Previous milestones in this evolutionary journey: Krishi.System 0.0 - > Agribusiness Matters 5.0

******************************************

Dear Friends,

I am rebooting Krishi.System 1.0 to rejig my content game in the advent of AI. Wearing a reductionist’s hat, content game can be played in two ways. There is timely content that provides notes for the historians of the future and the changemakers of the present. And there is timeless content that can withstand the vicissitudes of time. My content, so far, has been content to lean tad too much on the former rather than the latter. I am doing the necessary course-correction to bring that balance.

If you’ve been paying attention, I start my subscriber-only posts as “State of Agritech - <Date>”. I think this model is now becoming obsolete.

I am doing two changes.

One, I am officially retiring the word “Agritech”. Today, it means everything and nothing. If you are the kind to pay attention to the devil’s detail, I opened my last post with the header, “Meditations on Food Systems”.

Two, and the most important one is this: I am including more timeless content, alongside timely ones. Of course, the very idea of content is transient. But we can aspire better to create things that can last the tides of time.

I am kickstarting this with my systems change strategy artefact on regenerative transition. It’s a distillation of a question I have circled in this newsletter for four years: What would it take to accelerate a regenerative transition across India's smallholding contexts? Can a farming household eat its own food, stay healthy, grow healthy food for the people it sells to, and live with abundance? It examines these questions through an eight steps framework for systems change.

I hope you enjoy this new version of Krishi.System 1.0. Feedback, suggestions and brickbats most welcome. This work has been a labour of love and you all make it worthwhile:)

I am also introducing few new perks. Annual subscribers get these timeless content artefacts for free; Patron members get access to my Global Agritech 101 course for free, besides all the artefacts that will be published and lots of good karma for supporting my food system ecosystem engineering endeavors.

P.S. Special Thanks to Vivek VS for spurring this shift in my content game.

Cheers

Venky

Meditations on Food Systems - 21st August 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ The Next Two Decades

As India celebrates 80th year of independence, two decades of work left to fulfill our collective promise for vibrant agrarian futures when India celebrates her 100th year of Independence.

2/ Systems Change Strategy for Regenerative Transition

What would it take to accelerate regenerative transition across India's smallholding contexts? Can a farming household eat their own food, stay healthy, grow healthy food for the community they serve and live a life of abundance?

If you don’t want Stripe’s notorious CC hassles, you are most welcome to sign up through Nas.io or 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 across Nas.io (where Community engagements will kickoff) and you will get complimentary access to paid Substack content in one membership.

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.

Upcoming Krishi.System Events

1/ Vizag Agripreneurs Meet - 26th August 2026 | Venue: Ratan Tata Innovation Hub | Time: 630 PM - 830 PM | RSVP here

I’m traveling to Vizag and would love to meet agripreneurs in town. Hosting Vizag Agripreneurs Meet in collaboration with Ratan Tata Innovation Hub (RTIH) AP and AgriMinds Ecosystem Foundation.

2/ Varta-Seeds DPG AMA with Guptajee - 21st August 2026 | Venue: Zoom | Time: 4 PM - 530 PM | RSVP here

I am hosting an AMA with Ashish Gupta—Guptajee—to take a closer look at VARTA-Seeds, a work-in-progress Digital Public Goods architecture being developed by Gram Disha Trust and Core Stack at IIT Delhi.

VARTA-Seeds seeks to place institutional seed-biodiversity knowledge directly in the hands of farmers. Using localized AI and vector search, it translates dense regulatory gazettes into accessible vernacular information mapped to specific agroclimatic zones. Designed as a participatory commons, its memory can evolve through field-level contributions and farmer logs—strengthening regional seed knowledge and sovereignty over time.

1/ The Next Two Decades

I don’t know about you. When you hit forties, the sense of death starts pervading your subconscious. You see grey hair. You see interesting shifts in your perspective. You learn to enjoy silence as an art of self-expression. You pass through questions that used to bother you with a smile. You see people around you die. You see old enchanted ideas becoming everyday things with a post-script that quietly murmurs, “Yeah. Alright”. You see your favorite singers die. You see your favourite aunts and comedians die. Slowly, you start preparing for that possibility that you too will pass on.

Kabir, in one of his memorable poems, likens death bed to a wedding ceremony where the groom Yamraj (God of death) awaits union with the bride, decked up with garlands and flowers, waiting for that precious moment to unfold and severe ties with the known.

And a few seconds before the take-off, according to Hindu tradition, you get to see the entire movie of your life in an instant. What would you *see* in that moment?

As I took a moment of breath to celebrate India’s eightieth Independence day few days ago, It struck me that I would turn sixty-two on 15th August 2047. That is, if I am still alive:)

It felt like a poignant occasion to ask myself: What would I do over the next two decades before I reach the age ripe for official bureaucratic retirement?

If you pay attention to India’s vibrant political climate, it may seem as if the entire country is gearing up for this one day: 15th August 2047. There are all kinds of plans being made. All kinds of aspiration are floating in the air. Children are asked to write painstakingly innocent essays about how vibrant would India be in 2047.

The plans are grandiose.

India would become $30 trillion economy. India would eradicate absolute poverty and achieve multi-dimensional zero poverty. India would provide high-quality, affordable education and universal healthcare access as basic rights. India would expand workforce capabilities with 100% skilled labor and raise female participation in economic activity to 70%.

To reach the $30 trillion GDP milestone and raise the per-capita income to approximately $18,000, India requires a consistent 8% real GDP growth per annum until 2047. Closer home, in the domain of agriculture, that would also mean, as per official documentation, India would achieve less than 5% post-harvest loss and greater than 75% farm mechanization by 2047.

Beneath these economic plans, there is a deeper spiritual reason behind the fervor: India would finally be able to stand with spine erect and wear the label “Developed Country” with pride.

During an interaction with a correspondent on 6.6.1947, Mahatma Gandhi wrote a powerful statement that still resonates with me.

“You are gravely mistaken in assuming that as soon swaraj [self-rule] comes, prosperity will flood the country. If, before assuming that, you had used your imagination a bit to see that after 150 years of slavery, we would need at least half that much time to cleanse our body politic of the virus that has infiltrated every cell and pore of our being during our subjection, you would not have found it necessary to ask me.”

Would India finally be free, in the truest spiritual sense of the word, on 15th August 2047?

I am not interested in doing intellectual masturbation examining whether these plans are feasible in the climate emergency futures we inevitably see today.

There is a grand aspiration in the air. And my question, as a concerned citizen of India who cares about her future, scratch that, our futures, would be: What would I contribute to this grand orchestra of hope?

Few days ago, in a conversation with , we discussed two goals that are worthwhile to achieve vibrant agrarian futures and got into a friendly debate

Goal 1: Four Unlocks to Achieve India’s Vibrant Agrarian Futures

1. Unlocking Land as a resource - What would it take to unlock land as a resource and give the agency to the farmers to decide what to grow and exit agriculture if god forbid they want to?

2. Unlock Soil as an Asset - What would it take to treat soil as an asset instead of treating it callously as an income?

3. Unlock Infrastructure as an Asset - What would it take to build better infrastructure that can deal with the adverse effects of agritech - development death cycle?

   

4. Unlock Technology as an Asset - Can we unlock technology’s licensing potential which has been hugely under-indexed in Indian Agriculture?

   Goal 2: What would it take to accelerate regenerative transition in Indian Agriculture from 5-6% to 25%

   In India, out of 93 Million farmers (based on 2019-20 census), we have around 5-6% of Indian farmers who practice regenerative farming. Of course, I take every public number in India with a heavy dose of salt, at the risk of straining my cardiovascular system.

   

With my work transitioning from a strict agritech/agribusiness lens to Food and Agriculture System lens, I am watching life lovingly providing me with wings to go beyond my comfort zone and help me address Goal 2 - regenerative transition challenge - head on.

I seem to have a bias towards Goal 2 although I am increasingly seeing Goal 1 to be equally important, especially around the question of unlocking Land as a resource.

Perhaps, the answer lies in holding both Goals loosely enough so that I am able to address the inherent tension that lies underneath them.

One thing is clear. The harder the systems change problem I chase, the lighter I must feel from inside while tackling them. If that’s not happening in my inner climate, surely, I must be doing something wrong.

Let’s see:)

2/ Systems Change Strategy for Regenerative Transition

I prepared this strategy artefact as a part of my Mastery in Systems Leadership fellowship. This began as a question I have circled in this newsletter for four years. What would it take to accelerate regenerative transition across India’s smallholding contexts? Can a farming household eat their own food, stay healthy, grow healthy food for the community they serve and live a life of abundance?

Answering this wicked, tangled question urged me to build a way of seeing before I could find my way through any answer.

Where does the system begin and end? Who are its actors, and where has trust broken between them? Where is the energy, and where is the resistance? Which feedback loops keep the old pattern in place, and which small opening could compound into a new one? The eight steps of system change are the scaffolding I used to hold all of this in one frame.

This deck would be only available for annual and founding members. It has already been shared with few friends whom I know are serious about regenerative transition.

If you are also seriously working on these goals, I am happy to speak with you.

Treating agriculture as a business and treating it as sacred have both ended with farmers capturing less of the value they create.

What would it take to move past this and accelerate a regenerative transition across India's smallholding contexts without romanticizing the small or worshipping scale?

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 “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend

Meditations on Food Systems - 14th August 2026

1/ How to deal with India’s Ethanol predicament?

There are problems to be solved and predicaments to respond to. There was a time when Ethanol was a problem to be solved in India. Today, it is a predicament to respond to.

2/ When Algorithms Take Over Village Planning

wrote a fascinating essay about algorithms taking over village planning in India’s new draft rural employment law. If you open the hood and pay attention to the devil’s detail, you discover that the problem is much more than what it seems.

3/ Reflections from Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet

If you don’t want Stripe’s notorious CC hassles, you are most welcome to sign up through Nas.io or 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 across Nas.io (where Community engagements will kickoff) and you will get complimentary access to paid Substack content in one membership.

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.

Upcoming Krishi.System Events

1/ How to deal with India’s Ethanol predicament?

Many moons ago, a wise man taught me the difference between a problem and a predicament. As John Michael Greer wrote,

There are problems to be solved and predicaments to respond to. There was a time when Ethanol was a problem to be solved in India. Today, it is a predicament to respond to.

Why does this distinction matter?

When you look at Ethanol as a problem, you start to zoom in excessively on Ethanol and its attendant problems while forgetting solar.

When you look at Ethanol as a predicament, you ask an important question: Is India using its farmland for the right kind of energy in the first place?

’s thought experiment is deeply helpful.

Take the land the world currently uses -about 32 million hectares net- to grow biofuel crops. Cover the same land with solar panels instead. You would produce around 22 times more energy. Crops convert less than 1% of incoming sunlight into usable biomass. Solar panels convert around 20%.

India crossed 162 gigawatts of installed solar by June 2026, up 57-fold in a decade, the third-largest solar fleet in the world. A megawatt of solar needs about four to five acres. On the other side, India blends 20% ethanol, produces 661 crore litres of it, and still makes almost all of it from first-generation food crops.

Holding E20 to 2030 on today's crops would need 7 to 9 million hectares, the entire cropped area of Andhra Pradesh, by Arcus Policy Research's reckoning.

The predicament we face on the ground is this: The same government racing to 20% ethanol on food crops is also running the world's third-largest solar build-out. The government's own 2025-26 Economic Survey admits the bind, warning of "an emerging tension between Aatmanirbharta [self-sufficiency] in energy and Aatmanirbharta [self-sufficiency] in food."

The government has no incentive to get itself out of this bind.

41 of India's 75 ethanol companies, a full 57.7%, are owned by politicians across every party. 1

The farmer has a new income line. The politician has a new product line. The state has saved ₹1.9 lakh crore in foreign exchange and displaced 30 million tonnes of crude imports. Who would want to rock this boat?

India hit 20% blending five years early precisely because nobody with power wanted it stopped.

Of course, facing record sugar prices and a drought-hit cane crop in Maharashtra and Karnataka, the government has begun weighing a cut to the sugarcane going into ethanol. Mills would be told to stop making ethanol from cane juice and B-heavy molasses, and to lean on C-heavy molasses instead, the residue left after most of the sugar is pulled out.

What moved the government was the sugar price, not water data or the vanishing pulses or the food-security warning in its own Economic Survey.

The state acts on ethanol only when ethanol threatens sugar. The sugar lobby is already pushing for E27, and 100% ethanol is now a legally recognised transport fuel.

If we are serious about resolving this bind, there is only way to work with the powers that be.

Treat ethanol as a bridge fuel to an electrified future and price it like one. Cap its claim on food crops, push it patiently toward crop residues and degraded-land feedstocks, and stop pretending a higher blend number is the goal.2

I’m not being cynical here.

Second-generation ethanol, made from crop residue and biomass rather than food crops, is the technically clean answer. India has chased it since 2019 through the PM JI-VAN scheme. The results are sobering. The flagship Panipat plant runs at only 62% of capacity, defeated by the shifting moisture and silica in the straw it feeds on. Two years into commercial production, it still has not passed its contracted performance-guarantee test. IOCL has withheld half the licence fee owed to its technology provider. The build cost has crept to ₹984 crore against an approved ₹909 crore.

Second-generation ethanol costs about ₹120 a litre to make, against ₹72 for the maize-based kind, and there is still no standardised process for it. The International Energy Agency reports the same fragility worldwide.

The bottom line is an uncomfortable truth: India is attempting to imitate Brazil prematurely. India must first build the feedstock supply chain first, the aggregation, the storage and the farmer-aggregator contracts. And then build the plant.

When the same acre that yields a litre of ethanol can yield twenty times the energy as electricity, and can do it without the farmer giving up her food crop, why should the farmer choose biofuel over solar?

Why should the farmer have to choose between growing food, growing fuel, and harvesting sunlight, when on the same land, she can do all three?

Why not organise farmers into a community-owned solar utility, on the model of a milk cooperative, let them hold equity in a special-purpose vehicle, and the farmer stops being a tenant on her own land and becomes a co-owner of the power plant?

What is the moral of the story? There are plenty of possibilities for systems change even if the macro picture looks bleak:)

2/ When Algorithms Take Over Village Planning

I began to pay deeper attention to India’s new rural employment law after reading ’s fascinating essay about algorithms taking over village planning in India’s new draft rural employment law.

The plan cannot be faulted for its ambition:

“The planning framework marks a paradigm shift from traditional demand-based or “wish-list” approaches towards a scientific, geospatially enabled, and resource-optimised model of rural development”

But how does this framework work in the first place?

The document that will decide what two and a half lakh Indian villages build over the next two decades was published in June 2026 by the Ministry of Rural Development and the German development agency GIZ, under a project called “Support to India's Water Vision 2047”. It carries seven named authors and one reviewing IAS officer. It is called the Draft Framework for the Viksit Gram Panchayat Plan.

Somewhere inside the document is a fascinating table. It counts the works a Gram Panchayat is permitted to propose.

Seventy-two work types. Three hundred and eighteen permissible works. Two hundred and twenty-one of them new construction, ninety-seven of them repair and maintenance. Water security gets 107 options. Core rural infrastructure gets 88. Rural livelihood gets 86. Disaster mitigation gets 37.

The most fascinating statement in the document comes in the section 2.3

Did you pay attention to the fine print? The algorithm has become the first planner and the Gram Sabha has become the reviewer.

Here is how it works.

The Yuktidhara portal ingests layers from PM Gati Shakti, India-WRIS and Bhuvan. It runs a gap assessment. It produces a shortlist of works with proposed coordinates, site boundaries and dimensions. The planning team walks into the hamlet consultation carrying findings and the Gram Sabha assembles to “ground truth” and “validate, refine and prioritise interventions based on local needs and conditions”.

Are you kidding me?

Anyone who has visited India’s villages knows what a joke this could turn out into the ground.

Now, let’s rewind and examine MGNREGA’s planning in the first place.

The most recent all-India performance audit the CAG ever conducted on MGNREGA covered April 2007 to April 2013. It sampled 3,848 Gram Panchayats across 182 districts, 458 blocks, 28 states and 4 Union Territories. There has not been another one since.

Yes, you read it right. We have only decade-old data.

In 1201 sampled Gram Panchayats across eleven states, roughly thirty-one percent, the annual plan was either never prepared or prepared incompletely. In three states, including Andhra Pradesh, not one sampled Gram Panchayat had made a plan at all.

District labour budgets were missing in 49 districts, a quarter of those sampled. And where plans did exist, they were often hollow. In 58 districts the projected employment generation was simply left out. Many carried no shelf of works and no list of assets to be built at all. The gap between when a Gram Panchayat plan was due at the block and when it actually arrived ran from one month to twenty-one months.

What about plans that were made?

Across fourteen states and one Union Territory, 129.22 lakh works worth Rs 1,26,961 crore were approved in annual plans. Only 38.65 lakh of them, thirty percent, were actually completed in the audit period. Meanwhile, in 25 districts across nine states, nearly five thousand works were executed outside the annual plan altogether. The plan predicted one set of works, seventy percent of it never got built, and a parallel set of works appeared that no plan had authorised.

Who is in charge and where does the buck stop?

The Gram Rozgar Sevak (GRS) is the village-level functionary meant to run registration, job cards, work allocation, wage payment and social audit. The audit found vacancy rates in these posts running from twenty percent in Uttar Pradesh to ninety-three percent in Punjab. In four states, including Tamil Nadu and Kerala, no dedicated GRS had been appointed at all. In Uttar Pradesh, seventy-four percent of the money set aside to train these staff went unspent.

The deliberation that was supposed to legitimise the plan was often not happening either.Attendance studies of Gram Sabhas routinely report participation in the low double digits.

And so the honest question we need to ask is: If Gram Sabha is largely a signature on the page, can it be disrupted by an algorithm3?

A 2024 ethnographic study of MGNREGA planning captured a functionary in Jharkhand explaining, with some relief, that GIS would put an end to the whole business of gram sabhas passing schemes.

Where is GIS better suited than Gram Sabhas in passing schemes? How about groundwater?

The framework mandates minimum water expenditure floors keyed to groundwater status: sixty-five percent of spend in over-exploited and critical blocks, forty percent in semi-critical, thirty percent in safe blocks.

A farmer knows his or her borewell is failing. Can he know that the aquifer he is drawing from crosses three panchayats? Hydrology is genuinely supra-local, and local knowledge is often blind to it.

How about maintenance?

Ninety-seven of the 318 permissible works are repair and maintenance. Under MGNREGA, a silting check dam belonged to nobody. New works generated persondays, photographs and political credit. Repair generated none of those things. Making maintenance a first-class category with its own line items in the catalogue is a genuine correction to a real perverse incentive.

How about duplication?

GeoMGNREGA has geotagged more than three crore assets since the exercise began in 2016. Yuktdhara has existed as a planning portal since August 2021. If the portal can tell a panchayat that a percolation tank already exists four hundred metres from where it is about to build another one, wouldn’t that help planning of public goods better?

Can GIS act as a guard rail against elite capture? Perhaps, if it can provide its recommendation backed by data.

But how far is the data reliable?

Annexure 1 of the draft framework lists every layer the Yuktdhara portal will use for its scientific gap assessment. The satellite imagery is recent. High resolution one-metre data from 2022 to 2024. LISS-IV from 2025.

The interpretation layers are unfortunately dated. The coarse 1:50,000 Land Use Land Cover layer is dated 2015-16. Land Degradation is dated 2015-16. Geomorphology is dated 2005-06. Wetlands, pre and post monsoon, are dated 2005. And Waste Land is dated 2008-09.

What happens when the portal will tell a Gram Panchayat in 2026 that it has degraded wasteland available for plantation, on the authority of a raster generated in 2008-09?

A 2024 ICTD field study of digital planning tools for rural water security found Bhuvan's thematic layers to be spatially coarse and not temporally updated, and found that government staff were not trained to use them. Only civil society field staff attempted to use the layers and they routinely had to source higher resolution data elsewhere.

So who is exactly going to run the gap assessment, compose the maps, analyse pour points and micro-basins, and then present findings to the hamlet? We have no clue.

Here is the irony. In the older MGNREGA world, bad plans were inert while the village works were done by the sensible judgement in the ground.

In the newer VB-G-RAMG world, bad plans have no escape valve. All works must be drawn exclusively from approved Village Gram Panchayat Plans. Top-down authoritarian plans’ failure patterns have been documented adequately

1. Look at a complex and confusing reality with intricate social dynamics.

2. Fail to understand all the subtleties of how this complex reality works.

3. Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations.

4. Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like.

5. Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represent rationality.

6. Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary.

7. Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

Given that this framework still calls itself “draft”, I’m hoping it would be revised more sensibly so that technology complements democratic judgement rather than substitute it.

3/ Reflections from Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet

When I first entered Srinagar airport to pick up my luggage, I heard the birds chirping inside. My head wandered. I could only see the airport's scaffolding.

Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet manifested out of a simple conviction: Its time to build bridges and connect Kashmir's wonderful agripreneurs with the rest of India's agripreneur community.

It started off with a random LinkedIn message to Dr. Irfana Rashid. We started talking and we had around 30 agripreneurs, including farmers and my old friend KHAN MUKHTAR joining us. Agripreneur friends Manohar Sambandam Partha Chakraborty Jagadeesh Sunkad Ashok Banerjee from various parts of the country, Saumya Sen and friends from CEEW joined us.

Word started to spread about the event and Shamsuddin Saab from Kashmir Agriculture department joined us to share fascinating insights, including how Himachal Pradesh learned its market-linkage lessons from J&K and took a great leap forward.

Kashmir has incredible potential. It produces incredible agricultural products.
The ecosystem needs to be strengthened. We need allied ecosystem support that can make agripreneurs successful. There is a huge gap.

Kashmir grows the best walnut in India. It sells for half the price of a chilean one. Kashmir's apple economy runs on a single highway, NH44, often called the valley's Achilles heel. In 2025, landslides on the Ramban-Banihal stretch stranded around 22,000 tonnes of apples, about 2,200 truckloads, for nearly two weeks, right at peak harvest.

Kashmiri saffron carries a crocin content around 8.72 percent, higher than the Iranian standard, which is what gives it deeper colour and aroma. It earned a GI tag in 2020. And it still cannot command its price, because on a shelf a buyer cannot tell genuine Kashmiri saffron from threads blended with cheaper Iranian stock.

As a followup to the Kashmir Agripreneurs Meetup, we are working on an agripreneur incubator cohort specifically for regenerative value chains for Kashmir. I’m planning the next Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat in Kashmir in April 2027.

It has been seven years since Article 370 was abrogated. The important work remains: How do we build better bridges that can unlock more opportunities and prosperity for the farmers of the state? How do we unlock regenerative transition in Kashmir?

And when this model is clearer, I want to go to Arunachal Pradesh and other places where we need to build more bridges. Let's see:)

Programming Note: I’ve kept footnotes under the paywall, as they have juicy tidbits that are better served by those who enjoy this kind of nerding out and are willing to pay for it:)

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 “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend

Read more

As per the Hindu lunisolar calendar, I turn forty one with the “Aadi Krithigai” star falling today1. As a student of food systems and the civilizations that birthed them, It’s fascinating to observe how calendars shape our view of time, agriculture and civilization.

The Gregorian calendar tracks the Earth's journey around the Sun. The Hindu calendar2 tracks the Earth’s journey around the Sun3 and the Moon4, making it both an almanac for agronomy planning and monsoon prediction5 simultaneously.

The month Aadi (ஆடி) has deep agrarian significance as it marks thanksgiving for irrigation at the nick of time when cultivation season begins.

Traditional taboos in the month of Aadi - inauspicious for weddings and new ventures-acquire a new meaning when you consider its agrarian significance. With cultivation beginning at this period, it is labor-intensive season. Households are absorbed in fieldwork and the season is uncertain. Why take risks with celebrations and expenditure until the crop is sown and the horizon is set?

Fundamentally, Indic civilization is deeply agrarian.

Even the gods celebrated during this month -Mariamman and the village goddesses- are essentially about propitiating the mother goddess for good rain, a fertile field and a healthy household during the sowing season.

I’ve never deeply considered the significance of my birthday coinciding with the sowing season. Is there a meaning?

I don’t know about you.

For me, birthdays are quiet signposts to celebrate with near and dear ones and ponder: What on earth are you here for?

When you have enough grey hair in your head, you realize that it doesn't matter whether you believe
a) Universe has meaning in the curvature that makes space bend
OR
b) Universe is expanding meaningless space in which the Earth spins like a mad spinning top.

Meaning is imbued by the self, and you can cook up any cockamamie story you want to. Every time I wake up and hit the mat for my Yoga practice, I breathe and discover that meaning is a question of choice.

What am I here on Earth for? The other day a friend, in a moment of true candour, characterized me with a label that was particularly interesting: Millennial Slogger.

I come from a civilisation where work is considered as one of the paths to existential liberation/freedom/enlightenment. And I feel blessed to discover work that feels as salivating as the bumble bee drinking its own honey.

Sree Narayana Guru describes the culmination of Yoga thus:

"When mind, the bumble bee, sips the honey-like sweetness of one's own bliss, fluttering ceases and it is drawn into union."

Work becomes a slog only when there is no honey to taste. Work becomes bliss when it is yoked inside. Of this I am convinced: Any sufficiently advanced systems change is indistinguishable from Yoga.

As long as I practice Yoga, I will share the honey I discover in these spaces to the readers of Krishi.System. It has been a ritual in these spaces to offer a special gift to readers of Krishi.System on my birthday.

This year is no different. You get forty one percent discount, if you take up the Annual subscription of Krishi.System.

Get 41% off for 1 year

If you don’t want to suffer through the notorious Stripe’s indifference to Indian credit cards, you are most welcome to sign up through Nas.io or or paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) and pay the annual subscription (8500 INR/95 USD) after taking into account 41% discount (please do your math) with your email in the comments.

I will enable access immediately across Nas.io (where Community engagements will kickoff) and you will get complimentary access to paid Substack content and Nas.io Community in one single membership.

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.

You also get forty one percent discount in all the products I sell in my gumroad account (Type this discount code: G1GQYHX at the check out)

1. Global Agritech 101 Self Learning Version

2. Nine Mental Models for Agritech Founders and Investors

3. Vrikshayurveda Deepdive with Dr. AV Balasubramanian

4. Yoga of LinkedIn (incase you are curious about how I play with Social Media through the principles of Yoga)

5. Making Sense of Mineral.ai

I turn 41 today. One short of discovering the answer to the ultimate question of life, universe and everything. This year should be fun:)

Love,

Venky

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 “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend

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.

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.

Editor’s Note: This longform piece should take 14-15 minutes to read. Here is the geography I cover: Why Mandi is the most efficient post-harvest machine? - > What are its limitations? What is a Private Mandi and what is not? What is the thesis of Bloomly? What are its strengths? What are its limitations?

A Case for Private Mandi

Before we make the case for private mandi, the case for mandi must be made.

Despite all its misgivings and the truck load of perceptions it carries, we often fail to realize how efficient the Mandi system is, operating at just enough viable margins to keep the system chugging along.

Consider what the system delivers every single morning before most of the country wakes up.

Azadpur in Delhi receives around 14,000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables a day. Pineapples from Nagaland. Pomegranates from Maharashtra. Sixty percent of Kashmir's apples. Approximately 2,200+ commission agents clear roughly 20,000 + transactions a day.1

Koyambedu in Chennai turns over nearly 1,500 truckloads of produce daily and absorbs a hundred thousand visitors, with most trading done before sunrise. No cold chain2, no software, no subsidy. The whole apparatus is self-funding, settles daily, and holds almost no inventory overnight.

Two decades of organized retail, one decade of venture-funded agritech, hundreds of millions of dollars deployed haven’t managed to move even a third of fresh produce out of this chain. Per tonne moved, per rupee of capital employed, per dispute generated, the Mandi is the most efficient post-harvest machine India has ever run.

Given how India’s political economy works, I am now convinced that it is churlish to think that Mandi can be replaced warts and all. If we are enterprising enough to reimagine Mandi, it must be done through a new architecture that grows much like weeds on an old building, slowly taking the best of it and removing the worst out of it.

Because, let’s be honest. Mandi provides a bundle of services no other rural institution provides together. For outsiders not clued into the Mandi’s belly, here is a quick primer.

At the end of the day, what does Mandi really do in its ideal design intent?

It aggregates scattered harvests into tradeable lots. It discovers3 price through an open auction where rival buyers bid on the same heap. It assures quality floor by physical inspection4. It settles5 the same day with deductions fixed by statute6 and a paper trail attached to a licensed name. It clears everything7 — any quantity, any quality, some price — as the farmer values a certain sale over anything else. Some price beats no sale for a perishable every time.

How does this system perpetuate its legitimacy? It broadcasts feeding arrivals and prices into the public record that farmers fifty kilometres away use to decide what to sow.

Let’s build a proper vocabulary to be more nuanced while talking about Mandis. There are two types of mandis. Those which are seller-led at production regions. And those which are buyer-led at consumption regions. As my friend VS Vivek defines it, in both these regions, traders are selling to other businesses whose job is to resell to either different region or different consumer.

Every Mandi’s rules are written by its buyers.

V.S. Vivek’s example from his Subjimandi venture days is illustrative here.

Solapur and Nashik both trade onion round the year, barely 250 kilometres apart, yet Solapur trades in bags and Nashik sells loose on tractor wagons. Solapur's buyers are traders reselling to Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, while Nashik serves buyers from every region including exporters. Same crop, same state, different buyer mix, different market.

The same is the case with sweet lime. They are sold in production mandis as loose direct loads of 10-24 ton vehicles. Consumption Mandis pack them in 25-30kg bags as per buyer convenience.

India has roughly 2,477 principal regulated markets and about 4,843 sub-yards. No official census splits them into production and consumption side mandi. An APMC is an APMC. But if you pay attention to the geography, the classification becomes obvious.

The overwhelming majority of the seven thousand sit in producing regions, because that is where the Acts of the 1960s and 1970s built them: one yard per tehsil, to regulate the first sale of the local crop. The consumption mandis are a thin crust on top, a few dozen big-city terminal markets, perhaps a hundred or so yards nationally that primarily distribute the produce. Practically every metro has between one and four of these big-city terminal markets.

Between production and consumption ends, the produce runs a relay. Intermediary must exist at every regional boundary to move between these mandis, insider enough to know the customs of both yards, buying enough volume to make the truck economically viable.

Ownership changes hands at every hop by design. Farmer to trader in the local mandi, trader to buyer in the consumption mandi. This happens as we are dealing with an ungraded trade where price cannot travel without the produce.

Quality and grade parameters are never standardized across the journey of the value chain for a reason. Every vendor gets to define quality and grade in their way. It is their currency of trading.

The mandi’s quality assurance rests on inspection of physically present goods. This hands the person who grades the power to price. The arhatiyas has been quietly converting that power into the ten percent commission paid, prevalent in the fruit trade, irrespective of the outcome with ten percent wastage deduction added as a cherry on the cake along with 1 percent loading and unloading charges.

Here is the spanner in the wheels.

The Mandi is facilitating the sale without ownership in an environment that benefits from price uncertainty and opaque price discovery. And if that weren’t enough, the absence of a guaranteed closing price—with or without an auction—adds to the uncertainty. Working capital bottlenecks are mitigated by traders through delays in farmer /aggregator payments.

This, unfortunately, is what makes Mandi transactions a zero-sum game for the farmer.

The farmer is fighting a battle of diminishing returns every time he steps into the Mandi.8 This is evident in anecdotal data that is emerging across several Mandis. There has been significant dip in farmer footfall across Mandis with farmers preferring private traders over Mandis. The earliest evidence points out to 2012-13 and this trend has accelerated further.

“Nationally representative data of agricultural households suggests that only 25% of all transactions in India during 2012-13 passed through these mandis, whereas 55.9% were sold to private traders.” (Source)

“In the same period of 2018, only 8 per cent of paddy was sold in APMCs. Take the example of pulses: only 22 per cent of arhar landed in APMCs in 2018, compared to 66 per cent in 2012.”

“…The share of wheat marketed by farmers in APMCs dropped from 44 per cent in 2013 to 13 per cent in 2019. That for mustard declined from 63 per cent to 13 per cent.” (Source)

“…For paddy and wheat, only 29% and 44% of the harvest is sold in a mandi, while 49% and 36% goes to local private traders or input dealers" (Source)

Instead of replacing Mandi as the site of transactions, why not bring more skin in the game with the facilitator-aggregator taking the risk by owning the produce and providing price certainty, besides providing grading slip to the seller?

That’s Bloomly’s Private Mandi thesis in a nutshell.

Bloomly is a bootstrapped fruit business with a small team in Bengaluru that is building a Private mandi model in consumption side regions.

The word “Private Mandi” comes here after a lot of thought-wrangling. If you look around, you would see plenty of “Private Mandis” out there. Last week, I covered one in Himachal for apples by Ninjacart.

For some, Private Mandi is replicating the design principles of the public mandi, including the auction system in a private market context. For some, Private Mandi is setting up destination markets where the facilitator aggregates from aggregators(who in turn buy from farmers without true ownership) and acts as a guarantee for collection.

Ownership is the key differentiator here as it provides skin in the game.

Here is how the model works on the ground.

The farmer or aggregator enters Bloomly’s private mandi with credentials. Weight is taken and the moisture loss is adjusted openly. The produce is graded into A, B and C grades. GRN is created instantly and spot payment is done through RTGS/UPI mechanisms.

This thesis is predicated on the key contrarian insight that the web of incentives in the Mandi system make the B-grade and C-grade (what is commonly called Misfits) irrelevant, often cleared at throwaway dirt prices, reducing the incomes earned by farmers.

Several fresh produce players don’t care enough about C-grade produce deeply enough to have avenues to liquidate them. Neither the Modern-trade nor the Mandi have the right incentives to liquidate the C-grade produce.

Here is a rough thumb rule breakup of the journey the produce takes from the farmgate to the Mandi. The modus operandi among the mandi players is simple. Mix B-Grade with A grade so that price and margins get adjusted.

In contrast, here is how the hierarchy of the grades plays out with Bloomly.

A-grade finds its way to the modern trade and quick commerce. A-grade and B-grade finds its way to the general trade- which occupies the highest pie of trade- where the demand is real and price-sensitive buyers value it properly. C-grade produce becomes cut-fruit, smoothies, juices, pulp where cosmetic appearance is irrelevant and the produce is finally paid for what it actually is.

How does Bloomly procure different commodities ? Here is a snapshot of their hybrid-sourcing fruit universe in action circa 2026.

Hybrid sourcing is key here as each article has its idiosyncratic supply and demand cycle and this diversity is equally reflected in the avenues that are available to liquidate the produce. This ensures that the market design is no longer unhealthily dependent on the premium grades alone.

If you pay attention to their hybrid-sourcing fruit universe, you would notice that Collection Center procurement is blank. Why is this the case?

Collection center procurement is rife with leakage/ corruption issues with employees often doing illegal side-business with the buyer and manipulating the employer with fake transactions. The leakage issues plaguing collection centers have prompted larger collection center players to pivot aggressively toward local vendors, suppliers, and Mandis.

The advantage of this model is that the entire lot clears at fair value instead of one-third of it carrying the economics of the whole. Wastage falls because B-grade moves fast enough to stay consumable. And blended basket margin lifts not by squeezing anyone in the chain, but by capturing value the chain was quietly throwing away.

So what are the limitations of this model?

Today, there are far more traders willing to play the old game, pass the relay of ownership by coupling price-discovery with the sale of produce than traders like Bloomly who are willing to own the produce and the risk and decouple price-discovery with the sales of the produce.

In an ideal world, we would be a lot better if we can do farm-gate sourcing with machine-generated grade slips. But the risks of corruption, leakage and consistency will always remain.

When the vehicle’s trip is priced at per trip rather than per kilo, there is a stronger case for aggregators to do this far more profitably than farmers.9 This is the reason why seventy to eighty-five percent of consumption-side arrivals come through aggregators and the rest via farmers. Ten years down the line, the farmer pie is bound to increase and arrive at an optimal mix. There are two trajectories at play here: One, Farmers gain share as DCs multiply and the near-radius grows. Two, Declared benchmark prices force aggregators to bid up the farm gate.

At the end of the day, the fundamental question remains: Is the farmer's trip to the private mandi actually cheaper than the trader's pickup at his gate? Or if the farmer is better off, if he takes the transit risk on his own and sell at the price he sees fit?

The biggest limitation of this model is what I call Informationalization paradox.

An efficient model that works on the ground is not what is often favored by the investors. Here is the paradox in action: The more you informationalize the transaction, the more personnel you hire, and your cost curve starts climbing.

Refuse to informationalize and there is no tangible difference between you and the trader.

A private mandi privatizes price discovery and the state has noticed the category. Karnataka's March 2025 APMC amendment pulls warehouses and dark stores under APMC licensing and cess. Would the fate of private mandi also suffer from the same policy cholesterol that public mandi is beset with? I don’t know.

One thing is for sure. Private Mandis are already here and unevenly distributed. If they tweak their business model to align with fundamental Mandi reform principles that provide better margins and transparency with price-certainty for farmers, the possibilities are immense.

For starters, Private Mandis can start building closed-loop regulatory infrastructure in the near futures. They could publish pan-India wide grading standards, deduction and price basis on every transaction slip happening across the country, open the transaction log to ombudsman audits and share the price feed through consortium structures via API feeds.

The Future of Private Mandi can be bright as long as long as the farmer can read on one slip -the grade, deduction and reason- everything that the Mandi never showed.

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 “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend

State of Agritech - 24th July 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ From Loans to Securitization: Why Indian Agribusinesses Are Rewiring Working Capital

Farmart and few exporter friends in the agripreneur community are increasingly preferring working capital securitization models to address their working capital needs. Double clicking on Unnati’s ₹17 crore debt raise from Recur Club, an AI-native debt platform.

2/ Making Sense of a Phoenix called Ninjacart

How has Ninjacart’s 2023 reboot evolved thus far? What is Ninjacart’s Private Mandi strategy? How to understand their recent fundraise?

3/ Making Sense of Anmasa’s fundraise

88% of India's wheat flour market is unorganized and local mills struggle with hygiene and consistency. Can Anmasa formalize this market with all its attendant complexity?

4/ The Whole Truth Chocolates Vs Manam Chocolates

The Whole Truth and Manam both make chocolate with Indian cacao. The Whole Truth buys dried beans. Manam buys wet cacao fruit. What does cacao sourcing of Whole Truth Foods and Manam tell us about the tradeoffs the founders have made in their agripreneurship journeys?

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.

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.

Read more

State of Agritech - 16th July 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ What should India download from Netherlands’ blueprint?

The second largest agricultural exporter on Earth is extraordinarily good at producing, processing, trading and exporting high-value agricultural products. What should India download from Netherlands’ blueprint? And what it shouldn't?

2/ Double Clicking on PRAGATI: Can India’s Largest Privately Held Agri-Entrepreneurship Program deliver the goods?

Governments, Corporates and Global Foundations are joining hands to train 20,000 agri-entrepeneurs who will serve 200,000 smallholders. The initiative targets a 30% rise in farmer incomes and a 15-20% yield boost in paddy, maize and potato, with regenerative practices adopted by at least a fifth of participating farmers. Are these targets feasible? What would it take to deliver these targets?

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.

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.

Upcoming Krishi.System Event:

1/ What should India download from Netherlands’ blueprint?

A recent paper from Nature asks an extremely important question: Is Netherlands feeding the world? Or is the world feeding Netherlands’ livestock?

Before we answer this provocative question that carries deep political ramifications, let’s set the context.

The Netherlands is extraordinarily good at producing, processing, trading and exporting high-value agricultural products. It has built one of the world’s most sophisticated agri-food ecosystems: greenhouses, seed systems, logistics, cold chains, knowledge institutions, farmer training, water control, precision horticulture. It has cracked what it takes to unleash dense collaboration between government, companies and research.

The Dutch model offers a seductive answer to every country struggling with fragmented farms, poor quality, weak logistics and climate stress: Make agriculture scientific, controlled, export-oriented and institutionally coordinated.

And India has been salivating.

Punjab’s chief minister, after touring the World Horti Center in Westland, announced plans for a horticulture learning centre built on the same lines, as Punjab’s path to redemption from its water-guzzling crops

The eighth Joint Working Group on agriculture between the two countries recorded that bilateral Centres of Excellence have demonstrated advanced technologies, produced quality planting material and trained thousands of farmers, and that both sides now want to scale the model into more states and more horticulture subsectors.

This year’s India–Netherlands joint statement went further, committing to Clean Plant Centres and an Indo-Dutch Centre of Excellence on dairy training in Bengaluru.

The Dutch government’s own India-facing agriculture page calls the offer a ‘Dutch Integrated Approach’, where companies, government and research institutes work together to squeeze more out of scarce resources.

The industry cluster HortiRoad2India expects India’s first fully operational high-tech greenhouse to begin production by the end of this year.

But the question remains. What can India exactly learn from Netherlands? And more importantly, what should India NOT LEARN from Netherlands.

When we peel the mythology surrounding the Dutch model and go one step deeper, we discover this uncomfortable duality: The Netherlands is the second-largest exporter of agricultural goods on earth. It is also, on balance, an importer of calories and protein.

Here is the data in plain sight.

Dutch agriculture uses about 1.6 million ha inside the Netherlands, but current production, consumption and exports also depend on about 4.7 million ha abroad, largely for food and animal-feed imports.

How the paper arrived at this insight is deeply fascinating.

Ben van Selm, Imke de Boer and colleagues at Wageningen ran the Dutch food system through an agroecological model. They asked how many people the Netherlands could actually feed from its own soil. The answer is roughly its own population. But there is a catch here: Only if the crops the country cannot grow are swapped for locally available substitutes. And that comes with its price tag. That alone would consume every available hectare. Nothing would remain for exports, for bio-based materials, for bioenergy, or for nature.

Measure Dutch farming in euros and it looks like a miracle. Measure it in land, feed, calories and protein and the miracle thins out. This distinction acquires deep political implications when you contrast India’s context with Netherlands’.

The Netherlands is a dense trading economy with high capital, high institutional trust and a deeply integrated European market.

India is a vast, unequal, smallholder-heavy food system where agriculture is simultaneously livelihood, food security, ecological management and political economy.

India is importing the Dutch model at the precise moment Dutch scientists are dismantling the narrative that sells it. As de Boer puts it, the Dutch role no longer lies in high-volume exports, and the country's real strength may lie in planting material, knowledge and innovations that help other countries produce and consume food more sustainably.

Net net, the moral of the story is this.

Protected cultivation may be useful for perishables, quality, urban supply chains and farmer income, but it should not be sold as a national food-security substitute.

India should copy the learning architecture: research–industry–extension–farmer feedback loops. It should not copy the resource footprint blindly.

Every Dutch-inspired intervention in India should ship with a public balance sheet, published annually.

Land used and displaced. Water drawn and saved. Energy intensity. Nutrient and plastic flows. Import dependence. Farmer income and farmer debt. Calories and protein actually added to the Indian food system.

Punjab has been trying darnedest to escape its groundwater trap. It cannot afford to not have the indicator that shows where the water went. India should import Dutch discipline. It should leave the blind spot in Westland.

2/ Double Clicking on PRAGATI: Can India’s Largest Privately Held Agri-Entrepreneurship Program deliver the goods?

What is the purpose of agri-entrepreneurship in smallholding contexts?

Can agripreneurship simultaneously transform the incomes of smallholders while building viable livelihoods for the entrepreneurs ? And can this model be built at scale, bringing together Governments, Foundations and Corporations, to deliver the regenerative outcomes?

These are some of the gnarly questions that I encounter when I study PRAGATI, as their press release suggests, “India's largest privately led agri-entrepreneurship programme”

What are we essentially dealing with?

Twenty thousand agri-entrepreneurs. Twenty lakh smallholders. Twenty thousand village kiosks. Eight states which already have agripreneur networks running: Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.

And the targets look ambitious at first blush, until you examine AEGF’s body of public work.

1. A 30% rise in farmer incomes

2. A 15 to 20% yield boost in paddy, maize and potato

3. Regenerative practices adopted by at least a fifth of participating farmers

4. Financial inclusion for half.

For an ambitious program of this kind, no rupee figure was announced. No scheme document. No published MoU. The version carried by Business Standard runs under an advertorial disclaimer.

AEGF closed FY2024–25 with total assets of ₹2.73 crore, up 60% from ₹1.70 crore a year earlier. Cash and cash equivalents rose from ₹1.37 crore to ₹2.21 crore, while reserves and surplus increased from ₹1.29 crore to ₹2.21 crore.

In the same year, its agri-entrepreneurs routed ₹623.67 crore of transactions—₹228 of rural commerce for every rupee of assets on AEGF’s books. Its total annual expenditure, salaries included, was ₹7.45 crore, giving it ₹84 of network throughput for every rupee spent.

Why would AEGF go for this multi-stakeholder partnership if they have such a good capital efficiency?

To answer this question, we would have to read AEGF’s Annual Reports from 2022-23 all the way up to 2024-25 for its vital signs to emerge.

The first strange thing you observe when you overlay the annual reports together is that reporting category of farmers changed from ‘Served’ to ‘Served/benefited’ to ‘Registered’.

The cadre grows by roughly four thousand a year. Commerce peaked in FY2023–24 and fell by a fifth the following year. Average throughput per agri-entrepreneur—the value of business passing through each entrepreneur, and therefore the transaction base from which commissions and service fees can be earned—has fallen by approximately 39% in two years.

It does not tell us what an entrepreneur actually earns, but it tells us that the pool of commerce available per entrepreneur is becoming thinner.

The farmer count moves the other way. The 2024–25 report counts 23.85 lakh farmers registered, against 14.40 lakh farmers served or benefited a year earlier.

A farmer can be registered in a digital diary without buying an input, selling produce, receiving credit or changing an agricultural practice. The network is registering farmers faster than it is trading with them.

And so could the purpose of PRAGATI be to create this full-stack agripreneurship model so that new revenue layers could be added to the same village interface, thereby increasing the throughput per agri-entrepreneur?

Corporate supply chains can use the entrepreneur for procurement and traceability. Banks can use her for customer origination and transaction facilitation. Foundations can use her to deliver development programmes. Climate organizations can use her to promote and measure regenerative practices. Governments can use her to connect farmers with schemes without constructing another last-mile cadre.

PRAGATI stacks all these functions onto one kiosk and hopes that their combined economics will create a viable livelihood. To understand, how these functions could be stacked, it is important to understand the AEGS’s existing geography

The FY2023–24 report records 5,428 entrepreneurs in Bihar, 5,546 in Maharashtra, 2,012 in Madhya Pradesh, 1,009 in Uttar Pradesh, 514 in Jharkhand, 375 across Assam and West Bengal, and 250 in Rajasthan.

That gives us 15,134 entrepreneurs across PRAGATI’s eight states, serving 12.16 lakh farmers over 25.87 lakh acres. These states accounted for 78% of AEGF’s entrepreneurs, 84% of its farmers and 82% of its acreage.

PRAGATI is not an expansion into new territory. It is a doubling of the network where the network is already thickest. Everything its four targets require has already been attempted in some form by the same organization, in the same geographies, at meaningful scale.

Let’s take Farmer incomes.

PRAGATI promises a 30% increase in the incomes of twenty lakh smallholders. AEGF’s most substantive farmer-outcome evidence comes from an impact study undertaken by 60 Decibels and reproduced in its 2022–23 and 2023–24 reports.

Roughly one farmer in six reports an income improvement above 25%. PRAGATI is promising an improvement of at least 30% across twenty lakh farmers. It’s evident that PRAGATI needs a robust outcome evidence study. There are data integrity issues at play.

The 60 Decibels account describes a phone survey of 150 agri-entrepreneurs who had joined by the end of 2020, conducted across Maharashtra, Bihar and Assam. It does not explain the sample behind the farmer-income chart reproduced in AEGF’s reports. By March 2025, the network contained 22,560 trained entrepreneurs and 23.85 lakh registered farmers.

Mind you, Farmer income and entrepreneur income are not separate targets in this system. The entrepreneur is expected to deliver the advisory, input access, market linkage, finance and regenerative transition through which farmer incomes rise.

The reports also need to publish a state-wise distribution of entrepreneur incomes or the relationship between transaction value and net earnings.

There is also the challenge of density.

AEGF says its model is designed around each entrepreneur serving 150–200 farmers across one or two villages. The reported data shows a system operating considerably below that density.

Bihar’s AE count increased from 2,946 in FY2022–23 to 5,428 the following year—an 84% expansion. Over the same period, farmers served per entrepreneur fell from 113 to 78.

Rajasthan offers an even sharper warning. Its entrepreneur count remained at 250 across both reports, while farmers served fell from 8,320 to 3,072. That leaves approximately twelve farmers per entrepreneur.

Adding entrepreneurs does not automatically create more rural commerce. In saturated geographies, it can divide the existing transaction pool among more people. PRAGATI’s success will depend on whether its additional functions create paid work or merely add unpaid responsibilities to the kiosk.

Adding entrepreneurs does not automatically create more rural commerce. In saturated geographies, it can divide the existing transaction pool among more people. PRAGATI’s success will depend on whether its additional functions create paid work or merely add unpaid responsibilities to the kiosk.

Then comes yield

AEGF’s strongest published yield result comes from the Axis Bank Foundation programme in Maharashtra: a 12–15% increase in Bengal gram and up to 25% in onion, attributed to interventions including mulching and drip irrigation.

The FY2024–25 report records 192 field demonstrations reaching 40,992 farmers and attributes a 7–10% yield improvement to fertilizer optimization through soil testing.

These are useful results. But they are not the crops PRAGATI names.

PRAGATI promises a 15–20% yield improvement in paddy, maize and potato. Across the three reports, AEGF does not publish a comparable baseline, sample, control group or measured result for these crops.

AEGF’s clearest regenerative project is the Mitti Labs programme in Odisha, which seeks to move rice farmers from continuous flooding towards alternate wetting and drying.

The FY2023–24 report states an objective of reaching 12,000 farmers across 7,000 hectares. It reports delivery to 477 farmers over 2,389 acres through sixteen entrepreneurs.

That is 4% of the farmer target and approximately 14% of the area target. It may have been an early implementation year, but it remains the clearest regenerative delivery rate AEGF has published.

AEGF’s explicitly regenerative programs sit in Punjab, Odisha and Tamil Nadu. None is among PRAGATI’s eight states. PRAGATI has selected the states where AEGF’s entrepreneur and distribution networks are thickest, rather than those where its regenerative evidence is strongest.

It is important to delve deeper into the transaction mix layer.

The FY2024–25 report says 53% of farmers in its Maharashtra programme buy agricultural inputs directly from AEs. An entrepreneur who persuades a farmer to buy less fertilizer may improve the farmer’s economics while reducing her own commission.

The contradiction can be resolved only if someone pays the entrepreneur for the transition service—for advisory, soil testing, water savings, measurement, verification or assured procurement. Otherwise the system asks the entrepreneur to finance regeneration from her own foregone revenue.

If the entrepreneur earns from selling the farmer’s produce, rather than predominantly from selling inputs to her, higher farmer profitability and higher entrepreneur income begin to reinforce each other.

Credit and insurance transactions fell from ₹1.46 crore in FY2022–23 to ₹30 lakh in FY2023–24. The FY2024–25 report identifies insurance transactions of approximately ₹75 lakh, but its changed taxonomy prevents a direct comparison with the earlier combined category.

The reports place several activities under this label: working-capital loans to entrepreneurs, public subsidies unlocked for farmers, business-correspondent transactions and farmer credit linkages.

All are valid services. But a cash-in/cash-out transaction, a loan to an entrepreneur and production credit for a farmer are different outcomes. PRAGATI’s 50% target cannot be evaluated until financial inclusion is defined.

PRAGATI shows immense potential.

However, when I examine AEGF’s publicly available data, the following challenges are visible. Registration is outrunning engagement. Recruitment is outrunning transaction growth. Regenerative ambition conflicts with input-linked commissions. Financial inclusion remains undefined.

Can PRAGATI plumb deeper into its innards and make India’s largest privately-held entrepreneurship program work? Let’s see:) For starters, Can AEGF do a better Impact Study? Let’s hope.

Here is the geography I cover in my talk:

Why does India’s carbon market lack agricultural depth and farmer agency? -> What are the six systems principles that underpin India’s carbon markets - > Two sets of Warm Data worth meditating upon to address lack of agricultural depth- > Four feedback Loops that underpin farmer exclusion in carbon markets→ Can APCNF build India’s MRV standard for natural farming?

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.

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

State of India’s Carbon Markets

Setting the Context

After China, India is the second-largest carbon credit producing country in the world. A Verra registry analysis shows China with 1,115 projects, 489 of them registered, and India with 1,007 projects, 519 of them registered.

But here is the thing. India has scale in the voluntary carbon market, but not agricultural depth.

Agriculture is about 0.2 percent of India’s issued credits, while renewable energy accounts for roughly 87 percent, a split the underlying Berkeley registry data confirms. A C-GEM landscape study puts India’s 132 dedicated agriculture projects at just 0.40 million tonnes of CO2 issued between them.

The agri-food subset is even thinner.

Of the 242 agri-food projects registered under Verra and Gold Standard by the end of 2024, only 21 had actually earned credits. India as a whole was about 4.1 percent of the global voluntary carbon market by revenue in 2023.

Much like us exporting low-quality rice — strike that, exporting water to be precise — to African countries, we are doing the same in carbon credits.

Here is where things get interesting.

Agriculture is the only sector in India’s voluntary market where almost every credit issued has already found a buyer with a near-zero unsold buffer. Demand is not the bottleneck. The architecture is. Today, it is almost impossible to let a farmer produce a credit in the first place.

If agriculture can sequester carbon, reduce methane, improve soil health and generate farmer income, why should farmers not participate in carbon markets with a steady demand? Before we unpack this question with all its complexity, let’s first start with basics.

What is a carbon credit?

One credit stands for one tonne of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in another greenhouse gas such as methane. That tonne can come from two very different kinds of project.

An avoidance credit rewards an emission that was prevented. The methane a rice farmer keeps out of the air by draining a flooded paddy instead of leaving it submerged. Or by changing his practice to direct-sowing method.

Now wait. Didn’t the farmer originally do this method, before they were advised to switch by the so-called “experts” during the times of green revolution, back in the sixties?

A removal credit rewards a tonne actually pulled out of the air and stored in a tree, in soil, or in biochar. Both sell as a single credit, yet a removal is harder, more durable and that gap is where things get complex. A buyer pays for that tonne to offset their own emissions.

The whole system was built decades ago for large industrial emitters like power plants and steel mills. It learned to measure a smokestack, but never a smallholding farmer’s predicament.

Six Systems Principles Underpinning India’s Carbon Markets

On paper, India has far more potential sellers of carbon than buyers. The country has roughly 146 million farm holdings, and beyond them sit forest communities and wetland stewards, a vast pool of land that could store or avoid carbon. Buyers at home are thin by comparison, because domestic corporate demand is still young and most appetite for Indian credits comes from abroad.

The reasons are obvious. The market reads a factory easily than a farm. A factory has one chimney and a meter. A farm has fragmented plots, mixed crops and soil that changes across every cluster, depending on its topography

Information and communication gaps are the central obstacles for smallholders starting all the way from how a credit is calculated to which market channels even exist. A C-GEM survey of 94 civil-society groups reports that 93 percent of the barriers are knowledge gaps, and that 84 percent had never joined a carbon project even though 41 percent had been approached by a developer.

Why is this the case? Ultimately, it boils down to risk bearing architecture.

Here is how carbon markets work in ag contexts. A project developer signs up farmers, runs the measurement and sells the credits. The farmer supplies the practice change that creates the credit. The developer captures the margin.

The farmer becomes the asset rather than the partner.

Europe’s regenerative farmers put a number on this. They modelled a 100-hectare project, and after a permanence buffer, a project buffer and a developer commission of around 35 percent, the farmer was left with roughly €20 per hectare a year in the optimistic case.

India’s best project tells the same story.

In January 2026, Grow Indigo’s Aadi project became India’s first high-integrity soil-carbon issuance under Verra’s rigorous VM0042 method, covering about 30,000 acres across Punjab and Haryana and generating more than 50,000 credits. This is the gold-standard with real science and satellite-backed verification. Even here, the company estimates the carbon revenue lifts farmer income by only around 7 percent. The credits fetch $40 to $60 globally, with no domestic benchmark yet.

Carbon can top up a farm’s income, but it cannot be the reason a farmer rebuilds her whole practice. Can the market see farmers as more than carbon-bearing assets?

Carbon markets are in throes of change.

India is moving from an informal voluntary market to a regulated one under the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme. Nine energy-intensive industrial sectors now face binding compliance targets. Agriculture sits outside that in a voluntary offset track with government-defined rules but no mandatory demand. Soft demand keeps the price low. A low price gives the farmer no reason to change.

But there is a deeper problem that is often not spoken about.

A CO2 certificate promises permanence and soil carbon cannot deliver it.

Healthy soil is alive and microbes constantly build and break down organic matter. Any carbon you add to the soil will, in time, be eaten by those microbes and released again as carbon dioxide or methane.

The carbon does not stay put. Nature loves to recycle carbon. The systems we have built around soil carbon treat soil carbon as a stock, a quantity locked in a vault, when in nature it behaves as a flow, a river moving through the ground.

A certificate that pays for permanence is the wrong tool for something impermanent by design. Few who understand this are walking away.

Climate Farmers built Europe’s first internationally approved soil-carbon methodology and then stepped back from the market, judging that integrity had become too costly to deliver.

The reasons are obvious. We are trying to flatten a living system into one number.

Regeneration touches soil biology, water, biodiversity and farmer livelihoods all at once and a single CO2 score captures none of that. You cannot read a soil’s health from one figure any more than you can read a person’s health from their weight.

And there is the additionality clause.

A project earns credits only for going beyond business as usual. The farmer who switched to zero tillage last year qualifies. The farmer whose family has farmed regeneratively for three generations does not, because for her it is already baseline. The market has strong case of recency bias: It rewards the recent convert and shuts out the person who was right all along.

How do we address these challenges?

Two Sets of Warm Data Worth Meditating Upon

Warm data' is Nora Bateson's term for context-rich, relationship-embedded information that gets lost when you reduce a system to metrics. Hot data is the number — 0.2% agriculture credits, 99% of farmers received nothing.

Warm data is the why behind the number. You could argue that the carbon market runs on cold data, while regeneration needs the warm kind.

Europe’s regenerative farmers’ position paper on soil carbon markets sets out six redesigns.

1. Replace the single CO2 score with outcome indicators for soil, water and biodiversity.

2. Build tiered measurement, so the paperwork burden scales with the size of the farm.

3. Reform additionality to reward continuous improvement, not just new conversions.

4. Separate regenerative livestock from industrial livestock in the accounting.

5. Restructure the finance to pay farmers earlier and share the transition risk.

Four Feedback Loops

When you ponder about why carbon markets are stuck, you eventually end up at three feedback loops that keep the market stuck. The fourth one is the possibility that awaits when we wear the ecosystem hat.

1. Exclusion loop

   Marginal farmers cannot absorb the risk of a yield dip, so they stay out. Because they stay out, we gather no data from their fields, and because we have no data, the methods never learn to measure them. So they stay excluded next season and the one after.

   In carbon projects studied across Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households held only 5 percent of the land against 17 percent in neighbouring villages, and women were about 4 percent of participants despite doing most of the farm labour.

2. Price-suppression loop

   Conservative benchmarks under the compliance scheme flood the market with easy credits and oversupply pushes the price down. Low carbon price means insufficient income to justify farmer practice change. Thin agricultural supply means VCM prices for agricultural credits should theoretically be higher. Unfortunately, the compliance oversupply depresses even that.

   Price divergence is extreme globally — from under $6/tCO₂e for low-quality avoidance credits to $1,000+ for tech-based removals.

3. Trust-deficit loop

   Farmers sign contracts they were never equipped to read. With yield penalty or a delayed payment, trust breaks further. They drop out, buyers discount Indian agricultural credits, developer margins tighten, and investment in farmers falls further. Registry timelines of 4–5 years erode farmer confidence before any payment materialises. The C-GEM study found that interviewees cannot answer farmer questions on amount, timing, or guarantee. A farmer anecdote from Haryana paints the reality starkly.

   Jitendra Singh practiced non-flooded rice cultivation for three years and had not received a single rupee. Not because the developer was dishonest. But because the system takes that long.

4. The Infrastructure Commons Loop

   This loop is the reason I am still optimistic about carbon markets and see some ecosystem gameplay in context with the work I do at Krishi.System.

   Shared DMRV infrastructure reduces per-project MRV cost. Lower cost makes more projects viable. More projects mean more credits issued. More supply improves price discovery. Better prices attract more farmers. More participants generate more ground-truth data. Better data improves models. Better models reduce MRV cost further.

Who is building a shared digital MRV commons on Agristack? Let’s take the case of regenerative agriculture in India. There is no single, purpose-built MRV standard for Regenerative Agriculture in India yet.

Take the case of natural farming which is getting adequate traction, thanks to state-led efforts such as APCNF.

We are dealing with three levels of district verifications.

The first is practice compliance. Is this farmer actually chemical-free and following the Natural Farming methods package? On the government side, the National Mission on Natural Farming uses a farmer-friendly certification managed by NCONF under the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS-India), with real-time geo-tagged monitoring through the NMNF portal.

As has been reported in several states, Regional councils are being pressured to register thousands of farmers quickly. The haste could dilute the credibility of the natural farming label. Certification runs roughly Rs 1,500 to 2,000 per hectare per year.

The second is climate outcome: soil carbon, methane, emissions.

India has borrowed, not built, its own.

The credible MRV players run on international methodologies like ISO 14064-2 and Verra's VM0042. On the soil-carbon side, Boomitra became the first developer to register an Indian project under VM0042, and rice-focused outfits like Mitti Labs and CarbonMint use satellite-plus-sensor digital MRV feeding into voluntary registries and, increasingly, India's national carbon trading portal. None of these is natural-farming-specific. They verify a carbon claim, not an NF-practice claim, and the two are not interchangeable.

The third is market/produce claim — residue-free, traceable to a plot. Private players are creating their own data silos.

We need a stack that brings these three levels of verification claims together.

Who is building India’s RegenAgri stack?

In April 2025, RegenAgri launched its Carbon Insetting Standard 2.0. It has A) practice-certification layer against regenerative criteria, B) Updated soil organic carbon quantification combining direct measurement, modelling, and hybrid methodologies C) Monetization rail where participating farms generate third-party-verified carbon insetting units. RegenAgri anchors its carbon accounting to GHG protocols and IPCC guidelines.

Can APCNF build RegenAgri equivalent for India?

APCNF has the practice model at state scale. It has the outcome evidence machinery others lack. What APCNF hasn't done is codify that into a transferable, third-party-auditable MRV protocol that a carbon buyer or a Sarkar registry could plug into. It generates evidence; it hasn't yet productized a standard.

Can APCNF do it? I hope they do:)

Start Survey

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Hyderabad, India. Welcome to Sunday Reflections where I reflect on what I’ve written and ask myself, In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?

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.

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.

Subscriber-only Post Trailers

Decoding PerPlant’s Digital Ag Moat

Perplant is attempting to make the existing tractor-sprayer stack intelligent in an European context. When camera is getting commoditized, can crop-protection workflows become a stronger moat?

The Copenhagen-based startup has built a tractor-mounted AI camera system that scans fields in real time, enables precision spraying, and claims reductions of up to 90% in herbicide use and 30% in fertilizer use.

PerPlant is not building a new vehicle; it is trying to make the existing tractor-sprayer stack intelligent.

John Deere’s See & Spray is the incumbent benchmark. Deere says its “See and Spray” system uses camera vision and machine learning to differentiate weeds from crops and spray only the weeds, and its technology was reportedly used across more than five million acres in 2025, reducing non-residual herbicide use by nearly 50%.

If Deere already owns the tractor, the sprayer, the dealer, the data pipe, the service network, and increasingly the camera model, what room is left for PerPlant?

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System

Post-Facto:

PerPlant’s Co-Founder, Sumod, in response to my teaser post wrote,

“More than 90% growers don’t have the possibility to purchase new equipments which costs a couple of 100k$, while their margins are shrinking day by day. All that they want is doing better with their existing equipment and that’s our primary target. Our proposition is simple most of the machines in agriculture are currently running blind, we just want to give them eyes while creating tangible value for growers.”

ONO Ag takes A Fintech Turn

ONO Ag takes A Fintech Turn - Can ONO.Ag convert mandi players workflows into credit intelligence in an Indian context?

I’ve covered ONO Ag before, especially with its attempt to place the commission agent at the centre of its agritech constellation.

ONO’s latest $1.2 million Pre-Series A round, led by Aeravti Ventures with participation from Tremis Capital and angels signals its fintech ambitions. As part of this growth phase, ONO has reportedly acquired a significant stake in an NBFC to deepen lending capabilities and improve credit access for underserved Agri-SMEs.

A SaaS tool can digitize behaviour. A mandi platform can reveal transaction flows. But a fintech layer can change the velocity of the system.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System

Making Sense of Manam Chocolate’s Fundraise

There are two ways to build a chocolate brand on Indian cacao.

First, Make origin irrelevant. Second, Make Origin Everything.

When you do the first, you build a brand so strong that the ingredient disappears behind it. Cadbury Dairy Milk sold chocolate in India for decades. No Indian consumer knows or cares where its cocoa comes from. Honestly speaking, calling it a chocolate is debatable. Chocolate-looking Sugar perhaps?

When you do the second, you attempt to build West Godavari into a name that carries flavour meaning the way Darjeeling carries it for tea.

Perhaps you know this. Belgian chocolate carries its brand value despite Belgium not growing cacao. Belgium's reputation for chocolate is a reputation for processing and technique.

Manam is playing this second game and have raised capital recently from Omnivore.

Manam Chocolate, founded by Chaitanya Muppala, operates across cacao sourcing and fermentation, chocolate making and retail. It exports fine-flavour cocoa beans and produces chocolates for the HoReCa sector, walking the long mile from farmer to fermentery to finished bar to export.

Chaitanya Muppala, a Level 3 certified chocolate taster, did not arrive at craft chocolate through a food-tech startup trajectory. He came through Almond House, the Hyderabad mithai (there is a difference between mithai (Indian sweet) and sweet) institution his family built across decades.

Its parent company Distinct Origins works with over 250 farmers cultivating more than 3,000 acres of cacao across West Godavari. The $9 million raise would, if all goes well, take them from three experiential retail stores to eighteen.

The important question we need to ask is this: Can Manam scale from 3 to 18 while keeping their supply chain intact? Or to put the question in more flavourful terms, can craft chocolate thrive with the rocket fuel of VC funding without losing its soul?

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System

How Lactalis Group Learned to Love Low Margins

When most global dairy players (Danone, Nestlé) failed to crack the largest dairy economy on earth, what makes family-owned French dairy player Lactalis Group tick? And how did Lactalis become the only global dairy giant to build a mass dairy business in India? What is their end-game for India?

India is the largest milk economy on earth, and almost all of it is drunk, set, and cooked at home. Every global food company wanted a share of it. Danone entered and retreated to nutrition. Nestlé built quietly and never chased the mass milk market. Lactalis, the family firm behind Président cheese, is the only global dairy giant to have built a mass dairy business in India. It stays mid-sized inside India, far behind Amul and the big cooperatives.

It is private, owned by one family for generations, and has stayed inside dairy while rivals diversified into water, nutrition, and snacks. It is also the most acquisitive dairy company in history, with more than a hundred buyouts and reportedly none ever sold. Its latest is Fonterra's consumer brands abroad, bought for around US$2.4 billion.

How did Lactalis reach here?

In 2014 it acquired Tirumala in the south for about ₹1,750 crore. Tirumala was owned by the private equity firm Carlyle, which exited at three times its money. Lactalis was buying not from a founder but from a financial owner who wanted out.

It repeated the move, taking Anik in the centre (covering UP, MP and Chhatisgarh) and Prabhat in the west for roughly ₹1,700 crore. The three buys cost around ₹4,000 crore in all and assembled in a few years a procurement footprint that greenfield building would have taken fifteen years to grow.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishi.system

Making Sense of FirstClub Fundraise

Quick commerce imposes a distribution tax and F&V players die when they confuse freshness with a defensible channel. Otipy tried and failed. Sorted came and pivoted to Handpickd. Wheelocity came and pivoted. Deeprooted came and shut down. Can FirstClub, with its horizontal quick commerce gameplay, crack the F&V code? How does it compare with Freshly’s vertical-but-not-so-quick commerce gameplay?

Think School recently hosted Quick Commerce accelerator and few friends from Agripreneurs community joined them as well.

There has been tremendous interest in F&V quick commerce as it has been the albatross neck of quick commerce beast. You could crack almost every other SKU in the quick commerce pipeline.

Except F&V.

Otipy tried and failed.

Sorted came and pivoted to Handpickd.

Wheelocity came and pivoted.

Deeprooted came and shut down.

Can FirstClub do something different?

Ayyappan R is not entering grocery as a farm-to-fork romantic. His background runs through Flipkart, Myntra, Cleartrip and the larger consumer internet machinery.

Flipkart brings fulfilment density. Myntra brings curation and premium consumer behaviour. Cleartrip brings experience and trust in a category where friction kills conversion.

FirstClub’s thesis is a jhalmudi (a melange, to put it loosely) of all three.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of KrishidotSystem.

How to Blow Mangoes in Indian Agriculture

Prasanna, founder of Mangopoint, in response to my piece, wrote,

“…As someone closely working with the mango ecosystem, it is an irony and still mystery how this mayhem continuous to run year after year. Production hit in Konkan with high Hapus prices passed to consumers while we are harvesting Totapuri for a processing unit for mere 7000/Ton in the South and UP just starting their season with Dasheri. Localized, region specific intervention is what we might need. Yes we grow half of worlds mangoes and we also consume them in whatever form. So there is a problem, there is an opportunity, are we ready to think beyond Varieties, Pulps and Juices?…We could start looking at maximizing the most value out of the fruit itself and options might differ based on the clusters and varieties. Decentralized micro value additions with high value generation instead of chasing me too products”

Ankur wrote,

“You make a lot of relevant points. But the irony is that markets and farmers have interests too divergent to act as one unit for any “mango change.”

Take Konkan Alphonso. It is an old cultivar that got romanticized over the last few decades. The variety is very delicate. It bears fruit in alternate years, has spongy tissue, and is highly sensitive to weather like rain and temperature. In today’s climate change era, this is a recipe for farmer distress. People in Konkan know how the temperature and rain cycles have shifted. This distress has grown over the last five years. Bigger farm holdings can still survive, since one good fruiting year can carry their overall income. For smaller farmers, it is a crash. So what does it take to shift to more resilient varieties?

It is an open secret that non-Konkan hapus gets mixed in and sold as Konkan hapus. There are also ripening malpractices at market yards. Who is going to stop these? The farmer? Farm-to-home sounds like a helpful idea, but it absorbs very little cost at market scale, and only at a higher rate. We all love mangoes. But how many of us actually buy genuine, GI-tracked, tree-ripened hapus at home for, say, 1200 rupees a dozen?

I met a few shopkeepers who are genuine sellers with a good reputation. They are finding it hard to get consumers to buy hapus this year at such high prices, because the Konkan produce was low. So even mango lovers have a limit on what they will pay.

The same problem hits the pulp. Genuine hapus pulp gets mixed just like the fruit, all in the name of hapus, because of the huge price gap. Totapuri pulp is the B2B market favourite since it is so cheap. Hapus pulp costs about 4.5 times more. It does not stand a chance, except with a few loyal hapus fans.”

APCNF won the Food Planet Prize. Can it now scale across India?

It was a delight to receive a beautiful comment from Vijay Kumar Garu who spearheaded APCNF

“…You have summarized my 26 years journey very well. A big thanks. We owe so much to so many people. I want to acknowledge the role of Dr. Sanghi, Founder of CSA and WASSAN and Dr. Rupela of ICRISAT. I can never forget their contribution to my thought processes. Sh.Subhash Palekar is another person who had a remarkable influence on us.

It is an excellent article. One correction - the cost per farmer in our model is not Rs. 15,000 per year. It is much, much less. The cost is Rs.25,000 over 8 years which works out to Rs.3000 per year. There are many Scientific breakthroughs in our work, which makes it such an important transformation. CSA, WASSAN, DDS all provided pillars with their expertise, ability to work together etc, the years of SERP, NPM provided an excellent launchpad for what APCNF could achieve.”

Ananth Krishna who is deep in the Vidarbha BRC rabbit hole wrote,

”In maharashtra, our version of the lite model with the promotion of bio input resource centers has largely failed because it targeted the wrong audience (farmer group, all males) , pushed brc's based on two philosophies (farmlab, ten drum theory) and nothing else. It was hurried, it got no official backing from the four state universities (a powerful stakeholder in the advisory space) on that, no concerted push on the ground without a dedicated workforce, honestly it ended up giving a bad name to natural farming. we were already very polarized with subhash palekar ji with the way he went around the state with 'my way or highway' approach, lambasting the scientific establishment. so it was no surprise that APCNF dumped him, went on their own broadbasing, adapting to the ground realities there. Yeah they cant. blended as you say has possibilities. the carbon market can chip in with a tiny lil bit. I don’t think APCNF still has touched that yet or maybe you haven’t heard it if they have. And we should evolve to ecosystem services credits as well ahead but that is still some ways away which might potentially give more than what the carbon market do”

Rajiv Prakash wrote,

“When we one day understand that most solutions are intrinsic, what will it do the extrinsic economy? Hence a need to imagine and propogate nature's intrinsic abilities and our role as individuals and through entities we create is to help restore and support the balance. The regenerative "economy and society" can provide millions of viable livelihoods and meaningful lives.”

Prasad YG, Former Director, ICAR Cotton Research wrote,

“RA and NF systems have similar goal but differ in the means to achieve it as far as I understand. Certified programs for standards like RA or Organic have a more documentation focus… is there a standard for NF supported by MRVs essential for scaling up? I understand that farmer markets may have the limitation of confinement to production areas. Rythu Bazars in AP & Telangana are now occupied by Vendors. Expanding markets beyond local requires building trust in NF produce. Just my 2 cents.”

Agristack Samvaad

Agristack Samvaad unfolded beautifully beyond our expectations.

We had thirty five friends join us from the DPI ecosystem, ministry of agriculture, civil society organisations, privacy advocacy groups, ex ACS, data enablers, CTOs, digital payment specialists, tech leaders, lawyers, journalists and activists working on farmer rights.

The Samvaad began yesterday with Shri Rajeev Chawla IAS (Chief Knowledge Officer and Strategic Advisor, Agristack) sharing the vision of Agristack and ended with Rajeev ji listening to our discoveries and findings from the two day brainstorming of every aspect of Agristack design and implementation today.

We also had a special session on Mahavistaar, with a detailed open Q&A session with the relevant stakeholders.

We did four case study clinics on 1) Land governance 2) Farmer services 3) Data privacy issues 4) Market enablement and business models in a post Agristack universe and brainstormed on guard rails (with an interactive game using lego blocks) that can be brought into the Agristack across its layers.

Based on the clinics, we arrived at design principles that could be measured and evaluated across four domains viz.,

1) Chinese firewall
2) Farmer Consent
3) Decentralization
4) Inclusion, contestability and grievances at the edge.

We hope to contribute our discoveries, learnings to the relevant avenues and make Agristack far more inclusive for vulnerable farming communities, including pastoralists, women farmers thereby making it a true enabler for Indian agriculture.

Deep gratitude to Ashwini Chhatre, Dinesh Balam, Sameet Panda Rohin Kumar, Neha Niharika, Kasturi Thorat Devahuti Sarkar and friends from Purpose (Gurpriya S. Komal Chaudhry ) who made this event possible.

Deep love and gratitude to all the Samvaad participants for the open, frank conversations and the debates that sharpened our perspective about Agristack.

We hope to take this momentum forward and make this engagement a continuous one and a valuable feedback mechanism for Agristack.

Auroville/Pondicherry Agripreneurs Meet

Auroville/Pondicherry Agripreneurs Meet became Agripreneur Family Men and Women get together.

Met Aurovilian family entrepreneurs who've left the city grind and make ginger ale and ice tea with steady b2b demand. Last week I wrote about FirstClub and it was interesting to hear entrepreneurs talk about it as a channel to distribute their quality conscious ginger ale.

Met back to the landers who are growing vegetables in ancestral land while wondering who in the right mind takes up farming.

Met bellyful dreamers who care deeply about serving healthy food to the people of Pondicherry and struggle with the working culture of Gen Z who are entering the workplace with different expectations about work.

Met meditating sadhu entrepreneurs who care deeply stewarding the land and facilitating conditions of abundance.

We ended up attracting a car traveling family to our gathering who are asking deeper questions about the food that comes with labels.

Children kept entertaining themselves while stepping in at times to ensure adults remain in order and stay grounded.

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.

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.

Systems Leadership in Human Scale

For reasons that barely made sense, signing up for Mastery of Systems Leadership coincided with the Augustan life circumstances when I turned forty. My father had passed away few days earlier. The grief was raw like an active volcano. My dad’s death rituals were coinciding with the inaugural London retreat schedule. Jung’s famous quote kept hovering my head. “Life begins when you turn 40. Until then you are doing research”

I’ll be honest. It wasn’t easy. I kept ping-ponging between dropping this outlandish idea to explore the subterranean roots of the tree of my work and trusting my gut to push my boundaries. Given the course fees, I knew that if at all I would sign up, it would have to be sponsored by the community that I serve through my systems change work. Imposter’s voice took over. Have I done enough to audaciously ask few of my community patrons to take care of the course expenses, including my travel to Australia and London to attend the in-person retreat modules?

I kept procrastinating the fundraising campaign letter. One fine day, after a beautiful Yoga practice, I was done with it. It took me five minutes to draft five emails to five patrons. The responses came swift like a rocket. Three responded with a tentative outlay within the next hour. I totaled them while counting my stars. I was all set to go.

When I signed up for the Mastery of Systems Leadership (MSL), the 2025 self had two straightforward objectives viz.,

1) Can I formally learn the language of systems change? I had been speaking them informally in my work and wanted a rigorous validation.

2)Does my agritech ecosystem engineering – an ecosystem led approach to solve the pressing problems in smallholding agriculture - thesis make sense from a formal system change lens?

On the last day of the inaugural London retreat, where I was asked to write a letter to my future self who would have completed the course, I articulated my underlying feelings more honestly.

“Dear Venky,

I am glad you chose to step out of your comfort zone and explore the limits and boundaries of being native. Can you explore what it is to be native within a global context that holds a question of systems change?

You have explored systems thinking to your heart’s content. You have experienced the withering of the boundaries of culture and got in touch with the corest essence of being human. You have also explored what it takes to explore systems thinking through food and agriculture systems.”

Today, while navigating systems change, being a native insider has become an equally comfortable inner stance as much as being an outsider who sits at the boundary of a global system. I’ve travelled a long way to dissolve every ounce of tension that once existed in the polarity of an insider native and an outsider observer.

When this inner stance shifted, it didn’t take much time to rebrand my business from an outsider-frame “Agribusiness Matters” to an insider-frame “Krishi.System”, despite many of my customers warning me that it would be a brand suicide.

It also helped that MSL was beautifully curated to look at both inner and outer dimensions as two sides of the same coin called systems change. Whether it was shifting sectors, places or capital, the underlying gestalt remained the same. Today, when I observe this mind-body envelope drafting this essay, I see that my praxis has shifted significantly.

P.R.A.X.I.S.

Derived from ancient Greek, it represents the continuous, cyclical marriage of theory and practice—where abstract ideas are tested through real-world action, and those actions then inform and refine the theory.

I’ve come to see Systems Thinking as an evolutionary instinct sitting as the feeble, but powerful voice of a dreamer quietly watching the drama beneath the incessant chatter of the judge, beckoner, victim and guardian that animate my everyday life theatre.

Just because it is an instinct doesn’t mean that it becomes second nature. Instinct needs lived experience to merit its stay inside the sinews of the mind-body envelope. It needs to be forged by the fires of real-world action.

Even though “Entrepeneur” is a terrible inner stance for systems change, entrepreneurship thankfully ensures that the contact of reality happens always at appropriate resolution levels to discover your inner gyroscope (not compass)

I am going ahead of myself. Perhaps, I need to slow down here a bit.

Why is “Entrepreneur” a bad stance for systems change? The vast, mythical conditioning the word “Entrepreneur” carries doesn’t help one bit in systems change. It might help in early days when you are deprived of kinetic energy to push the hard walls of the system. But, once you are experienced enough to see the dust it kicks up, you also start to see that the dust gets in your eye, and you’re not focusing on the core purpose of your work.

Why does gyroscope/compass distinction matter (I learned it from Venkatesh Rao) when it comes to understanding systems leadership?

A compass orients you relative to an extrinsic coordinate system (say for instance, the Greenwich meridian or any other fixed external landmarks), while a gyroscope tracks orientation intrinsically, relative to your own prior state of motion, not any external reference.

Can you trust your inner gyroscope to know who you are, where you are and whether you are part of the problem or the solution? In doing what you are doing, what are you really doing? Can you trust that feeble voice of evolutionary instinct while seeking for the direction you need to go in your systems change work?

When I started my work, I thought “Agritech Ecosystem Engineering” meant seeing the reality outside the reality distortion field of agritech founders and investors. Few years later, it evolved to navigating the contradictions between those who were wired to see the profitability of the food system as opposed to the sustainability of the system. Few years later, it evolved to navigating the contradictions between those who see it through a for-profit and not-for-profit lens.

Today, I am able to navigate through each of these polarities and place myself lightly at the centre of the storm with a playful spirit. The facilitator’s role becomes critical here in quietly, but steadily holding the container infrastructure while navigating the polarities and boundaries.

The playful spirit becomes sine qua non here as it is the opposite of a formal posture that one often encounters in systems leadership theatre.

When I was growing up, I never wanted any inch of formality in the calendar of my life. Today, I got what I wished for. Informality has become a non-negotiable factor in my systems change work. It has become my north pole barometer: The harder the systems change problem I chase, the lighter I must feel from inside while tackling them. If that’s not happening in my inner climate, surely, I must be doing something wrong.

This informal playfulness flows in not just how I situate myself, but also in everything I do.

Every Agripreneur meetup across the world I host is friends catching up in the city with no airs of founder egos. Every relationship is personal. When Agripreneur friends are unable to reach out to someone in the Agripreneur community I steward, I become the social check-in register they inquire to see if everything is okay.

Every retreat I host starts with a Kabir song, replete with indic cultural rituals and symbols. Every time I host a convening, I take great pains to ensure that every one entering the room removes the trappings of their work identities and enter the “sacred space” as a human who is willing to sit with their vulnerabilities and the double-binds (I am damned if I do, I am damned if I don’t) they are painfully sitting on.

This is also where Yoga becomes an integral component of my systems change work.

My Yoga mentor’s definition of dharma has been my personal north star in my years of practice: Dharma is any action that enlivens me, the other, and the context all at once. When you ponder over this definition, one discovers something profound. Any sufficiently advanced systems change is indistinguishable from Yoga.

This is no romantic ideal. Let’s look around and be honest. It’s an ugly chaos we have created and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures.

As vitally committed human beings concerned about the quality of life we have created for ourselves and will create for the next generations, we must penetrate to the source, the roots of chaos.

Is not the source of the collective misery of our broken food and agriculture systems that neither serves us, farmers and consumers, nor the planet the acceptance of a very narrow, superficial view of the totality? Are not the roots of our chaos in our ignorance, denial of wholeness?

The question Yoga keeps putting to me is the same one I ask in the middle of any hard systems problem. In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?

This hand-crafted piece takes sixteen minutes to read. It examines the origin story, evolution, impact of Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) and its scaling possibilities. It examines the nitty grittiness of its impact - what its critics say, where scaling might fail; what the data actually says about APCNF - and what is needed on the ground to scale this model across India.

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.

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.

APCNF won the Food Planet Prize. Can it now scale across India?

Indian agriculture plays a strange Jekyll and Hyde act.

During the day, the government foots the ventilator bill of the conventional farming system that depends on synthetic external inputs. Every year, ₹2.3 lakh crore, roughly $24 billion flows in as synthetic fertilizer subsidies, keeping the dying system alive. Urea reaches farmers at a fraction of its production cost. The drip has been running for decades despite depleting the soil, guzzling water and trapping farmers in feudal chokepoints. It is a political hot potato no politican worth her spine will dare to touch.

At night, the same government funds a programme to replace chemical farming entirely. One million farmers in Andhra Pradesh are now practicing natural farming, thanks to Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming. How it came this far and where it is poised today with over 50 countries adapting the model to their own agro-ecological contexts is fascinating.

Let’s start from the origin story.

The Evolution of APCNF

The year was 1992. At a SAARC summit in Colombo, South Asian heads of state commissioned a study on rural poverty. The resulting document, Meeting the Challenges, landed on one core insight: the poor cannot be helped through technocracy alone. They have to be organised.

UNDP took this seriously and ran pilots across South Asia. The model that worked best came from Pakistan. Shoaib Sultan Khan’s National Rural Support Program. In India, UNDP chose the three most “backward” districts in Andhra Pradesh viz, Anantapur, Kurnool, Mahbubnagar. The logic was obvious.

If it works there, it works anywhere.

In 2000, Andhra Pradesh scaled the pilot through a new body, the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP). The Chief Minister chaired it. The Vice Chairman was B.N. Yugandhar, civil servant and father of Satya Nadella.

A young IAS officer named Vijay Kumar Thallam joined as Co-Leader. Over the next decade, SERP organised 11.5 million rural women in Andhra Pradesh into Self-Help Groups. The groups federated at village, mandal and district levels. They became parallel institutions of the rural poor, capable of holding the panchayat, the bank, and the welfare departments to account.

In 2004, SERP introduced Non-Pesticide Management into this SHG infrastructure. The model had started in Punukula village and was scaled by G.V. Ramanjaneyulu's Centre for Sustainable Agriculture. By 2010, it spread across 18 districts and 35 lakh hectares, cutting pesticide use by half.

NPM is the direct precursor of APCNF. The vehicle was the same — women's federations. The principle was the same — community professionals embedded in villages doing the teaching. WASSAN and the Centre for Science and Environment built early proof-of-concept. Deccan Development Society contributed millet recipes and traditional food knowledge. The ASHA-Kisan Swaraj network kept the policy conversation alive across governments.

In 2011, Vijay Kumar moved to Delhi to lead the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. He extended SHG support from three to ten years, arguing that people poor for centuries cannot be lifted out by a single subsidy. By 2023, the architecture he championed had organised 100 million rural women across India. He returned to AP in 2015 and the next year took over a new mission — APCNF — as Vice Chairman of Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, a parastatal originally set up for farm loan waivers but given a deliberately broader mandate.

The early years drew on Subash Palekar's Zero Budget Natural Farming, but, as Vijay Kumar points, the conversion rates from Palekar's trainings were at only 2-5%. The programme needed its own scientific foundation.

It found one in 2018. Vijay Kumar had been watching a four-hour YouTube lecture by Walter Jehne, an Australian soil microbiologist, on the carbon cycle. He listened seven times.

He invited Walter to AP. Together they experimented with pre-monsoon dry sowing — pelleted seeds planted before the rains, soil covered with mulch. Eleven farmers tried it in 2018 in arid Anantapur. The rainfall was poor. Their fields stayed green. By 2023, 850,000 farmers were using the technique.

Food Planet Prize

Few weeks ago, APCNF won the 2026 Food Planet Prize from the Curt Bergfors Foundation in Sweden — the world's largest environmental award for changing global food systems.

“Out of over 1,000 nominations worldwide, APCNF was chosen for showing that farming can support both people and the planet. The prize gives USD 1.5 million and honors scalable solutions to major food system problems.”

Is it a scalable solution?

What would a strong investment case that could back this scaling effort after considering every possible objection look like? Before we navigate the choppy waters of complexity involved in scaling this effort, let me breathe and meditate on this important chart that outlines their scale.

The village count was identical in 2020-21 and 2022-23 — 3,730 villages both years — but farmers grew from 480,000 to 851,000 in that period. It suggests that the program perhaps deepened within existing villages before expanding to new ones. Village saturation before expansion is a healthy signal of genuine community diffusion.

The farmer-to-area ratio is also striking.

1.13 million farmers on 524,000 Ha = 0.46 Ha per farmer on average. AP’s average farm size is about 1.06 Ha. APCNF is overwhelmingly concentrated in the smallest landholding category — marginal farmers below 0.5 Ha. The 2025-26 plan is a near-doubling of village coverage — from 4,116 to 8,390.

The national programme to replicate this — the National Mission on Natural Farming, launched in November 2024 — targets 40 lakh farmers across 28 Indian districts by 2030.

The 2025-26 budget gave it ₹616 crore. The fertilizer subsidy got ₹1,75,099 crore.

Can you see this fascinating contradiction?

That’s the crux of the problem we are dealing with. This ratio -0.35% - is, perhaps, the most expensive act of policy incoherence in Indian agricultural history. If we are serious about correcting this, it is important to delve deep into the contradiction and find a way out.

Where Scaling Might Fail

The standard argument against natural farming — repeated by agricultural economists, policymakers, and input industry lobbyists — goes like this. The transition to organic or natural farming causes a yield penalty in the first several years, during which farmers lose income. Smallholders with no savings buffer cannot absorb that loss. Therefore, natural farming is a luxury for rich-country hobbyists and cannot feed a country of 1.4 billion.

This argument has driven agricultural policy for forty years. It is the justification for ₹1,75,099 crore in annual fertilizer subsidies. It is the reason every natural farming program in India has been treated as a niche welfare intervention rather than a mainstream agricultural strategy.

Let’s now walk further with the devil’s advocate in context with the data showcased by APCNF. There are five specific objections worth taking seriously — on data quality, labour costs, equity, replication, and long-run yield trajectory.

Let’s examine each of them.

The Andhra Pradesh programme’s income improvement data — farmers earning 57% more than their chemical-farming neighbours by year four — comes primarily from assessments commissioned by the implementing agency.

GIST Impact study commissioned by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, conducted across 12 villages in three agro-ecological zones between 2020 and 2022: prime crops — paddy rice, maize, millet, finger millet, red gram — showed an average 11% yield increase and a 44% reduction in input costs.

The most rigorous independent study from the University of Reading partially validated these findings but found yield improvements in only three of five AP districts studied. Context-specific variation, the researchers noted.

“The southern (drier) districts of Andhra Pradesh (Anantapur, Kadapa, Nellore, Prakasam) had the highest yield in the ZBNF > conventional > organic treatment. There was no significant difference between the treatments in Krishna, and the effects of treatments were reversed in the northernmost district of Visakhapatnam (highest yield in conventional > organic > ZBNF).” (Source)

There is also a labour cost problem that the headline numbers hide.

Natural farming increases labour hours — bio-stimulant preparation, intensive crop management, diversified planting systems. The income improvement figures measure the return on cash expenditure, not total economic cost. Scarcity of hired labour is a growing constraint for APCNF farmers, reported by 35% of farmers in 2018-19, rising to 60% in 2021-22.

Who actually benefits from APCNF?

A 2024 peer-reviewed paper from Coventry University and the Food Sovereignty Alliance India documented that APCNF's SHG credit infrastructure primarily benefits land-owning farmers. The programme uses women’s self-help group networks as its delivery vehicle. That architecture works well for small landholding households. Agricultural labourers — more than half of India's agricultural workforce — are structurally excluded.

Although to be fair to APCNF, as Vijay notes, natural farming has changed tenancy rates and provides a pathway for landless to move towards leased lands.

“There are 522,935 landless families in the project, who have enrolled themselves in Natural Farming. Out of this, 352,262 have raised seasonal nutri-gardens (67%) and 73,922 have raised 365-day nutri-gardens. More than 50% of these families are Dalits. The data on further graduation to leasing lands for food production is not being captured in our MIS.” - Vijay Kumar Thallam

Would the national programme attempting to scale it inherit these blind spots?

Let’s be clear. NMNF and APCNF are apples and oranges.

The national programme uses a lighter delivery model — routed through Krishi Vigyan Kendras and Bio-Input Resource Centres rather than the intensive SHG-embedded Community Resource Person network that APCNF spent a decade building in Andhra Pradesh.

AP’s results required a pre-existing dense women’s federation infrastructure that most Indian states do not have. Whether the lighter model can replicate APCNF-level behaviour change on a five-year timeline is, let’s face it, a tall order.

There is also the Sikkim precedent.

In 2016, Sikkim became India's first fully organic state, winning the FAO Future Policy Gold Award in 2018. Within a few years, cardamom yields — the state’s primary cash crop — had fallen sharply, with over 60% of plantations becoming barren. A CSE survey of 16 farms across Sikkim’s four districts found that only two of 14 private farmers reported any yield increase after the transition; ginger production on some farms fell to a third of earlier levels.

The state now imports significant food from outside its borders. Critics noted that organic certification benefited tourism and premium export markets far more than it helped the average farming household.

Sikkim's organic transition was state-mandated, fast, and uniform. Synthetic inputs were banned outright. APCNF's model is the opposite of Sikkim: the transition is voluntary, gradual, and community-managed, with crop diversification built in from the start.

Sikkim’s yield decline did not appear immediately. It emerged several years after transition, precisely the horizon at which APCNF is now operating in its earliest villages.

Mind you, these are not random objections. They are the central empirical uncertainties in dealing with the scaling question. Now that we have examined every possible way this system could fail, let’s now look at what the data is actually telling us.

What the Data Actually Tells Us

Critics point out that AP’s total fertilizer consumption has actually risen — from 3.5 million tonnes in 2016-17 to 4 million tonnes in 2024-25. If the programme is working, shouldn’t the state be using less?

This is a base rate error. APCNF covers 524,000 hectares out of AP’s 8.9 million hectares of gross cropped area — 6% of the state’s farmland. Six percent coverage cannot move a state-level aggregate that fluctuates more than 6% annually from rainfall variability alone.

AP’s per-hectare nitrogen consumption was 116.8 kg/ha in 2021, up from 105.4 kg/ha in 2020, against an all-time high of 146.8 kg/ha in 2015. The trend is declining from a 2015 peak but the direction is not obviously APCNF-linked. It correlates more with the shift in AP’s cropping pattern post-bifurcation with Telangana (which took most of the irrigated paddy area).

You need to look where the intervention actually happened.

Between 2015-16 and 2019-20, Andhra Pradesh’s pesticide consumption fell by approximately 40%. In the same period, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh recorded steady increases. The decline tracks precisely with APCNF’s initial scaling — from 40,000 farmers to nearly half a million.

Pesticide is a demand-side signal tracked through commercial dealer networks. It is the closest thing to a population-level, independently observable validation that APCNF is genuinely changing farmer behaviour.

Why pesticide before fertilizer?

Because farmers replace chemical pest management first with botanical preparations they make themselves. Fertilizer reduction follows more slowly. But this claim carries a caveat.

A 2024 peer-reviewed MDPI study using Directorate of Plant Protection, Quarantine & Storage data found that AP's total pesticide consumption actually increased significantly over the last decade.

The two sources may be measuring different metrics — technical grade pesticides versus all formulations, or different sub-periods — but the discrepancy has not been publicly reconciled and the 40% decline figure cannot be treated as settled.

The only study that looked at the retail channel directly - A 2022 Lancet survey of 894 farmers and 38 pesticide retailers in Kurnool - found APCNF farmers were 35% less likely to use pesticides. But no impact on retailer sales was observed. After a median two years in the programme, individual behaviour had shifted but the market had not. Training alone, the study concluded, may be insufficient.

The definitive evidence is pending.

The BLOOM study — a cluster-randomised controlled trial across 80 clusters in four AP districts, measuring urinary pesticide metabolites, crop yields and household income — will provide the first controlled evidence on whether APCNF reduces actual pesticide exposure at population scale.

To sum up, the pesticide signal is a plausible hypothesis. The evidence has not confirmed yet.

The CEEW independently estimated in 2020 that APCNF covering 25% of AP’s crop area would yield $70 million in annual fertilizer subsidy savings in AP alone — at pre-Ukraine prices. A government spending ₹15,000 per farmer per year on transition for three to five years, then displacing ₹12,000 per farmer per year in subsidies permanently, makes a bet that pays back within a decade and saves money indefinitely thereafter.

The longer arc is sharper still. A 2024 FAO-CIRAD-RySS foresight study led by CIRAD economist Bruno Dorin modelled two scenarios for AP through 2050: agro-industrial intensification versus full agroecological transition via APCNF. The agroecology scenario performed better on employment, food production, income inequality and natural resource depletion.

Now that the case has stronger legs, can we examine the scaling question?

What Scaling Really Wants

The full APCNF delivery model costs roughly ₹15,000 per farmer per year, with 75% going to capacity-building and the CRP cadre. At 40 lakh farmers, that is ₹18,000 to 30,000 crore over the transition period.

The government’s total NMNF commitment is ₹2,481 crore. It covers roughly one month of what the proven model actually costs. The programme will run regardless. To achieve a pan-India behavioural change, we need to work on two critical levers.

The first is the knowledge institution.

IGGAARL launched India’s first Farmer Scientist Course in July 2023 — a four-year degree for practicing natural farmers, graduation conditional on demonstrated farm income performance, not examinations.

The first cohort of ~520 graduates in 2027. At current intake, four cohorts by 2030 produce roughly 2,000 trained farmer-scientists, almost entirely from AP.

The farmer-as-teacher model is the right approach, although it is something which ICAR wouldn’t be able to stomach. Agricultural ministry budgets flow through ICAR. ICAR funding comes with its conditions viz., curriculum approved by PhD-qualified faculty, degrees awarded through UGC-affiliated examination systems, institutional positions requiring conventional academic credentials.

The second is the market.

APCNF has been clear about what kind of market it wants. When asked about selling to private aggregators in his Journal of Peasant Studies conversation, Vijay’s response was straightforward: "Instead of selling to Amul and others, why can't we sell to ourselves?".

The model is producer-owned and circular.

265 NF stores already operate in 56 Rythu bazaars run by NF farmers. Mahila Marts (women-owned retail) stock NF foods in 24 locations. Anganwadi tie-ups in 129 villages supply 157 centres and 132 schools with fresh vegetables. The five-year goal: 10,000 farmer-entrepreneurs across 500+ villages doing their own value addition and urban marketing.

There is plenty of potential for blended capital that underwrites farmer-owned enterprises and producer infrastructure.

This is where APCNF can accelerate regenerative agripreneurship in India at scale. 10,000 farmer-entrepreneurs in five years is not a small number. Each one — the NF farmer running a village vegetable shop, the SHG processing unit, the urban retail entrepreneur, the farm-to-Anganwadi supplier — needs capital, mentorship, market access and value chain integration.

Investments need to flow towards the producer-owned market infrastructure at scale and the agripreneurial ecosystem around it. SHG-owned processing units, cold chain, urban retail presence, procurement contracts with state midday meal and Anganwadi systems beyond pilot scale, and patient capital with technical assistance for 10,000 farmer-entrepreneurs.

The combined investment — knowledge institution and market architecture — is ₹800 to 1,300 crore over five years. It is 0.7% of a single year’s fertilizer subsidy, invested once.

And so we come to the million dollar question.

Can It Be Scaled?

Yes. But not the way the government is currently trying to do it.

The agronomy is proven. The community diffusion model is proven. What is not yet proven is whether the pesticide signal holds at scale, whether NMNF's lighter delivery model achieves APCNF-level adoption depth, and whether yields hold steady in AP villages now entering their seventh, eighth and ninth years of full natural farming — the horizon at which Sikkim's cardamom collapsed. The next 36 months — tracked through the BLOOM RCT, district-level pesticide data and NMNF enrollment — will answer at least two of those questions.

The investment case does not require certainty. Either way, you need the CRP cadre. Either way, you need the market channel. The two investments are robust to both outcomes.

India is spending ₹1,75,099 crore a year to keep the ventilator of a broken system running and ₹616 crore to build the alternative. Whether the Jekyll and Hyde act ends or continues indefinitely at public expense is a bet we would collective make for our food system’s regenerative futures.

Bibliography

APCNF — Origin, Operations, and Leadership

• Thallam, V.K., & Patel, R. (2025). Andhra Pradesh community managed natural farming – a conversation. The Journal of Peasant Studies. Link

• Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS) / APCNF official site. Link

• Ramanjaneyulu, G.V., Chari, M.S., Raghunath, T.A.V.S. Non Pesticidal Management: Learning from Experiences. Springer. Link

• Centre for Sustainable Agriculture — Ramanjaneyulu profile. Link

• EcoTippingPoints — Punukula Non-Pesticide Management origin story. Link

• Walter Jehne — Land & Leadership Initiative profile. Link

• Subhash Palekar — Wikipedia. Link

• MANAGE — APCNF: A leading example for scaling (training PDF with ₹15,000/farmer cost structure). Link

• National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM). Link

• ASHA-Kisan Swaraj Network. Link

• WASSAN. Link

Independent Evaluations

• Gupta, N., Tripathi, S., & Dholakia, H.H. (2020). Can Zero Budget Natural Farming Save Input Costs and Fertiliser Subsidies? Evidence from Andhra Pradesh. CEEW. Link

• GIST Impact & Global Alliance for the Future of Food (2023). Natural Farming Through A Wide Angle Lens: True Cost Accounting Study of Community-Managed Natural Farming in Andhra Pradesh. Link

• Duddigan, S., et al. (2022). Impact of Zero Budget Natural Farming on Crop Yields in Andhra Pradesh, SE India. University of Reading / Sustainability. Link

• Jaacks, L.M., et al. (2022). Impact of Large-Scale, Government Legislated and Funded Organic Farming Training on Pesticide Use in Andhra Pradesh. The Lancet Planetary Health. Link

• Jaacks, L.M., et al. (2023). Co-Benefits of Largescale Organic Farming on Human Health (BLOOM): Protocol for a Cluster-Randomised Controlled Evaluation. PLoS One. Link

Critical Studies

• Ramdas, S.R., & Pimbert, M.P. (2024). A Cog in the Capitalist Wheel: Co-Opting Agroecology in South India. The Journal of Peasant Studies. Link

• 2024 MDPI study on AP pesticide consumption trends. Sustainability. Link

Government and Policy Sources

• Press Information Bureau — National Mission on Natural Farming launch (November 2024). Link

• Down to Earth — Budget 2025-26 NMNF allocation. Link

• BigHaat — Fertiliser subsidy budget overview. Link

• NITI Aayog — APCNF documentation. Link

• CEIC / Directorate of Economics and Statistics — AP per-hectare nitrogen consumption series. Link

• Agriculture Census 2015-16 — average landholding size. Link

• KfW — €90 million Agroecology programme grant to AP. Link

• IGGAARL launch — Agro Spectrum India. Link

Sikkim Comparison

• IndiaSpend — Why the move to organic is faltering in Sikkim. Link

• FAO India — Sikkim Future Policy Gold Award. Link

• Sikkim Express — Sikkim’s Black Gold Fades: Cardamom Farmers Face Uncertain Future. Link

• Down to Earth / CSE — organic trial survey from 16 Sikkim farms. Link

Recognition

• Food Planet Prize — APCNF 2026 award profile. Link

State of Agritech - 17th June 2026

In Today’s Edition:

1/ Making Sense of Manam Chocolate’s Fundraise

There are two ways to build a chocolate brand on Indian cacao. Manam wants to scale from three experiential retail stores to eighteen. Can craft chocolate thrive using the rocket fuel of VC funding without losing its essential identity?

2/ Decoding PerPlant’s Digital Ag Moat

PerPlant is attempting to make the existing tractor-sprayer stack intelligent in an European context. When camera is getting commoditized, can crop-protection workflows become a stronger moat?

3/ ONO Ag takes A Fintech Turn

Can ONO.Ag convert mandi players workflows into credit intelligence in an Indian context?

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.

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.

Read more

State of Agritech - 10th June 2026

1/ Making Sense of FirstClub’s Fundraise

Quick commerce imposes a distribution tax and F&V players die when they confuse freshness with a defensible channel. Otipy tried and failed. Sorted came and pivoted to Handpickd. Wheelocity came and pivoted. Deeprooted came and shut down. Can FirstClub, with its horizontal quick commerce gameplay, crack the F&V code? How does it compare with Freshly’s vertical-but-not-so-quick commerce gameplay?

2/ How Lactalis Learned to Love Low Margins

When most global dairy players (Danone, Nestlé) failed to crack the largest dairy economy on earth, what makes family-owned French dairy player Lactalis tick? And how did Lactalis become the only global dairy giant to build a mass dairy business in India? What is their end-game for India?

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.

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.

Read more

Editor’s Note 2: This hand-crafted criminal activity began with tomatoes. Mango follows next.

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.

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.

By every measure of public attention, the Indian mango had its best season in years. The Prime Minister flew a box of Alphonso (We lovingly call it Hapus as our Marathi brethren do) to the White House for the Modi-Trump trade talks in February. American supermarkets sold boxes of fresh Indian fruit for up to a thousand dollars each. Fifteen shipments worth half a million dollars ended up in a Los Angeles landfill over a paperwork error at a Mumbai irradiation facility. Influencers ran blind tastings of Alphonso against Kesar.

Meanwhile, in the Konkan, the crop fell by seventy to ninety percent. A farmer named Santosh in Devgad village watched fog kill his flowers at dawn, thick enough to drip like rain. His crop insurance returned nothing. In Junagadh, traders pressed Kesar growers to give up ten percent of every sale as commission and those who refused dumped their fruit at one hundred rupees a box in the private market. Dayabhai Sojitra saw his season's earnings collapse from three lakh to forty thousand.

Indian Agriculture has a fine tradition of treating every commodity crisis as a one-off event even when the same crisis turns up every other year like clockwork. This has been the bane of tomato. Mango is now joining the club.

Honestly. It feels deeply frustrating, especially, if you love India and Indian Agriculture.

<Trigger Warning. I am venting>

We produce abundance, celebrate abundance, culturally worship abundance, hold mango festivals for abundance, and then somehow ensure that the people who grow the abundance remain the weakest actors in the chain.

</Venting>

Why do we do this?

If you've been reading me in the inter webs, you know I care deeply about Indian Agriculture and its future in the nick of Climate emergency. So here is what I want to do. I want to hand you a three-step playbook to blow up mangoes.

Step 1: Blame the Weather

The heat broke the flowering window this year. Winter ran long. April jumped to forty-two degrees. Fog rolled into the Konkan in April thick enough to drip like rain. Ninety percent of the Alphonso crop fell. Every English-language paper ran a climate shock story. Including the Marathi press. The climate-change brigade got a beautiful villain. The weather is cruel, changing. The weather did this.

All of that is true. But the deeper problem sits somewhere else.

India grows almost two of every five mangoes on Earth and earns almost nothing. It ranks fourth among exporters, behind Mexico and Brazil, both of which grow a fraction of what India does. Most farmers who grew the fruit are still poor. This was true in a normal year. The weather just made the fragility of the system visible.

Weather takes the mango cake to be the most convenient villain in Indian agriculture for a good reason. It absolves everyone else. The trader becomes innocent. The exporter becomes innocent. The state government becomes innocent. The insurance company becomes innocent. The policy machinery becomes innocent.

The climate did it. Case closed. Can we move on to the next horticulture mission?

If we are serious about examining the fragility of the system, we need to unpack its deeper layers.

Let us start with the fruit.

A mango tree is fussy. It is bruise-prone and unforgiving. It flowers only when the nights turn cold for a few weeks, usually in February. If the cold comes late or the heat arrives early, the flowers fail. A ripe mango lasts about five days before it rots. The weather broke the flowering window this year. Winter ran long. April jumped to 42 degrees Celsius.

The mango is also alternate-bearing by nature.

A heavy crop year is usually followed by a thin one, even without climate stress. This makes cold chains and packhouses hard to justify, because the fruit they handle disappears every other year. You can run a juice factory year-round on Totapuri pulp. You cannot run a fresh-export packhouse on Alphonso that flowers fully only once every two summers.

The next layer is the farm.

Most Indian mango orchards are small and scattered. A typical grower has a few acres, often split across plots. Yields are low, sometimes just six to eight tonnes an acre in the older belts. A farm this size cannot pay for a cold store, a grading line, or a packhouse on its own.

If you peel the skin deeper, you will arrive at infrastructure

The infrastructure a mango needs barely exists in India. NCCD's last full assessment found a ninety-nine percent shortfall in pack-houses and eighty-five percent shortfall in refrigerated trucks.

The northern mango states have cold storage capacity built almost entirely for potatoes. The biggest producing states - Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal and Madhya Pradesh - are landlocked and short on the right refrigeration. Their fruit rarely reaches a port.

Trust leaks as well.

Cheaper Karnataka mangoes are ripened with chemicals and sold as Hapus. A good name takes three generations to build and one season to steal. If misdiagnosing the root cause is the first step to perpetuating a problem, what guarantees that the problem repeats itself ?

Step 2: Mistake Glamour for the Industry

A box of Alphonso selling for a thousand dollars in an American supermarket does not mean India has built a mango economy. It means one box reached one shelf at one absurd price. A mango festival does not mean the farmer has bargaining power. A GI tag does not mean origin is protected. A viral tasting does not mean the grower captured value. A Prime Ministerial gift does not mean the mango economy is healthy.

Let’s be clear about the market dynamics. There is no single mango market in India.

Thanks to its alternate bearing structure, there are tiers stacked delicately on top of each other.

Premium GI-tagged varieties like Alphonso sit at the top, fragile and fake-vulnerable, with volatile prices. Mid-tier varieties like Kesar, Banganapalli, Dasheri and Langra cover the broader domestic plate. The mass tier is Totapuri and a few processing varieties that feed the pulp factories.

Each tier behaves differently.

When Alphonso collapsed this year, Banganapalli prices in Mumbai rose because shoppers switched. Gujarat Kesar growers had their best season in years. Climate damage to one variety lifted prices for another. The total mango export figure is an average that hides which variety, which district and which farmer is actually winning.

The glamour layer is useful because it distracts us from the boring layer where the money is lost. Who graded the fruit? Who owned the packhouse? Who financed the farmer? Who captured the premium? Who took the rejection risk? Who paid for the cold chain? Who certified the origin? Who benefited when a consumer abroad paid a ridiculous price for memory wrapped in cardboard? None of these questions are interesting as long as we play out mango hype in Instagram reels.

The fake Hapus problem exposes this perfectly.

Premium mango markets are built on names: Devgad, Ratnagiri, Gir Kesar, Banganapalli, Dasheri, Langra, Himsagar. These names carry geography, memory and price. So the market naturally invites fraud. Cheaper mangoes are ripened, polished, renamed and sold as Hapus. The consumer is cheated, but the deeper damage is to the real grower whose premium margins are stolen.

A premium depends on trust. If the market cannot distinguish Devgad Alphonso from a chemically ripened lookalike, the premium weakens. If the premium weakens, the incentive to invest in quality weakens. If investment weakens, the origin brand becomes a joke. A geographical indication without enforcement and traceability is not a moat. It is a fit for nothing certificate.

Even the biodiversity story gets distorted by glamour.

India grows six or seven hundred named mango varieties and only two of them carry almost the entire fresh export trade. Alphonso has the highest spongy tissue rate and the lowest export viability.

Kesar and Banganapalli dominate much of India’s fresh export trade because they fit the export machine better. They have thicker skins, longer shelf lives, more forgiving shipment characteristics and better aggregation geographies.

More importantly, they sit closer to serious processing ecosystems.

Kesar exports work because Gujarat has flat land, large concentrated holdings, a serious pulp industry in Junagadh, and a Gujarati diaspora in the Gulf. Banganapalli exports work because Andhra has the Nuzvidu pulp factories absorbing the lower grades and a Telugu diaspora in the United States.

The Konkan Alphonso belt has nothing like this. There is no Maaza-grade processor at scale absorbing the cheap fruit. So Konkan growers swing violently from glut to scarcity with no buffer, and the celebrity variety the country loves most is structurally the most exposed.

This is our worst habit: We celebrate diversity in speeches, destroy it through incentives.

Of course, the answer is not to romanticize every variety.

Some mangoes should become premium fresh fruit. Some should dominate regional domestic markets. Some should feed pulp, pickles, beverages, dairy, desserts, dried products, cosmetics, seed-kernel products and waste valorisation. Some may work best as local tourism or heritage products. The task is to assign economic roles to diversity. Every mango does not need to fly to Dubai. Every mango needs a convincing reason to remain in the orchard.

Which brings us to the most uncomfortable step.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?"

Step 3: Love Mangoes So Dearly That Reform Never Reaches Them

India exports so little because we love our mangoes so much. Indians buy almost everything. The home market eats about eighty-five percent of the crop with ease and clears the surplus as well. That sounds like a strength, and in one way it is.

A large domestic market can absorb varieties, price points, regional preferences and seasonal surges that no export market can. But it is also the reason none of the challenges we have been talking about ever get fixed.

A farmer who can always sell into the mandi has no reason to grade, chill, or prove his fruit. The deep home market is a cushion. It absorbs every shock and sadly, every incentive to improve.

Because the crop can usually be sold somewhere, the system is not forced to improve. Fruit moves even when it is ungraded. Consumers buy even when origin is uncertain. Traders clear volumes even when cold-chain discipline is weak. Farmers survive even when they do not prosper. The system functions just enough to avoid collapse.

This is the tragedy of Indian agricultural underperformance: It rarely dies. It adjusts downward and calls the new level normal. I am done with snarky cynicism.

Export obsession will not change the status quo. It will not change the fragility of the system. It will only make it worse. We have already seen in in the case of tea, spices and marine products.

If we are serious, what changes do we need?

Mango regions need farmer-aligned aggregation with commercial discipline. Packhouses must be tied to assured volumes, grade standards and market contracts. Cold-chain investments must be variety-specific and region-specific. Alphonso does not need the same architecture as Totapuri. Kesar does not need the same system as Dasheri. Banganapalli does not face the same constraints as Himsagar.

Processing must be treated as price insurance. A pulp plant, frozen puree line, drying facility, beverage ingredient chain or mango butter unit can stabilize the fresh market by giving lower-grade fruit a destination. The fresh market becomes less desperate when rejected fruit finds new lease of economic life.

Climate risk must be redesigned into the mango system. Orchard insurance cannot behave as if flowering failure is a paperwork inconvenience. Heat stress, fog, unseasonal rain, alternate bearing and fruit-set failure need better assessment models.

Traceability must become the foundation of premium. If a consumer pays for Devgad, the system must prove Devgad. If a buyer pays for Gir Kesar, the system must prove Gir Kesar. Origin, grade, ripening method and farmer identity cannot remain matters of faith in a dynamic market built for substitution. A premium that cannot defend itself becomes an invitation to fraud.

Let us stop treating the domestic mango market as the consolation prize after exports. It is the main event. It is where most mangoes will be eaten, gifted, pulped, blended, frozen, cooked, worshipped and fought over. Upgrading this market is the real prize.

We are blessed to remain the largest mango producer in the world. Can we work towards becoming the world’s greatest mango economy?

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 “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Hyderabad, India. Welcome to Sunday Reflections where I reflect on what I’ve written and ask myself, In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@ic…

Read more

State of Agritech -27th May 2026

1/ What can India Learn from South Africa?

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that South Africa’s agricultural sector supports roughly 960,000 jobs. What is South Africa doing right? What is the counter-intuitive truth about the way India regulates its agricultural markets? Although India’s agrarian predicament is unique, what can India learn from South Africa?

2/ Making Sense of StrainX Bioworks’ $13Mn Fundraise

Is StrainX Bioworks addressing the missing messy middle between lab-scale synthetic biology and commodity-scale biomanufacturing ? In contrast to China, has India really moved the needle on industrial fermentation unit economics? How does Industrial Fermentation Stack look like? What could be the two ingredients StrainX Bioworks is likely to commercialize in the near future? I speculate based on the clues given.

3/ Surely, ITC Spices Must Be Joking!!

ITC recently claimed to be “leading exporter of organic spices”. Shall we peel the onion layers with the help of their Q4 FY26 results? Organic spices constitute 0.39 percent of India’s spice export volume and 0.96 percent of export value. It is like saying you are the largest EV maker in a country where total EV sales are 0.5 percent of the auto market.

4/ China’s Big Food Gamble

China doesn’t want to take more land from staple grain; rather, draw more calories and protein from forests, grasslands, oceans, and bio-tech. What are the hidden trade-offs behind China’s Big Food gamble? Is China ready to let go of resilience in frenzied pursuit of control variable?

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.

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.

Read more

Read more

State of Agritech - 20th May 2026

1/ Wingreens Picks Safe Harvest

Why did Wingreens acquire Safe Harvest? Would Safe Harvest follow the same trajectory Raw Pressery did when it was acquired by Wingreens in 2021? Although it is pointless, what could have Safe Harvest done differently?

2/Decoding Fragaria’s and Oishii’s Vertical Farming Thesis

Amidst a graveyard of vertical farming failures, how to make sense of Fragaria’s and Oishii’s thesis? Is it time to revisit my bearish outlook on vertical farming?

3/ Update on FMC India’s $252 million distress sale to Crystal Crop Protection

4/ Is Gates Foundation Chasing Rainbows?

Rainbow Crops Awarded $7M Grant by Gates Foundation to Advance Climate-Resilient Crops. Climate resilience could be built two ways. What are those? Where can Rainbow Crops’ combinatorial approach work realistically? Where it cannot?

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.

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.

Read more

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 Ayush1 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. Sarpagandha was 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?

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 “Krishi.System”, please click on Like at the bottom and share it with your friend

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Hyderabad, India. Welcome to Sunday Reflections where I reflect on what I’ve written and ask myself, In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?

If you don’t want CC hassles, you are most welcome to use paypal or UPI (venkat.raman.kr@ic…

Read more

State of Agritech - 14th May 2026

1/ FMC India’s $252 million distress sale to Crystal Crop Protection

Soon after shutting down its India Operations, FMC finds a pre-IPO suitor, albeit with a divergent cultural DNA. What led to this distress sale? What does Crystal Crop Protection gain? What does FMC gain? What is the road ahead?

2/ When Climate-Resilient Crop becomes the most Climate-Vulnerable Crop

A new study covering 51 years and 563 districts has just published the most rigorous estimate yet of what climate change is doing to Indian agriculture. Which crop lost the most yield to a 1°C rise in temperature? Not rice, wheat or maize. Pearl millet.

3/ Double-clicking on Amazon’s $30 million deal to buy carbon credits from Indian rice farmers

Amazon bought $30 million worth of Indian carbon credits without using India’s carbon market. Why are Indian farmers not a counterparty to this deal? What about additionality paradox? Can it be resolved?

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.

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.

Read more