The Four Core Myths Still Taught in Agribusiness Schools
Fourteen years ago, when I had more black hair, I passed out of a business school with specialization in Marketing, Web 2.0 and Ecology. While I had formally opted for Marketing majors at the time of my admission, the rest were an informal serendipitous rabbit hole I happily fell into. It’s uncanny when I think about it. What are the odds of an organic farmer showing up as a visiting faculty to teach a strategy elective?
Isn’t Nature the greatest strategist of all time? If Nature works on the basis of everything connected with everything, wouldn’t technology follow a few rules of Nature? His mind-bending course began with this audacious premise. I’m not exaggerating one bit. It was the Matrix red-pill moment of my life. My MBA, in a strange turn of events, became a life-long investigation of Myths, Biases and Assumptions of my life.
Gobsmacked by the design and the designer of the course, I signed up for another elective course, “Science, Technology and Ecology”, he was teaching in another business school. Back then, I had the dubious distinction of being a student of two management institutions at the same time.
In these intervening fourteen yours, barring those two courses, I have largely focused my energies on unlearning my MBA degree and the subsequent seven-years of playing conslutting (not a typo!) techno-business games. Such is the nature of unlearning and habits that get ingrained inside outdated myths that shape the architecture of these institutions.
This became deeply poignant when I was recently invited to review the curriculum of a leading agribusiness management school, soon after I designed a curriculum to teach a fully credited course (to be taught in July 2026) on agricultural technology in the age of climate emergency.
It’s fascinating to observe how time gets frozen in management institutions and get trapped into a vortex that has little or no escape route. Nate Hagens helped me articulate these inchoate feelings when he published a brilliant video that explored the 10 core myths that are still taught in business schools. The video was fascinating and I wanted an excuse to meditate deeply on how few of these myths cast their spells in the agritech/agribusiness games we play.
Let’s be clear.
In the time of climate emergency, agribusiness schools worldwide still teach students to manage farms like widget factories: Inputs in, Commodities out. With time, we might upgrade the technological means that help students manage these widget factories. But the underlying assumption of farm as a factory is deeply ingrained in their pedagogical nervous system.
How do we transform this fundamental mental model that underpins these pedagogical approaches? Could we start with examining these deeply-held myths?
Myth 1: The Energy Blind Spot
The first and foremost lethal myth taught in agribusiness schools is that the environment is a subset of the economy. It is treated as a resource tap that can be opened and replaced with alternatives when needed. In standard agribusiness management, energy (diesel, fertilizer) is just another line item on a spreadsheet, substitutable by money or technology.
This is a dangerous delusion. The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the biosphere, not the other way around. Modern farming, as it happens at large, is essentially the process of turning fossil fuels into food. When we view energy as a mere input cost, we fail to see the fragility of our system.
What happens when we don’t see fertilizer as an embodied energy input of the system? What happens when we replace a noun with a verb - fertilizer with fertilization? How do we rethink teaching “Energy” in agribusiness schools when we are moving away from a ‘broadcast fertilizer’ approach to a ‘biological foraging’ approach?
How do we teach “Energy” as a concept in agribusiness schools when we discover that biomass is the only available renewable energy on planet Earth?
Myth 2: The Delusion of Price, Value and Yield
We are conditioned to believe that if the market pays ₹20/kg for tomatoes, that is their true worth. But market price ignores the “externalities”: the topsoil stripped, the water table depleted, and the nutritional collapse of the crop.
When we calculate the “yield” of industrial agriculture without accounting for topsoil loss, groundwater depletion, biodiversity collapse, nitrous oxide emissions, rural displacement and farmer suicides, we are not measuring the reality of the agricultural system. We are measuring an ecosystem extinction event that wears the lipstick of “growth”.
In agriculture, the “externality” is the system.
What happens when we truly account for the ecological services provided by a regenerative farmer? Whether it is biodiversity indices that are measured based on bird calls, sophisticated approaches measuring the hidden costs of agrifood systems, or farm management software that could calculate the nutrient density of the produce, water retention and microbial density, there are plenty of emerging approaches that go beyond measuring tonnage and yield.
When these approaches become mainstream, how will we teach the measurement of the true cost of the food we grow?
Myth 3: Farmers are Rational Economic Actors
Management Institutions fantasize over Homo Economicus, the idea that farmers and consumers are “rational utility maximizers” who make decisions solely to maximize financial profit. This myth led to a decade of failed agritech apps that assumed if you showed a farmer a chart promising 10% more yield, they would blindly adopt it.
Homo economicus was conjured out of thin air based on fertile imagination of economists believing individuals making rational decisions to maximize utility based on complete information and self-interest. In agrarian reality, what happens in the fields and markets are, well, we know what happens in the real world.
Can you imagine the consequences that ensues when we imagine farmers as protagonists of homo economicus archetype?
Farmers are social primates operating in kinship networks, community relationships, and cultural contexts. They make decisions based on risk aversion born from survival. Agricultural extension works largely through social diffusion, not rational calculation.
Farming isn’t just economic activity. It’s identity, heritage, and long-standing living relationship with land. This is not to romanticize them. Farmers breathe uncertainty in every waking moment with incomplete and asymmetric information. Try making “rational” decisions when you don’t know if the rains will come, what prices will be at harvest, or whether that input dealer is selling you real seeds.
The “Invisible Hand” of self-interest fails miserably when it comes to managing the commons, shared pastoral lands and shared resources like groundwater and electricity. Competitive borewell digging in smallholding agricultural contexts is the result of rational individual thinking leading to collective suicide.
Indian Culture Has Revered Farmers as ‘Annadata’(The One Who Feeds) for Ages. Today, It has sadly become the albatross hanging around their necks. What would it take to reclaim Farmers as “Annadatas”, fully understanding their role in shaping the health of our human kind?
Myth 4: Realigning Time and Money
Finally, we must confront the myth that money and debt are neutral. We are taught that debt simply moves money from the future to the present. But in agriculture, debt is a claim on future energy and biological productivity.
Agriculture and Agribusiness is the only domain (as far as I know) where the oldest economic adage, “Time = Money”, stands on shaky grounds.
The fundamental stress in farming today comes from a mismatch of clocks: the financial clock ticks in quarters and fiscal years, but the biological clock ticks in seasons and regeneration cycles. When we force the land to run on bank time, we degrade the soil to service the interest.
In a domain like agriculture, where ‘the definition of ‘fast’ is counted in years, time is the biggest leverage.
How do we bring an alignment of these mismatched clocks? Can emerging explorations around regenerative finance deliver its fullest potential, funding soil regeneration (with payback over decades), farmer education and knowledge networks (something that’s hard to monetize), community infrastructure (distributed benefits) and water cycle restoration (public goods)?
Today, capital allocation loves to fund consolidation (fewer, larger farms) over diversification; favors monocultures over polycultures (complex, resilient); finances input-intensive systems (more products to sell) over regenerative systems (fewer external inputs) and supports extractive operations with 5-year horizons over generational stewardship.
When Regenerative finance becomes mainstream, how would it change our default assumptions about capital allocations?
At the end of the day, we are left with two choices
We either recognize that we are nature, not separate from it; energy is the foundation, not just another input; growth on a finite planet is physically impossible; externalities are actually the main event and technology simply amplifies the system it serves.
Or we continue extracting, optimizing, growing, and simplifying until the systems we depend on collapse.
The choice is ours.
So, what do you think?
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