Swaminathan dedicated his life for the betterment of humanity through his pioneering work in agriculture and food security. He was instrumental in developing high-yielding crop varieties that led to a significant increase in food production between 1960 and 1970, making India self-sufficient in food and dispelling looming fears of famine. For this monumental contribution, he is hailed as the ‘Father of India’s Green Revolution’. Professor Swaminathan’s research contributions to agriculture were not confined to India alone. He actively collaborated with international organizations, including Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR), UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UNESCO leveraging his vast knowledge and expertise to tackle global food security challenges. Notably, he played a key role in the establishment of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in India (where I worked for 17 years), the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (now known as Biodiversity International) in Italy and the International Council for Research in Agro-Forestry in Kenya. His guidance was instrumental in shaping numerous institutions in China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran, and Cambodia.

Swaminathan had a distinguished educational background. He pursued his BSc at the University of Kerala and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. He completed his MSc from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) and was a UNESCO Fellow at Wageningen Agricultural University. Subsequently, he earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge and undertook post-doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin. In a defining decision, he declined a faculty position in the USA, choosing to return to India in 1954 to drive impactful change in his homeland. Subsequently, he served the Central Rice Research Institute, IARI, and then the Indian Council of Agricultural Research as well as international organizations in various roles. He served as Director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (1966-72), Director General of ICAR and Secretary to the Government of India, Department of Agricultural Research and Education (1972-79), Principal Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture (1979-80), Acting Deputy Chairman and later Member (Science and Agriculture), Planning Commission (1980-82) and Director General, International Rice Research Institute, the Philippines (1982-88). One of his most pivotal roles came in 2004 when he was appointed chair of the National Commission on Farmers. This commission was established in response to rising farmer distress and alarming rates of suicides among farmers. The commission’s report, submitted in 2006, made several recommendations. A prominent suggestion was that the minimum selling price (MSP) should be at least 50% above the weighted average cost of production.

Farmers’ friend

Swaminathan was a steadfast advocate for smallholder farmers and sustainable farming practices. He passionately believed in harnessing the power of science to uplift the marginalized. As a staunch supporter of equipping farmers with the knowledge and resources they need, he envisioned a holistic approach to agriculture. This approach emphasizes the significance of preserving biodiversity, conserving natural resources, and adopting environmentally friendly farming techniques. To further this cause, he founded the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in 1988. Since its inception, he had been dedicatedly serving and, in recent times, guiding MSSRF in its mission to develop and promote strategies for economic growth. These strategies are primarily aimed at increasing the employment opportunities for impoverished women in rural areas.

A lodestar for Indian scientists

Having Swaminathan as an inspiration in my early career (my PhD in India and Post-doc in Germany) and then a mentor and guide since joining ICRISAT in 2005, has been a privilege and instrumental for my research career. His humility, warmth, and passion for agriculture were palpable. He was always eager to listen to young scientists, to encourage new ideas, and to guide them on the path of innovation. I learnt the importance of interdisciplinary research and collaboration from him as he always emphasized that the challenges of agriculture required a holistic approach. That’s what I adopted during my tenure at ICRISAT for 17 years (2005-2022) and continue to deploy at Murdoch University. 

I first met Swaminathan during my early days as a PhD student when I attended a conference organized by him and the late Lalji Singh at MSSRF in 1999. At that conference, I received the Best Poster Award (along with a cash prize of Rs 2000!) from Swaminathan. It remains one of the most joyous moments of my life. I then met him again in 2000 at the 2nd International Crop Science Congress in Hamburg, Germany. While I was in Germany from 2001 to 2005, I stayed in touch with Swaminathan through letters and emails. However, after joining ICRISAT in 2005, I had the privilege of interacting with him more frequently. Our numerous meetings and interactions took place at ICRISAT, MSSRF, and other locations in India and abroad. I invited him to deliver keynote speeches at several international conferences. Similarly, I attended many meetings organized by Swaminathan at MSSRF in Chennai. 

Swaminathan’s life was remarkable, marked by dedication, innovation, and a profound love for the land. I recall an interaction with him during an FAO meeting in Bangkok in 2016. Despite being on a wheelchair, he was among the invited experts. Considering his advanced age and mobility challenges, I said, “Sir, you have already contributed so much to international agriculture. Perhaps you shouldn’t strain yourself by travelling so extensively.” Before I could finish, he replied, “Rajeev, interacting with young minds like yours at scientific meetings keeps me abreast of the latest advancements in agricultural science. That’s what motivates and energizes me to travel at this age.” He added, “I can’t imagine just sitting in my office when I believe I can still make a contribution to society.”

Indeed, I believe that the qualities exemplified by Swaminathan have been passed down to his children. His three daughters are proud bearers of his legacy–Soumya Swaminathan, formerly the Chief Scientist with the World Health Organization (WHO) and now the Chairperson of MSSRF; Dr. Madhura Swaminathan, an economist and Professor at the Economic Analysis Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore; and Nitya Swaminathan, a specialist in gender and rural development. All of them are actively contributing to societal change and human welfare.

Having been immersed in genome sequencing since 2007, I’ve always been intrigued by the secret behind Swaminathan’s boundless energy, enthusiasm, and intelligence. So, when he visited our Genomics Centre at ICRISAT, we asked if he’d be willing to provide a blood sample. With the support and collaboration of CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology and BGI-Shenzhen (China), we isolated his DNA, sequenced, and analyzed his genome. I had the honour of presenting his genome sequence (stored on a pen drive) to Swaminathan on his 90th birthday at MSSRF in 2015. 

“When I was working on my PhD, I began to understand the double helical structure of DNA. But I never imagined I’d one day hold the fully decoded sequence of my own genome in my hands,” he said. 

Such moments and interactions have served as a beacon of inspiration for countless young minds in agricultural sciences, both in India and internationally.

A lasting legacy

Swaminathan was not just a towering figure in agricultural science, but a genuine hero. His illustrious career was marked with countless awards and accolades, including Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, the Ramon Magsaysay Award, and the Albert Einstein World Science Award, Fellow of The Royal Society, Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan, Padma Vibhushan, World Food Prize.  I feel privileged to be one of few Indian agricultural scientists following in his footsteps to receive Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award and become a Fellow of The Royal Society. It was a moment of immense pride for me when upon informing Swaminathan of my election to the FRS in May 2023, I received his warm congratulatory message the very next day. He wrote “I am very happy to note that you have been elected as a Fellow of Royal Society. Kindly accept my congratulations and very best wishes on your well deserved accomplishment. A Fellow is someone who makes an “original contribution.” I wish you good health and much happiness.” That message remains my final cherished communication with him. During my conferment as an FRS at The Royal Society in July 2023, I was shown the esteemed 363-year-old Royal Society Charter, which bore the signatures of all its Fellows. The very first signature I sought was Swaminathan’s, inscribed in 1973. Finding and holding his signature filled me with elation; it was as if I was floating on cloud nine.

In closing, while we mourn the loss of Prof Swaminathan, we must also celebrate his enduring legacy. He exemplified how science can serve as a catalyst for positive change, demonstrating that research can and should be channelled to address tangible challenges. His tireless efforts and unwavering commitment to the cause of agriculture served as an inspiration for us all. We were motivated to follow in his footsteps, to carry forward his legacy, and to contribute to the growth and prosperity of agriculture. His legacy continues to inspire researchers, policymakers, and advocates worldwide to address the pressing challenges of our time, from climate change to sustainable agriculture.

Rajeev Varshney is Director of the Centre for Crop & Food Innovation, Director, State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre and International Chair in Agriculture & Food Security with the Murdoch University, Australia. This piece first appeared in his blog.