Saturday Sprouting Reads (Krishify, DayaTani, Rural<>Agricultural)

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Hyderabad, India! Welcome to Saturday Sprouting Reads!

Dumb memes, incisive perspectives and a small community for brave pioneers building food and agriculture systems of the future in an age of runaway Climate Change.

About Sprouting Reads

If you've ever?grown?food in your kitchen garden like me, sooner than later, you would realize the importance of letting seeds germinate. As much as I would like to include sprouting as an essential process for?the raw foods that my body loves to experiment with, I am keen to see how this mindful practice could be adapted to the food that my mind consumes.?

You see, comprehension is as much biological as digestion is.

And so, once in a while, I want to look at a bunch of articles or reports closely and chew over them. I may or may not have a long-form narrative take on it, but I want to meditate slowly on them so that those among you who are deeply thinking about agriculture can ruminate on them as slowly as wise cows do. Who knows? Perhaps, you may end up seeing them differently.

Next Members-Only ABM Townhall Event: “Is Agritech Party Over?” - Dialogue with ABM Members Mark Kahn, Managing Partner, Omnivore and Shubhang Shankar, Managing Director, Syngenta Ventures and other Agritech Founders, Investors and Executives. Members can RSVP here.

FOMO Programming Note: Ides of September Offer Deal to join Agribusiness Matters at 20% discount expires in 24 hours.

{Subscriber-Only}: Making Sense of Krishify’s Pivot

Tech Strategy 101: Guess the two words which Mark Zuckerberg won’t say anymore in his PR interviews.

Come on! If you have been following Mark’s gospel, this must be a cakewalk!

No idea?

Social Graph        

When Mark acknowledges how he “sort of missed” a newer way that people “interact with discovered content” via social networking services, it is starkly clear that he got bamboozled by Tiktok. And so naturally, you can expect ‘Facebook for Indian Farmers’ to follow suit.

When Krishify announced in October ’22 that they had reached 1 crore app downloads, their vision was centred around mapping (and monetizing) the ‘demand curve’ in real-time, tracking various demand signals from Indian farmers’ online (content +/ query) behaviours.

Many moons ago, I made the Agri-Input Hierarchy of Needs framework to answer a simple question: ?How do you help investors and aspiring agritech founders prioritize what to build for Indian Agriculture?

What is happening now in circa 2023 is really fascinating. We are platforming farmers, mapping their demand signals, while platforming extension workers as well. Would the demand curve for farmers through platforms supersede the demand curve for extension workers/field agents in smallholding contexts? Or is it the other way?

In a recent subscriber-only edition of Agribusiness Matters, I look at Krishify’s Pivot, evaluate Leads connect strategic investment with BL Agro, and examine if prognostications of demand-driven agriculture are greatly exaggerated.

{Subscriber-Only} Making Sense of DayaTani

In an interview, AgriAku Co-Founder Irvan Kolonas suggested that the Indonesian Agritech Scene has seen three waves. If I were to paraphrase the key aspects, it might be summed up thus:

Wave 1: Asset-heavy, Full-Stack Single Commodity Business

Wave 2: Food Delivery businesses riding the e-commerce wave, partnering with ag output sellers. Tanihub, Sayur box

Wave 3: Specialized B2B players like Agri Aku

The parallels to the Indian Agritech scene are obvious. Farmart’s rise is predicated on Wave 3 characteristics which AgriAku is talking about.

In other words, replace FarMart in this highlighted excerpt above and you will see that it’s not that different.

What happens when a second-wave startup operator from India (Dehaat) partners with another operator from another second-wave startup from Indonesia ( Sayurbox) to build a new startup in Singapore?

In a recent subscriber-only edition of Agribusiness Matters, I attempted to make sense of Indonesian agritech startup DayaTani, Rize which wants to decarbonise rice cultivation.

Rural =! Agricultural

South Indian pop matinee Idol Balayya Garu has a point here that is critical and often overlooked.

In a country like India, we tend to confuse rural with agricultural. We don't understand that surplus growth in the agricultural domain is a precondition for the growth of the rural domain.

And it works both ways.

When non-agricultural sectors, particularly industry are unable to absorb the agricultural workforce, we are losing precious human capital. Few days back, a fresh agriculture graduate student called me for career counselling. We spoke about career options that are available. I asked her if I could share her predicament so that we also explore the possibilities and she consented.

"As fresh agriculture graduates, my classmates and?I are uncertain about the next steps in our journey. Many have joined coaching centres for?UPSC, TNPSC, and Bank exams. A few others have pursued MSc. programs in various Agricultural Science fields. However, uncertainty lies in whether a Master's degree holds substantial value unless followed by a Ph.D. Also, there are limited opportunities in ICAR/State Research Laboratories and Universities post-Ph.D. completion. Even the job offers during our campus placements mainly revolved around sales roles within agri-input companies."

She is eager to pursue research, but since research in agricultural domains is undervalued, she will have to leave the country for better opportunities or switch towards agribusiness where market prospects are better, thereby dropping the research path.

When I shared her predicament in a conversation thread to explore career possibilities, an academic dean working in a school of agriculture wrote an extremely moving comment that reflected the angst held by many who boldly strive to pursue public agricultural research in India.

“A few years back, I attended an interview for Principal Scientist in NIRD &PR. One of the questions was - what is your take on rural development? My answer - Sir, we cannot talk about development when the ecosystem and systems have already disappeared. We have to start with rural revitalization. We have to bring back rural youth and migrants back to rural society by creating work opportunities and then, plan for development from there. Those IAS officers got annoyed and started bashing me. We have no fundamental understanding of rural society and we talk at length. 99% of students pursuing agricultural sciences don't understand that their client is the farmer and their destiny is the village (rural ecosystem). As long as their perspective doesn't change. They will remain confused. The other biggest villain in our society is IT. My own brother after doing 4 years civil engineering and 4 weeks course in IT earns 1 lakh, and I will not.... this comparison kills”.

So, what do you think?

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