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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Read more

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

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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.🙏

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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?

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Subscriber-only Post Trailers

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?

Plenty raised $940 million and went bankrupt in March 2025. Bowery raised $700 million and shut down in November 2024. AeroFarms, AppHarvest, Fifth Season, Kalera, Agricool, Infarms — fourteen controlled-environment agriculture companies filed for bankruptcy in 2025 alone. Combined burn across the graveyard sits north of $3 billion.

I’ll be honest.

I have been bearish about vertical farming thesis as it is blind to energy costs and relies too much on arbitrage gameplay.

Vertical farming was sold to venture capital as a technology bet when it has always been a price-arbitrage bet. The arbitrage exists only where field agriculture structurally cannot compete — through seasonality, geography, or freshness decay.

I put the obvious question to Harish Varadharajan of Fragaria Fruits: “Don’t your strawberries compete with open-field produce?”

“Only 3 months a year. Even in that time, since our products travel less from farm to customer, we are able to harvest late, resulting in better sweetness compared to Mahabaleshwar.”

For nine months of the Indian calendar, the field is empty. Indian per-capita berry consumption sits at 0.25 kg against 2–3 kg in China — an 8–12x demand vacuum that exists because no domestic supply meets year-round need.

But what about the high production costs?

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

P.S. I received interesting comments from agripreneur friends on vertical farming production costs.

1. 16000 sqft is approx .36 acres.

2. 1465 sq mtr and assuming 2.5 meter vertical space comes to total of 3650 total vertical production area. Now multiply 100 USD x 3650 comes to Rs 3.25 cr capex.
~~

“Vertical farming unit economy is very important, as long as it supports that you can do. personally our experience with vertical farm (especially in chennai climate) was a failure story due to unit of economy”

~~

“With all the headlines about Driscolls and pesticides, the opportunity is to sell a better/cleaner product, but one with proper (and regular) independent testing that's available to the public.”

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?

In March 2021, Wingreens acquired Raw Pressery at ₹100 crore. One fifth of its prior ₹500 crore post-money valuation. Raw Pressery had burned through roughly $150 million. Wingreens absorbed it as Sequoia Capital sat on both cap tables and could orchestrate the portfolio transfer.

Five years on, Raw Pressery exists as a sub-brand inside Wingreens with the original premium-positioning DNA muted, jostling for shelf space against mainstream juices.

Will Safe Harvest follow the same trajectory?

Lead investor and prime mover Ashish Kacholia’s mechanics is interesting.

He held Safe Harvest as a standalone HNI bet. By rolling that into Wingreens equity through the swap and leading the Series D, he is doing a value-transfer manoeuvre.

Safe Harvest’s journey, transitioning from a social enterprise that was incubated by eight civil society organizations in 2009 to its current form is fascinating.

Safe Harvest's portfolio is dominated by staples — atta, dal, rice, oils, sugar.
Indian consumer behavior in staples is brutally price-sensitive. Aashirvaad, Tata Sampann, Fortune, Patanjali compete on 3–8% gross margins at the brand level with massive volume offsets.

What are the assets Wingreens is buying? What could have Safe Harvest done differently?

More in a subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System

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?

The compliance market that India launched in 2023 does not cover agriculture.

The voluntary market for rice methane invalidated almost 99.9 percent of its credits last year over additionality concerns.

So Amazon funded a Bayer-led consortium, The Good Rice Alliance to enroll 13,000 rice farmers, train them, measure their methane, and aggregate the credits into a private supply chain.

India's own draft Carbon Credit Trading Scheme and the Article 6 architecture didn’t mediate this transaction.

The 35,000 hectares the deal covers represent less than one-tenth of one percent of India's 44 million hectares under rice. At $30M / 685,000 credits, the implied price is roughly $43.80 per tCO2e.

More in a subscriber-only edition of Krishi.System

___
P.S. I received several fascinating comments.

Banashree Thapa wrote,

“Dear Venky,

Thanks for this post and surfacing some suspicious angles with the whole Amazon deal. I want to highlight a few points on the above though:

1. 99% of the credits were invalidated would not be the most appropiate way to describe the issue. Verra scrapped off one AWD methodology; and 99% of the projects under it were from China. The methodology itself was suspicious; which is why it should have never passed through Verra's screening; but now that Verra is under increasing pressure to clean up its methodologies, the AWD one came under the review.

This is not to say that AWD's methane avoidance is necessarily isnt of merit through creation of robust methodologies.

2. On the farmers not being "counterparty" to the deal, I would love to understand what you mean here, since by your calculation 43.80USD/ton is not on the lower end of what carbon credits sell for (currently). If the farmers can continue to get similar prices (adjusted for inflation) for the remainder of the project duration, I would see that as one win for scaling SRC in India, while the policy case for it and the demand for it gathers momentum. The overall deal being done by non-Indian entities + agri-conglomerates should be rightly questioned.”

3. Additionally, India does not trade land-based mitigation credits under Article 6.4 and is reserving those deals for capex heavy sectors; hence why this deal couldn’t have gone through Article 6 mechanisms. On the CCTS front, one counter-argument they could make is: that domestic market wasnt ready yet, which is valid. But will be interesting to see how India responds to such large deals once its registry and governance frameworks are set up. Indonesia put a moratorium on call carbon trading by non-domestic parties 4-5 years back and asked every project developer to be registered in the domestic registry; which is something India could do as well.

Hasibur Rahman wrote:

“Bangladesh has been running AWD pilots since 2004. After twenty-two years, adoption remains under 8% concentrated almost entirely in project zones. That is not a science failure. It is a structural one: land fragmentation, pump owner control of water scheduling, fish income loss from drained fields. Individual farmers cannot implement AWD even if they want to.

The cooperative model changes the additionality calculus entirely. When a cooperative adopts AWD as a block, the practice change is verifiable, the MRV is manageable, and farmers become genuine counterparties not passive beneficiaries of a private supply chain. When the cooperative is the registered entity in the carbon agreement, farmers are genuine counterparties with governance rights. The cooperative secretary maintains records for MRV compliance. The cooperative receives and distributes payment. The cooperative can exit if terms are not met.

I am working in the Barind Tract in northwest Bangladesh: Rajshahi, Chapai Nawabganj, Naogaon, Dinajpur. Groundwater declines 0.3 to 1.0 metres per year. The Barind Multipurpose Development Authority controls irrigation scheduling across the entire region, which solves the pump owner problem at the institutional level. ADB and IRRI already have baseline data here. Cooperative structures exist through RDRS and COAST Foundation.

I am building the five-layer deal structure: international buyer, carbon developer, country advisor (my role), NGO farmer aggregator, and cooperative farmer blocks. The same architecture the Amazon India deal used, adapted for Bangladesh’s specific land and water constraints.”

Danny Levy wrote,

“The additionality problem will keep recurring as long as MRV frameworks only measure what is easy to count. The biological contribution to soil carbon mycorrhizal networks, aggregate formation, root mass rarely appears in these accounting systems. Until it does, rice programs will keep chasing methane because it is the only signal the market knows how to verify. The measurement gap is the policy gap.”

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.

A new paper ran its own econometric estimation on 51 years of district-level data (1966 to 2016, 563 districts, ten crops) and benchmarked the results against 30 reference studies covering India and the global literature from 2007 to 2025.

The results led to an uncomfortable truth that most of us with ears on the ground are familiar with: Most of the existing literature on India systematically underestimates climate damage to agriculture, sometimes by a factor of two or more.

The table the authors present with long-run impacts on crop yields, showcasing percentage change corresponding to a 20% decrease in rainfall and a 1◦C increase in temperature is fascinating for many reasons.

For starters, It inverts the entire millet climate resilient story on its head.

Pearl millet, the crop being promoted across the country through the Shree Anna Mission as the climate-resilient future of Indian agriculture, is the most temperature-vulnerable crop in the entire dataset.

A 1°C rise in temperature reduces its national-average yield by 19.1%. In the worst-affected districts, the loss climbs to 38.5%. Sorghum, the other promoted millet, takes the largest yield hit from a 20% rainfall shortfall: 14.1%. Two crops being promoted as climate adaptation sit at the top of the climate-vulnerability table.

The study is deeply counter-intuitive when it comes to Wheat.

Wheat is often described as water-thirsty and unsustainable and yet it comes out as one of the most resilient crops in the study.

A 1°C warming cuts wheat yields by just 5.4%. Why is this the case ? Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh. Districts with deep irrigation cover, canal networks, tube wells. When the monsoon misbehaves, the infrastructure absorbs the shock before it reaches the plant.

Sugarcane shows the same pattern, with rainfall vulnerability of just 1.7%, the lowest of any crop, because almost all of it sits on irrigated land.

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

I received several comments, critiquing the paper’s methodology. Here is a comprehensive view based on how I understand the criticism.

A Critique of Monash University Paper

Navigating the weeds of the methodological debate of this paper has been interesting. Broadly speaking, I am hearing three forms of criticism

1. Real resilience lives at the cropping-system level (LER, polycropping, soil biology, household food security variance) rather than at the single-crop yield level.

2. The paper doesn't model India's near-doubling of net irrigated area over 1966-2016 or the deeply unequal distribution of that expansion across the 563 districts

3. Is it possible to study resilience through time series study across the country without taking into account to the district soil types ,irrigation?

Let’s look at the first.

Most LER studies in cereal-legume systems report values of 1.2 to 1.4. In simple terms, Intercropped sorghum-pigeonpea, maize-cowpea, or wheat-lentil systems produce 20 to 40% more food per hectare than monocrop equivalents.

Let’s break down LER.

LER measures the land-saving power of intercropping. Take sorghum and pigeonpea.

Grow them separately on two equal pieces of land, and they give you a combined harvest of X. Grow them together on a single piece of land of the same size, and they typically give you 1.2 to 1.4 times X. The single field has done the work of 1.2 to 1.4 fields.

How does this happen ? Resource complementarity. Sorghum has shallow roots and a short canopy. Pigeonpea has deep taproots and a tall canopy. The two crops draw water from different soil depths, capture sunlight at different heights, and need nitrogen at different times. Pigeonpea fixes nitrogen into the soil that sorghum then uses. The crops share resource niches rather than compete for them.

This produces climate resilience. When a rainfall deficit hits, pigeonpea’s deep roots reach water that sorghum’s shallow roots can’t. When the early monsoon fails, pigeonpea’s late maturation gives the system a second chance at a harvest. The mixture has built-in redundancy. One crop fails, the other catches some of the loss.

Monoculture cannot do this by design.

This is the documented agronomic reality of a significant portion of Indian smallholder agriculture, particularly in the very regions the Monash paper identifies as climate-vulnerable: the Eastern Plateau, the Western Dry Region, the Southern Plateau.

If a sorghum-pigeonpea Adivasi farmer in Bolangir loses 14% of sorghum yield in a rainfall-deficit year but the pigeonpea catches some of the loss because it's drought-tolerant and matures later, the household-level food security shock is smaller than the sorghum-only measurement suggests.

This paper measures monocrop yields one crop at a time and aggregates them with crop-weights from the All-India Agricultural Production Index. The architecture of intercropping is invisible to that measurement frame.

When the paper says pearl millet loses 19% of yield to a 1°C warming, the true household-level food security impact for a farmer practicing bajra-moth bean-cluster bean poly-cropping in Rajasthan is almost certainly smaller.

Now the second.

India's net irrigated area roughly doubled between 1966 and 2016, the same window the Monash paper studies. That expansion wasn't uniform. Punjab and Haryana started high and stayed high. Eastern UP, parts of Madhya Pradesh, parts of Karnataka saw substantial growth. Some rainfed districts barely changed.

This matters because every yield observation in the paper has two competing explanations. Was yield high because the climate was kind that year? Or was it high because the field had irrigation, and irrigation absorbed the climate shock before it reached the plant? The paper doesn't distinguish between these two explanations.

When the data shows that the Indo-Gangetic wheat belt is "climate resilient," part of that signal is the canal network, the tube wells, and the electricity subsidies for groundwater pumping that intercept the climate shock before it reaches the wheat.

Strip those away and the wheat belt would look different.

Pearl millet's apparent vulnerability has less to do with the seed being fragile and more to do with the regions where pearl millet is grown never having received the buffering infrastructure the wheat belt got.

Now the third

Can you study climate resilience at all through a country-wide time series, without modelling the district-level differences in soil, irrigation, variety adoption, and input use that everyone agrees matter?

Obviously yes, with bounded conclusions.

Given each district's actual cropping pattern, actual input use, actual irrigation, and actual variety adoption at any given moment, how does monocrop yield respond to climate anomalies relative to that district's own long-period normal? That is a useful question. The answer the paper provides is methodologically defensible.

The right way to read this paper is as a measurement of climate sensitivity conditional on the actual structure of Indian agriculture during the study period, rather than as a measurement of the crop in isolation or a forecast of what climate sensitivity will look like under different adaptation pathways.

The paper cannot answer the following questions.

How much would climate damage shrink if India invested in irrigation expansion in rainfed districts? How much would it shrink if farmers shifted from monocropping to LER-1.4 polycropping? How much would soil organic carbon restoration buffer the temperature effect?

To sum it up, The Monash paper measures one slice of the climate-agriculture relationship, with clear blind spots about the other slices. The slice it measures well is monocrop yield sensitivity to climate anomalies, holding everything else fixed at its actual historical structure.

The slices it doesn't measure (cropping-system architecture, irrigation-expansion buffering, variety and input dynamics, household food security variance) reflect the limits of an agricultural data system built to track monocrop production for procurement rather than resilience for survival.

The agricultural data system itself, ICRISAT-TCI for crop output, IMD for climate, the Directorate of Economics and Statistics for area and production, was built to track monocrop production for MSP procurement, food grain availability calculations, and Green Revolution productivity claims.

The data system cannot see LER, soil organic carbon trends, household food security variance, or system buffering capacity, because those were not the metrics the post-Independence agricultural state organised itself to optimize.

A real shift needs us to introspect on the data system we have built.

Hyderabad and Bengaluru Agripreneurs Meet

Hyderabad Agripreneurs Meet and Bangalore Agripreneurs Meet were such a delight.
Friends showed up. And the conversations were genuine, deep and explored all the essential nine rasas of agripreneurship.

Acquaintances showed up to regale us with fascinating back stories on . And very quickly, felt at ease to join the web of conversations.

I was happy to meet Narendranath Reddy Vaishali Neotia Navya Kiran and other new folks who joined us at Hyderabad Agripreneurs Meet.

It was a delight to see and hear the birth of Defacto india from Shreyasi Agarwal.

It was lovely to hear about the sand bio inputs innovations of Chintala venkat Reddy and the work done by Palle Srujana

Bangalore Agripreneurs Meet ended up exploring a lot of dairy related threads and we also explored some of the fascinating developments in securitization of receivables with Chiru.

Thanks to Gaurav Haran, we explored the market of Lactalis and how the dairy is quietly changing in this country. Thanks to Prachur Goel, we explored rural India's reels culture and how tribal languages have found a new lease of cultural life, thanks to Instagram reels.

Kishore Reddy PV shared his misfit thesis and Vivekanand Tiwari shared his bhojpuri roots and his fascinating journey from Israel to India. Thanks Vinay Menon Vishala, Preethy. Kishore, Raghu, Vamsi, Ramakrishna and other friends who took trouble to join us from afar.

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 -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.

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Read more

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 Agripreneur Meets

We have couple of Agripreneur Meets coming up, besides the big one at Srinagar in Kashmir.

Hyderabad Agripreneurs Meet
Date: 26th May 2026
Venue: Amro Cafe, Gachibowli
Time: 730 PM to 930 PM

RSVP

Bengaluru Agripreneurs Meet
Date: 28th May 2026
Venue: Chocolate Room, Whitefield, Bengaluru
Time: 4 PM to 6 PM
RSVP

Godzilla, in Japanese cinema, is the patron saint of unintended consequences. A creature born from radiation that humans themselves released, grown beyond any human capacity to control.

The more I think about fertilizer subsidy, the more I am left wondering about the eerie parallels.

India's fertilizer subsidy for FY27 is budgeted at about ₹1.71 lakh crore, more than the entire ₹1.33 lakh crore the Union Budget set aside for agriculture and farmers' welfare that same year. And that figure was fixed before the Strait of Hormuz closed. The Department of Fertilizers' own preliminary estimate now puts the FY27 outgo at around ₹2.3 lakh crore.

The instrument built to support the farm sector now costs more than the ministry built to support the farm sector. How the hell did we get into this mess?

A 45-kg bag of urea landed at port in late April this year cost roughly $935 a tonne, almost double the February price, which works out to around ₹3,600 wholesale per bag.

The farmer paid ₹242 at the shop the next morning, the same price he has paid since April 2018. Every paisa of the ₹3,358 gap was absorbed by the taxpayer. The number on the bag has not moved in eight years.

Eight Years.

Before the shocks, the bill ran around ₹80,000 crore a year. Then every single year overshot its own budget. ₹70,000 crore budgeted in FY21 became ₹138,000 crore actual. ₹80,000 crore became ₹162,000 crore in FY22. The FY23 peak hit ₹254,000 crore against a ₹105,000 crore plan. FY26 budgeted ₹167,000 crore and is landing near ₹217,000 crore.

The difference is what it costs to keep ₹242 frozen while the world price moved. The FY27 bill alone is roughly equal to the Union health budget and four times the rural roads outlay. The monster now has a claim on the national budget and everything else, from irrigation to agricultural research to rural health.

It eats only after it has been fed. So who holds the leash of this monster?

The money comes from the Ministry of Finance, but the subsidy is administered by the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, not even by Agriculture. Unlike the EU and the US, which hand support to farmers directly and let prices float, India suppresses the price of the bag while propping up the floor price of the crop, breeding market distortions of Godzilla proportions on both sides of the farm gate.

We are back to my favourite wicked problem that bamboozles this sector. Aren’t we?

Principal-Agent Problem

The principal (Ministry of Finance) who pays has no operational control, the agent (Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers) who administers has no incentive to shrink the programme, and the cultivator the whole apparatus claims to serve is the one party whose actual behaviour nobody is pricing.

Why has it been so difficult to control this monster? Three man-made feedback loops and one biological feedback loop are at play.

The first is the frozen price.

Once ₹242 is held through a crisis it becomes politically encoded and stuck in a vicious deadlock. It becomes impossible to raise during a shock as the optics are catastrophic. It becomes impossible to raise after a shock, as the upward move looks gratuitous. The number continues to get more stuck. On 28 June 2023, the government formally notified that urea would stay at ₹242 a bag for another three years, and it committed ₹3.68 lakh crore to hold that line.

India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman spake thus in Mumbai earlier in the month of April: 2026 "Didn't we do that during Covid? Farmers paid the same price as before. We never shifted the burden to them."

Can you see what is happening here?

The second is the manufacturer-solvency loop.

India imports roughly a fifth of its urea and nearly all of its phosphatic fertilizer. All those tonnes are physically brought in by a handful of producers and traders who bid in government import tenders. They will only do so if assured the government will reimburse them the gap between the global landed cost and the regulated price the farmer pays.

When world prices spike, the importer is in trouble. Subsidy dues become arrears. The fixed nutrient-based subsidy becomes stagnant, leaving the importer to sell at a loss.

The rational response of the importer in such conditions is to stop bidding. The tender comes back empty and the fertilizer does not arrive, leading to dry depots, queues, black-market diversion.

The government is held hostage by its own supply chain, unable to trim the subsidy without risking that the bags never show up. The subsidy is not just a price support but the standing payment that keeps the importers willing to keep the bags moving.

Here is a detailed infographic based on an excellent Swarajya piece (albeit too AI-esque) on what it takes to keep the price of a bag of urea stable.

The third is the gas-import absorption loop.

Or, in simple words, why we are screwed even when India produces 80% of its urea requirement domestically.

Urea is, chemically, little more than solidified natural gas. The gas supplies both the hydrogen feedstock and the energy to bind it with nitrogen drawn from the air. It makes up roughly 60 to 80 per cent of the cost of producing a tonne.

So what if India manufactures around eighty per cent of its urea at home when a large share of that production runs on imported LNG?

Since domestic producers are reimbursed on the same cost-plus basis as importers, every rise in the landed gas price passes almost directly into their cost of production, and with the farmer's price frozen at ₹242, almost the entire increase lands on the subsidy bill rather than at the shop.

This leaves India permanently exposed to global gas markets with no hedge against them. A tanker held up at Hormuz surfaces, months later, as a hole in the Indian budget.

The fourth feedback loop is not political, or economic, but biological.

The more fertilizer a field receives, the faster it loses the organic matter that lets soil hold water and nutrients, which lowers the soil's own fertility, which forces the farmer to add still more fertilizer merely to hold the same yield.

Each of these feedback loops reinforces each other. Every fertilizer reform attempt since the Soil Health Card Era of 2015 has faced the same chokepoint due to these feedback loops.

This absurdity is compounded by the killers of the cereal hamster wheel. The government announces minimum support prices for more than twenty crops, but procures only rice, wheat, and sugarcane at any scale.

Farmers rationally grow those three which swallow more than two-thirds of all the urea in India. The cereal-and-cane monoculture has quietly killed the pulse and legume rotations that sustained Indian agriculture for millennia. In those rotations the legume fixes its own nitrogen out of the air and leaves some behind for the next crop, needing no urea at all or a tenth of what a cereal demands.

Today, India now grows roughly twice the rice it eats, exporting forty per cent of it and diverting another nine per cent to bioethanol for blending with petrol. A substantial share of that subsidized, soil-degrading, climate-warming nitrogen leaves the country embedded in grain or burns in our fuel tanks.

Can you imagine the shuddering implications when more than two-thirds of the ₹2 lakh crore spent on fertilizer subsidy each year is never harvested as food at all, but lost to pollution?

Plants take up only 35 to 40 per cent of the nitrogen applied, and the rest escapes, much of it as ammonia into the air and as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide, while most of the phosphatic fertilizer washes away into the water.

Neem-coating the urea has done nothing to halt this ammonia loss.

What about Nano Urea? Can a 500-ml bottle replace a full 45-kg bag? Can 44 crores a bottle a year ensure that India would no longer need to import urea at all?

Let’s do the math.

A 45-kg bag is 46 per cent nitrogen. It carries about 20 kilograms of it. A 500-ml bottle of nano-urea, at 4 per cent nitrogen by volume, carries about 20 grams.

The agronomists The Hindu consulted put the problem in crop terms: A wheat crop draws roughly 25 kilograms of nitrogen from the field to yield a tonne, and a plant never takes up all the nitrogen it is given.

N.K. Tomar, a retired soil science professor, ran the numbers. Even if a plant absorbed every last gram of the 20 grams in a nano-urea bottle, it would yield about 368 grams of wheat grain, against the roughly 496 kilograms a conventional bag supports at 60 per cent uptake.

Twenty grams misted onto leaves cannot stand in for the 20 kilograms a bag provides.

IFFCO's own field trials, run across thousands of plots, reported an average yield increase of about 8 per cent. It could be useful as a supplement, but nowhere near the doubling that replacing a whole bag would require.

Even the former ICAR director-general under whom the product was cleared has said the proof of its benefit is still awaited.

What about DBT transfer?

Analysts like Uttam Gupta talk often about decontrolling fertilizer outright: Scrap the price and distribution controls, let the MRP find its own level, and protect poor farmers with a direct cash transfer instead of a hidden subsidy buried in the bag.

Here is the thing.

DBT transfers cannot work in isolation without working on the soil.

We cannot simply wish the problem away by only changing who pays without considering what the money would buy. Cash-transfer reform and the soil-rebuilding work have to move together.

Now that we recognize the false silver bullets, can we take a full stock of where we are.

It is pretty absurdly ironic, if you come to think of it.

The creature born to feed the country has begun, quietly, to poison it, and the budget that sustains the creature grows every year.

Let’s be clear. It’s not that India doesn’t understand what needs to be done to tackle this monster.

In his Mann ki Baat address of November 2017, the Prime Minister asked the nation to halve fertilizer use within five years. The consumption naturally rose as there were no clear machinery to coordinate the words into action.

The Inter-ministerial National Nitrogen Steering Committee, as Nandula Raghuram points out in her excellent piece, set up to provide exactly that coordination, saw its tenure expire before a single one of its recommendations was acted upon.

PM-PRANAM was launched in June 2023 to share half of any subsidy savings with states that cut chemical fertilizer.

The states, believe it or not, delivered the goods.

Fourteen states cut their fertilizer consumption by 1.51 million tonnes in 2023-24. Karnataka delivered 30 per cent of the savings and Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Andhra Pradesh delivered another 58 per cent. The Parliamentary Standing Committee reported on 13 March 2026 that not a single rupee had been disbursed.

The steering committee meant to run the transfers had met twice in three years. The Cabinet note had been withheld under RTI, The scheme sunset on 31 March 2026 having paid out nothing.

I am sorry to be blunt. Today, given our political timidity, we can never kill this monster.

At best, we could tame it. If we are serious about change, where do we begin? Here is a series of recommendations from the short term to the medium term to the long term.

Short Term Recommendations for the next six to 12 months:

1. Operationalize PM-PRANAM retroactively. Pay Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Andhra Pradesh for the reductions they have already banked, an outlay of perhaps ₹3,000 to ₹4,000 crore against a ₹2 lakh crore envelope. There are obviously fiscal implications that I haven’t fully considered, but the precedent this sets is enormous and is worth the risk. It establishes, for the first time, that the Centre will pay a State to use less fertilizer.

2. Fund The Pre-Monsoon Dry Sowing, the practice Andhra Pradesh's community-managed natural farming programme has grown into a hundred-thousand-farmer movement over five years, anchored in the semi-arid drylands of Anantapuram and now codified into nine ecological principles.

The economics have moved far enough to justify a serious scaling bet. A 2023 True Cost Accounting study of APCNF found yields 11 per cent higher, farmer net incomes 49 per cent higher, and crop diversity 88 per cent higher than on comparable conventional farms, alongside a fall of more than 50 per cent in pesticide and fertilizer use. The Kutch adaptation in saline, drought-stressed Gujarat shows that pelletised dry sowing could survive even India's harshest geographies.

3. Plug the 20–25 per cent urea diversion. Subsidized urea continues to leak into industrial use — resin, plywood, dairy adulteration — despite neem-coating and PoS authentication. The Economic Survey of 2015-16 once put total leakage, including smuggling across borders, as high as 40 per cent. A focused crackdown on industrial diversion, particularly in the resin and plywood corridors of UP, Punjab, and Gujarat, could recover ₹15,000–20,000 crore annually without touching MRP or supply.

4. Linking Soil Health Card recommendations with fertilizer purchase at PoS can definitely push the needle. More than 23 crore cards have been issued since 2015. But the data is being poorly used to simply monitor the scheme rather instead of shaping how fertilizer is sold. A farmer with high-nitrogen soil can still buy as many urea bags as he likes. Where farmers do follow their card's recommendations, government assessments report chemical-fertilizer use falling by 8 to 10 per cent with yields holding or rising. Wiring that advice into the point of sale, so soil data is cross-checked against what is actually being bought, would turn a card farmers can ignore into a nudge at the moment of purchase. This is also a good DPI use-case.

5. Commission the bio-input resource centres. National Mission on Natural Farming aims for 10,000 BRCs, cluster-level units that supply ready-to-use bio-inputs. The central assistance is modest with ₹1 lakh per centre. The real constraint is not money, but the infrastructure and entrepreneurs the grant does not cover. Bio-inputs are punishingly labor-intensive. Substituting a quintal of chemical NPK can demand a trolley of manure and several rounds of bioculture. We need more innovations that can address this. I know of few entrepreneurs addressing this.

Medium Term Recommendations for FY 28 - 30 - This is where we tackle structural reforms.

1. Bring urea under the nutrient-based subsidy regime. The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices recommended this in its 2023 Kharif non-price recommendations, and the Sharad Pawar committee first urged it back in 2012. Urea's exclusion is the fundamental reason why its price stayed frozen while phosphatic and potassic prices drifted up. Addressing this distortion is critical in addressing the overuse of nitrogen in our soil systems.

2. Index the Urea bag price to inflation at four to six per cent a year. Let’s not treat farmers with kid gloves. They understand.

3. Shift the direct transfer from the landholder to the actual cultivator. This closes the trapdoor that excludes the ten million hectares of leased-in land farmed by tenants who own nothing on paper. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are pioneering efforts in bringing tenants into the ambit of the system. Early days. Lot can be done in this regard.

4. Broaden procurement beyond rice, wheat, and sugarcane. Put real purchasing weight behind pulses and oilseeds, as farmers will grow what the state reliably buys. The vehicle exists in the Dalhan Aatmanirbharta Mission, launched in October 2025 with ₹11,440 crore to lift pulse output to 350 lakh tonnes. As of April, pulse area up grew barely 1.26 per cent, against a ten per cent fall over the preceding three years. Growing pulses will fix nitrogen in the soil and reduce our foreign exchequer with self-reliance on pulses.

5. The Talcher coal-gasification plant in Odisha, India's first, was supposed to add 12.7 lakh tonnes of coal-based urea a year and cut LNG dependence. It has slipped repeatedly from its original 2024 deadline and sat at roughly two-thirds complete in early 2025. Can we get it running?

   Long Term Recommendations - This where we focus on Atma Nirbharta (Self-Reliance)

6. Scale green ammonia. The SECI tender that closed on 30 March 2026 allocated 724,000 tonnes a year across thirteen fertilizer plants, on ten-year fixed-price contracts at ₹49.75 to ₹64.74 a kilogram, roughly half what Europe's benchmark auctions discovered.

   India holds an advantage Europe and Korea do not: solar irradiance, a domestic electrolyser buildout, and a captive offtake market. The catch is water. Splitting water for hydrogen takes around 9 litres per kilogram on the chemistry alone, and 20 to 30 litres once purification and cooling are counted, and the green ammonia made from that hydrogen needs the same input at scale.

7. We need to hedge the geography of our fertiliser supply, because the import map is dangerously concentrated. Nearly 70 per cent of urea imports come from a handful of Gulf states — Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain. Potash is imported in full, drawn from Canada, Russia, Belarus, and Israel. About 80 per cent of phosphoric acid comes from Jordan, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia, and China. The diversification already under way runs along two tracks: securing finished product through long-term offtake deals, such as the five-year agreements signed in 2025 with Morocco's OCP and with Saudi Arabia, and building processing capacity at home, as with Coromandel's new acid plant and Paradeep Phosphates' expansion. Both routes chip away at the single-chokepoint exposure that the Strait of Hormuz represents.

   A Togliatti urea venture in Russia would do the same on the nitrogen side. Fast-tracked in December 2025, the ₹20,000 crore project is a 50:50 joint venture between Russia's Uralchem and a consortium of Indian state firms, Indian Potash, RCF, and NFL. It is designed to produce two million tonnes of urea a year, the entire output earmarked for India, by leveraging Russia's cheap gas, and is expected to be operational by 2027-28.

   More than 70 per cent of India’s fertilizer imports currently pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and a dedicated plant on the far side of Eurasia routes around that single point of failure.

8. Instead of paying a fertilizer manufacturer for a molecule delivered, can we pay the grower for an outcome held in the soil, whether that is organic carbon built, nitrogen-use efficiency improved, or nitrous oxide avoided? The protocols are still maturing. The revenue rail is coming into view through the jurisdictional carbon-credit work the government has been exploring with the Environmental Defense Fund, and through the emerging Indian carbon market.

9. India can build on G20 Leadership and take lead in reviving the Inter-ministerial National Nitrogen Steering Committee. Would Modi lead the way, now that he has been awarded Agricola Award by FAO?

As history has often taught us, every crisis is a wonderful opportunity . Shall we convert this crisis into an opportunity?

So, what do you think?

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

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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.

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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.🙏

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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?

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Subscriber-only Post Trailers

Pluckk Vs KisaanSay: A Study in Contrasts

Both focus on farm-to-door. Both raised capital recently. Both have similar growth trajectories. And yet their DNA is as divergent as it could get.

Two Indian food startups both raised funding in the same week of April 2026.
One raised ₹100 crore and wants to sell cold-pressed juice in UAE. The other raised ₹34 crore and wants to put Kalanamak rice from UP and Chambal ghee from Madhya Pradesh on Delhi living room shelves — with the farmer collective's name on the packet.

Pluckk is in perishables — tomatoes, broccoli, avocado, pre-cut salads. These require cold chain, dark store proximity, 24-hour sell-through, and continuous replenishment logistics. Every unit of revenue comes with high wastage risk and time-sensitive delivery cost.

KisaanSay is in shelf-stable staples — rice, ghee, atta, spices, dry fruits, honey, jaggery, cold-pressed oil. These products have months of shelf life, require no cold chain, tolerate longer delivery windows, and can be sold through any channel without a Blinkit partnership. FWIW. KisaanSay did partner with Blinkit recently for their staples

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishidotsystem

P.S. After I wrote this, I received an interesting comment that implored me to compare Pluckk, Kisaansay with Noice.

Noice operates as a quick-commerce private label incubated within the Swiggy ecosystem. It focuses heavily on fast-moving, high-margin consumer categories like cold-pressed juices (such as mango, ABC, and sugarcane) and frozen foods. Although quick commerce doesn’t do fresh food well, there are interesting possibilities that leverage quick-commerce data to identify and fulfill urban demand for convenience and impulse purchases.

Why Are Indian Seed Growers Leaving?

The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade.

What are the six archetypes of seed growers in India? What can be done to reverse this trend ? I explore four options viz., 1) Complete managed farming operations. 2) Leveraging genetics. 3) Partial mechanisation 4) Newer areas for seed production. One of these options is also part of the problem.

These are challenging times for seed growers in India. The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade.

The government is simultaneously subsidizing both sides of this problem.

In my home state, Oil palm has taken over seed production at large.
Under NMEO-OP, the National Mission on Edible Oils — Oil Palm, farmers in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka receive a capital subsidy, a drip irrigation subsidy, and a government Fair and Remunerative Price that is announced before planting and guaranteed by the state.

This is a genuinely generous package, and it is working — oil palm acreage is growing.

The same government, through a different department, is expressing concern about grower exit from seed production and calling for better field officer coverage.

Of course, the 'seed production farmer' is not a monolithic identity in India. The tomato seed grower in Haveri, Karnataka, the cotton seed grower in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, and the bajra seed grower in Barmer, Rajasthan, operate under fundamentally different agronomic, economic, and social conditions.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of KrishidotSystem.

P.S. Ravi Kumar Tomar made an interesting comment.

“All problems mentioned in last column does exist but Seed Production Industry as a whole is not declining in India. It’s just that farmers choose to go for Oil Palm due to ease & long term security BUT seed production acreages keep growing. Just the cluster shifts to some other location. There is a consolidation of such growers too via professional Seed Production companies”

Missing Middle in Agri-Mechanisation Landscape

If you look at India’s mechanisation landscape, there is a missing middle no one seems to be talking about. When I triage the price points and capabilities, the following tiers are emerging.

Lowest Tier:
Single-purpose walking machines, suitable for inter-row work in vegetable plots or orchards, start at 36 K INR (~390 USD) and could go all the way upto 1.65L INR (~1769 USD). These have constraints in terms of walking operator and 2-5 implements.

Second Tier:

Power tillers in India start from around ₹1.65 lakh, with VST Shakti models pricing at ₹2.04 lakh and Kirloskar models running ₹2-3 lakh. These are also walking type. There are no power take-off system for most implements.

Missing Middle:
The missing middle exists at ₹2.5L – ₹3.75L tier (~2681 to 4027 USD). Those in which the operator is seated + 4WD + heavy tillage + multi-implement.

Products exist in this price band, but all current offerings sacrifice at least two critical capabilities.

More in a recent subscriber-only edition of Krishidotsystem

P.S. Bhushan Darekar shared how his product thesis aligns with the missing middle in agri-mechanisation landscape. He also shared their roadmap with price point evolving from Robot as a Service to direct selling.

“Today’s options either a) Depend heavily on human physical effort (walking machines), or b) Are too large, expensive, and not suited for inter-row operations (tractors).

We are still converting human biological energy into farm work, often under harsh conditions (chemical exposure, fatigue, labor shortage). In many ways, this is unsustainable — both economically and from a health perspective. We are building the Farm Guardian Rover — a multi-utility, electric, compact, and semi-autonomous field robot designed specifically for horticulture:

A) Separates the operator from the machine (remote + autonomous operation)

B) Works in narrow rows and tough field conditions

C) Supports multiple farm operations (spraying, interculture, etc.)

D) Designed at a practical price point for Indian farmers and service providers

Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet

I am gearing up for Kashmir Agripreneurs Meet on 2nd June in collaboration with NewGen IEDC – Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Centre, University of Kashmir.

Despite the conflict this region has witnessed over decades, Agriculture has been the most resilient sector in this region for three reasons.

1) Altitude
Kashmiri saffron grows at 1,600 to 1,800 meters above sea level in the Karewa highlands between the Pir Panjal and Great Himalayan ranges. This altitude produces the specific combination of temperature differential, soil drainage, and UV exposure that gives the stigma its biochemical profile: higher crocin (coloring strength), higher safranal (flavor), higher picrocrocin (bitterness). These are the three parameters by which saffron is graded internationally. Kashmir maximizes all three.

2) Terroir
Kashmiri apples taste the way they do because the Karewa soil, the valley's night-day temperature differential, and the high-altitude sunlight angle are an unreproducible combination.

3) Tradition
J&K holds nine GI-tagged products: saffron, Pashmina, Kani shawl, walnut wood carving, sozani craft, papier-mache, hand-knotted carpet, Khatamband, and Basmati.

Besides, entrepreneurs and farmers joining us from Kashmir - Ashfaq Syed, Irshad Ahmad Dhar, we have a motley crew of entrepreneurs joining us from various parts of India

Jagadeesh Sunkad
Partha Chakraborty
Padma Satyamurthy
Ashok Banerjee
Jofi Joseph
Milan M.
Komal Jaiswal
How can we accelerate agripreneurship in Kashmir? How do we integrate Kashmiri agripreneur ecosystem with India's agripreneurial ecosystem? Why do I host Agripreneur Meets?

My life time goal is to build a mycorrhizal network of changemakers working on transforming food and agriculture systems. There is no agenda other than learning and understanding what different change makers are working on, wearing a variety of hats, whether through finance, entrepreneurship or culture.

If you are an agripreneur from Kashmir, do fill the interest form so that we can bring the right set of entrepreneurs in the room.

Food System Transformers

Besides my passion for food and agriculture, I have a long standing love affair with the Indian epic Mahabharata.

In my earlier life, I wore a colourful storyteller career hat that profited handsomely from leveraging Mahabharata as a story technology kaleidoscope and today, a large part of my leadership coaching owes its existence to the frameworks that are built on Mahabharata.

With more than one hundred thousand sanskrit stanzas in verse, eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey put together, it is the longest composition of the world, narrating the greatest story ever told.

My relationship with Mahabharata transformed when my Yoga Mentor showcased how the epic could be a powerful mirror of self-discovery.

Essentially speaking, you can read Mahabharata in three ways
1) Historical Text 2) Inspiration 3) A Mirror to Discover Your Self.

The first two are outside-in ways of reading Mahabharata, and the third is inside-out.

How do you leverage Mahabharata as an inside-out mirror to discover yourself? As my Yoga Mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan elaborates in his fascinating book, Five Seats of Power, Mahabharata explores five archetypal seats of power viz.,

1) Yudhishtra: Structure and Order

2) Bhima: Adventure and Sensitivity

3) Nakula: Service and Compassion

4) Sahadeva: Knowledge and Inquiry

5) Arjuna: Integration and Simultaneity

It’s fascinating when I apply these five archetypes in the context of food systems.

More in a recent edition of Krishidotsystem.

So, what do you think?

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

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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.

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Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That story falls apart at the first field visit.

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

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

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

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

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

Now consider how impact gets measured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vocabulary of Indian farming changes every 150 kilometres.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treat the Indian agricultural dialect corpus as Digital Public Infrastructure.

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

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

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

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I am finally back home after completing the ‘Shifting Cultures’ Module of my MSL Systems Retreat at Melbourne. I hosted a small Agripreneurs Meet at Melbourne; met incredible changemakers working on education and agriculture in India, while working their way to raise capital in Melbourne; traveled across the Great Ocean Drive and enjoyed the beautiful Victorian weather where it is sunny, raining and windy all at the same time. I had a beautiful experience interacting, learning and observing the fascinating forty changemakers from all parts of the globe.

My mind is still in a blur, metabolizing the diverse experiences I had during this retreat. I will be penning a long reflections note soon. Since I am in a liminal state, navigating the gap between where I was and where I am right now, I want to break the programming jinx with this self-reflective piece that explores the archetypes of transformers of food systems.

Love

Venky

Besides my passion for food and agriculture, I have a long standing love affair with the Indian epic Mahabharata.

In my earlier life, I wore a colourful storyteller career hat that profited handsomely from leveraging Mahabharata as a story technology kaleidoscope and today, a large part of my leadership coaching owes its existence to the frameworks that are built on Mahabharata.

With more than one hundred thousand sanskrit stanzas in verse, eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey put together, it is the longest composition of the world, narrating the greatest story ever told.

My relationship with Mahabharata transformed when my Yoga Mentor showcased how the epic could be a powerful mirror of self-discovery.

Essentially speaking, you can read Mahabharata in three ways
1) Historical Text 2) Inspiration 3) A Mirror to Discover Your Self.

The first two are outside-in ways of reading Mahabharata, and the third is inside-out.

How do you leverage Mahabharata as an inside-out mirror to discover yourself? As my Yoga Mentor Raghu Ananthanarayanan elaborates in his fascinating book, Five Seats of Power, Mahabharata explores five archetypal seats of power viz.,

1) Yudhishtra: Structure and Order
2) Bhima: Adventure and Sensitivity
3) Nakula: Service and Compassion
4) Sahadeva: Knowledge and Inquiry
5) Arjuna: Integration and Simultaneity

It’s fascinating when I apply these five archetypes in the context of food systems.

Yudhishtras (Aeneas if you want to draw parallels with Roman heroes) are the administrators bound by the norms. They are most often interfacing with Sarkar (Federal Government) engines, those who believe in the power of policy to create change.

The MSP commission designer, the FSSAI standards setter, the state agriculture department officer who drafts a natural farming policy are typical Yudhishtras. Their shadow emerges when they starts worshipping the book of shoulds over the reality that is emergent. Yudhishtra becomes Bhishma (”The Man with Terrible Vow”) who gets caught with rigidity and role-boundedness

The Bhima (Hercules if you want to draw parallels) of food systems is the high-energy agripreneur who goes first into difficult terrain. The founder who built a new market category long before anyone believed a market existed.

Bhima energy is what the entrepreneurs thrive on. Their shadow emerges when the bhima disrupts without understanding if the ecosystem really warranted disruption in the first place. Bhima becomes Duryodhana (who forgets that he was once Suyodhana) who is caught up in impulsivity

The Nakulas (The Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux,if you want to draw parallels) are self-less servants who work on grass roots and serve change makers on the ground. They are the healers and do the thankless job of holding the infrastructure that no one pays attention until it gets broken.

The cooperative secretary everyone trusts. The extension worker with a 20-year relationship across five villages. Nakulas serve and often place others needs before theirs. Their shadow emerges when they get burned out since they hadn't paid attention to their needs. Nakula becomes Gandhari who in his/her eagerness to offer, forgets to replenish himself/herself

The Sahadeva (Cassandra if you want to draw parallels) of Food System believe in data and theories. They need a working theory before working on the ground. They are the researchers who believe in the power of numbers and can predict what will happen. Sahadeva was also an astrologer.

Sahadevas predict the collapse of Central Gangetic plans, when a particular bioregion will run out of groundwater. Their shadows emerge when they are unwilling to take action on the knowledge they sit on. They are unwilling to take the risk and endlessly wait for the opportune moment when they feel ready to take action. Sahadeva becomes Sakuni who gets caught in intellectualism and forgets to deploy insight in a dharmic manner

Arjunas (Odysseus if you want to draw parallels) in the food systems are a rare species. The one who stands between the two armies examines the double bind inherent in every difficult choice.

The blended finance architect who won't let investor return logic erase farmer dignity. The researcher who won't publish a study that flattens complexity to serve a policy narrative.

Arjuna's dharma sankata (double-bind) in the food system is live and unresolved: Does chemical-free transition serve farmers if it reduces income in the short term? Their shadows emerge when they sit on double binds long enough and unwilling to pay the consequences of their decisions. Arjuna becomes Karna who fails to tap into his heroic potential.

Today, the food systems are collapsing by their own weight, thanks to Climate change and therefore there is "dharmic" fight to restore dharma of food systems. Which Pandava role do you play in food systems? Can Pandavas collaborate to solve food system challenges? These questions are powerful enough to wake up every day and do the work I do. :)

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I send personal updates when I embark on new projects. Not out of vanity to play status games. But out of the humbling realization that in systems change work, especially while dealing with those that lovingly pushes me out of my comfort zone, tapping the collective wisdom is the often the hardest part.

Trust Margaret J. Wheatly to beautifully explicate this:

Since the three dimensions of my work - Content, Community Building (Retreats and Meetups) and Consulting- are dedicated to build the underlying mycorrhizal networks that can potentially tap into this collective wisdom for food systems transformation, it is fascinating to watch my informal work become formal over a span of six years.

1. Catalyst in Residence

I have signed up as “Catalyst In Residence” for accelerating regenerative agripreneurship in India with CEEW, supported by Rainmatter Foundation, through their Green Economy Accelerator.

Since a large part of my ecosystem engineering work has largely been open source-driven, I thought why not take this approach for this project as well.

Regenerative Agripreneurship in India is currently a niche affair, operating in counter currents with the current economic, policy, social ecosystems that favors conventional agriculture, locking us in a zero-sum game that neither benefits agribusinesses, farmers, consumers or the planet.

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.

The question is: How do we accelerate regenerative agripreneurship in India?

Given my strengths and what the ecosystem sorely lacks, I am breaking down my intervention into three levers viz.,

1. Entrepreneurship:

   Build entrepreneurial collectives that bring together Civil Society Organisations driving regenerative Agripreneurship on grassroots and Entrepreneurs with strong unit-economics acumen to build deeper market linkages and create further cascading effects with entrepreneurs incubating regen-market clusters that require hand-holding support to build market-ready regen commodity ecosystems.

2. Finance:

   Build hybridized financial models that can be sequenced according to the payoff and risk-return and built into financial products that can help farmers transition towards regenerative agriculture.

3. Culture

   Focus on farmer dignity, shame of pursuing “ancient” (as opposed to “progressive”)agriculture and build collectives of religious/spiritual organisations that use their narrative juggernaut to help farmers with transitioning towards regenerative farming.

I have consciously kept Policy (Policy is still a black box for me and I feel its wasteful investment to work on something where you have less control over outcomes) and Production Systems (Who am I to tell farmers/growers how to transition towards regen? I am happy being enabler catalyst) out of this framework.

The most recent Bhopal Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat was a first step in building this mycorrhizal layer.

With the help of friends, I plan to run regen-specific incubation programs, design workshops that unlock the challenges in cracking transition financing and bring together diverse religious/spiritual organisations that are involved in regenerative transition.

What would be the collective outcome of these activities?

I plan to come up with few specific investment proposals that can be taken to funders who would be willing to address Agritech - Development Death Cycle

I sketched this image several moons ago to talk about Development-Death cycle and strangely enough, it refuses to become irrelevant. Can we attract capital towards systemic investments that does the hard job of market creation and address infrastructure gap that inhibits regenerative agriculture’s highest potential?

I will find out. :)

2. Melbourne Agripreneurs Meetup

I'm coming to Melbourne for the in-person retreat module of the Small Giants Academy's amazing Mastery in Systems Leadership Retreat. I would love to meet agripreneurs/agritech entrepreneurs/investors/regen farmers in town. I am especially excited to meet Beanstalk Agtech folks and Tenacious ventures folks and folks working on food systems in Regen Melbourne ecosystem.

Why do I host Agripreneur Meetups?

My life time goal is to build a mycorrhizal network of changemakers working on transforming food and agriculture systems. There is no agenda other than learning and understanding what different change makers are working on, wearing a variety of hats, whether through finance, entrepreneurship or culture.

If you are from Melbourne or know someone doing interesting work in food systems there, you can share this RSVP link with them. I will be grateful

Dates: 28th April 2026

Time: 530 - 730 PM AEDT

3. Kashmir Agripreneurs Meetup

I am planning my first Agripreneurs Meet in Srinagar on the first week of June. Despite the conflict this region has witnessed over decades, Agriculture has been the most resilient sector in this region for three reasons.

1) Altitude
Kashmiri saffron grows at 1,600 to 1,800 meters above sea level in the Karewa highlands between the Pir Panjal and Great Himalayan ranges. This altitude produces the specific combination of temperature differential, soil drainage, and UV exposure that gives the stigma its biochemical profile: higher crocin (coloring strength), higher safranal (flavor), higher picrocrocin (bitterness). These are the three parameters by which saffron is graded internationally. Kashmir maximizes all three.

2) Terroir
Kashmiri apples taste the way they do because the Karewa soil, the valley's night-day temperature differential, and the high-altitude sunlight angle are an unreproducible combination.

3) Tradition
J&K holds nine GI-tagged products: saffron, Pashmina, Kani shawl, walnut wood carving, sozani craft, papier-mache, hand-knotted carpet, Khatamband, and Basmati.

How can we accelerate agripreneurship in Kashmir? How do we integrate Kashmiri agripreneur ecosystem with India's agripreneurial ecosystem? Few agripreneurs are traveling with me to Srinagar. If you are interested in joining hands, and can help me reach out to many more founders from Kashmir, let me know. You can RSVP here

Date: 2nd June 2026

Time: 10 AM - 6 PM

Wish me good luck:) If you have suggestions that will help me reframe my “Catalyzing Regenerative Agripreneurship” thesis, I am all ears.

Cheers,

Venky

So, what do you think?

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State of Agritech - 14th April 2026

In Today’s Edition:

Programming Note: Happy Vishu and Tamizh New Year to my friends who are celebrating:)

1/ India’s Missing Middle in Mechanisation

If you triage the price points and capabilities in India’s mechanisation landscape, there is a missing middle no one seems to be talking about.

2/ Why Are Indian Seed Growers Leaving?

The economics of producing seed at the farm level have been deteriorating across every major crop category for over a decade. What are the six archetypes of seed growers in India? What can be done to reverse this trend ? I explore four options viz., 1) Complete managed farming operations. 2) Leveraging genetics. 3) Partial mechanisation 4) Newer areas for seed production. One of these options is also part of the problem.

3/ Pluckk Vs Kisaansay: A Study in Contrasts

Both focus on farm-to-door. Both raised capital recently. Both have similar growth trajectories. And yet their DNA is as divergent as it could get.

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Read more

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Reflections from Bhopal Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat

The scent of contentment is intoxicating. It implores you to start afresh with a regenerative sense of vigour. I am starting the new financial year FY 26-27 with a deep sense of contentment as I plan what comes next after completing the Bhopal Regenerative Agripreneurs Retreat.

Thanks to incredible local hospitality of Prateek Sharma, Vijay Dhole and Varun Chouhan and other friends, we had an incredible experience as the retreat unfolded with lots of love, joy, care and fun. It was filled with abundance and fragrance of the mahua (Indian Butter Tree Madhuca longifolia).that besotted us throughout the Satpura forests.

With friends joining us from various parts of India, Singapore and Dubai, we had forty four entre/intrapreneurs/ change-makers working across eight clusters viz., 1) Finance & Catalysts 2) Narrative Building 3) Policy and Research 4) Direct Farmer Commerce 5) Labour and Mechanisation 6) Agritech and Digital Ag 7) Bio-Inputs and Soil Science 8) Narrative Building

Unlike the previous editions, thanks to loving nudges of friends like Gurpriya and many others, we had better gender parity among the participants with 9 women changemakers joining us among 44 participants.

As you can see from the clusters, unlike the previous retreats, we made the definition of “Agripreneurs” fluid enough to bring together diverse, mutually dependent players working in regenerative transition.

Having done five retreats, we were confident during the planning phase to go beyond the Collective and Cooperative designs that have been attempted so far and try out collaborative structures with a vibrant group that had enough fuel of passion to appreciate the mutuality and interdependence instinctively from the abundant diversity in the room.

And so it warmed the cockles of my heart to watch this retreat become the Regenerative Social Hadron Collider that accelerated individual change makers to incredible energy levels, thanks to the passion and conviction each one was bringing from their lived experience to the room about regenerative pathways.

At one point, during the second day, the energy shift was palpable as spontaneous breakout sessions went on till 9 PM despite having a long day that started at 9 AM.

This energy owed a lot to the deep authenticity and vulnerability that emerged from sharing deeply personal stories of ethical dilemmas each of the participants have been holding in their breasts.

Among the various sessions we had organized, including a beautiful deepdive on Vrikshayurveda from CIKS Balu that forced agripreneurs to revisit their assumptions towards Indian Knowledge Systems, the one on “Ethical Dilemmas” is the closest to my heart. We ask an extremely personal question to every agripreneur in the room: What are your ethics? What are the most difficult ethical dilemmas you are sitting with ?

Thirty-odd dilemmas surfaced, each a live wire. Be a marketer or a farmer's friend. Follow the funder's agenda or the community's need. Hire people who execute or people who question. Stay small and stay true, or compromise a little and scale. Is data really objective ? Is it possible to institutionalize good work?

Should I be an apolitical entrepreneur or stay true to my political roots? Should I price my product based on the market realities or the real value I perceive in my bones? Should I take CSR funding or wait for the elusive patient capital? Should I stay true to my family and family business or break it down and become an entrepreneur in my own right? Should I focus on mechanisation or focus on livelihoods even when the work has copious amounts of drudgery? Should I give into pressures of the State or stay true to my ethics?

In conferences, especially with entrepreneurs in the room, people typically find ways to quickly resolve them. In a retreat like ours, we didn’t do that mistake here. We listened and sat. For listening intensely is sometimes more than enough.

There was one beautifully dilemma that I didn’t see coming though: What if the solutions we are envisioning for today become tomorrow's problem? And there was one that is definitely worth meditating deeper on.

Should I stay 100% committed to the perfect vision that is possible only at small scale right now ? Or should I compromise a bit and scale bigger? Most ecosystem conversations treat this as a sequencing question, as though deep conviction and scale are bed fellows. Anyone who has watched a regenerative enterprise navigate its fifth year knows that such hard questions have no other way other than to live through them.

Sometimes the willingness to sit with hard questions long enough is sufficient to change the people asking.

You see, at the end of the day, there is not much difference between agripreneurs and plants.

Both need sufficient nutrition to transform themselves. The trouble begins when we settle down with only one form of nutrition (VC capital, Incubator/Accelerator) and see everyone else as competitors.

Mitali and Saumya from Urbanfarms gave us a master class on Crop Nutrition 2.0 based on the emerging paradigm in soil science.

The first generation of crop nutrition thinking asked a very simple question. What is the plant missing and how do we deliver it directly?

Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium — ionic, water-soluble, immediately available. It worked spectacularly for a generation until physics and biology started protesting. A soil running on electrolytes alone eventually loses its ability to manage itself.

Mycorrhizal networks do something ionic delivery cannot: they route surplus from where it exists to where it is needed, across species lines, in response to signals the plant cannot even articulate.

Strangely enough, this session on Crop nutrition opened up a rabbit hole that transformed how I look at the entirety of my retreating business.

What if there could be another form of nutrition for agripreneurs beyond the conventional sources of nutrition? What could happen when we build mycorrhizal networks of agripreneurs who are willing to provide nutrition to fellow agripreneurs?

When we can let the plants choose the relationships it wants to build for nutrition and disease protection, thanks to a diverse and abundant and healthy microbial community in the soil, why not create a vibrant ecosystem for agripreneurs that lets them choose the relationships they want to build for their growth and prosperity?

It's funny.

It needed an independent solopreneur business to make the first real moves in building a vibrant community and a well-thriving ecosystem around Indian Agriculture.

Seeing the reflections from participants after the retreat (Ramesh, Manish, Prachur, Rahul, Pramel Gupta and Ashish Gupta) reaffirmed the deep conviction I have been pregnant with for a long time: Indian agripreneur ecosystem is hungry for a space with no agenda other than its highest possibility.

When I run the business of being independent (read as solopreneur business), I'm able to hold that container effortlessly without much strain. I am able to confidently state out that there is absolutely no other agenda here than the highest vision we could aspire to as a community.

It’s paradoxical and yet obvious when you mull over it. The smaller the organizational form, the larger the vision it can hold.

As a solopreneur, I have no board to answer to, no investor thesis to protect,
no particular business model to defend. No particular pet technologies to propagandize.

Being independent in these anxious times feels like a blessing — because independence at one level makes genuine interdependence possible at another.

So what next from here? I am getting ambitious.

1. I am doing an Agripreneurs Meetup in Melbourne later this month.

2. I am organizing a two-day Kashmir Agripreneurs Workshop on June 2nd and June 3rd this year with a bunch of agripreneurs traveling from various parts of India.

3. I am organizing a workshop with investing folks on making regen transition financing work in the month of June

4. I am organizing a special gathering of religious organisations working on regen transition in the month of July

5. I am planning the next Agripreneurs Retreat at Chandigarh on September 24-25-26-27

There are lots to do with the power of an ecosystem. It is now starting to feel easier to go after moonshot projects. Time now to dream bigger and chase goals that seem too daunting.

So, what do you think?

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And Agriculture?

Field extension manuals that nobody reads, public data that is brazenly manipulated based on the policy that is being professed, clueless machine-generated data sets that are blithely ignorant about Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety1and an extension officer chain so thin that one officer covers a thousand farm households in better-served Indian states and far fewer in poorer ones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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