Seven Lessons from Dancing with Food and Agriculture Systems

October 13th, 2020.

Fully sensing the uneasy pit feeling in my stomach, I mustered the courage to turn on the paywall for this newsletter. Although?my LinkedIn newsletter?was more than two years old, the substack newsletter was a four-month?baby. As soon as I hit send,?Nipun Mehrotra?(Founder of Agri Collaboratory) wrote a beautiful email and signed up as the first subscriber. It was the sweetest email alert of my life that carried a heartwarming message: I wasn’t writing into a vacuum.

Somewhere, something was?happening.

One Year in, my newsletter revenues look like this with 70+ members in the Agribusiness Matters Community.

Now that I am talking of revenues, let me share with you my next goal: I want to reach $100K ARR well before I get ready to write?Two Years In, Seven Learnings?(I am superstitious about 7) on October 13th, 2022.

I’ve been blogging?since 2007 mostly for esoteric reasons. I mean, there are people who blog for careers, jobs, and money. And believe it or not, there?are?people who blog because they are enchanted by how the blogging medium mirrors the fluid nature of human perceptions.

I’ll be honest. It feels preposterous to think that somebody would pay to read my fleeting thoughts about a domain that is rapidly evolving in front of my eyes.?

Even today, it feels surreal, given the fact that most of my writing is detailed, but fun note to?myself,?mostly written in a first-person account, trying to explain along what I am reading, spotting trends, listening, and sensing from ground truths (sic), and connecting the dots together using frameworks of history, complexity, strategy, and technology.

I had turned on the paywall with 399 INR a month (3999 INR per year)and earlier this June, I kickstarted Season 2 of this newsletter and?tripled the amount with an 1199 INR a month (11999 INR a year) subscription.

It helped to receive kind emails from subscribers saying that what they were getting is WAY more than what they were paying.

I had also introduced a new patron/sponsor tier,?Agritech Partner in Crime?subscription for fervent readers of this newsletter to collaborate for ongoing research projects. Soon after, Mark Kahn, who tops the leaderboard for deep readers of this newsletter, signed up to become a partner in crime in the truest sense of the word, with research and collaboration in emerging frontiers of Agribusiness.?

Today, with 70+ paid subscribers so far from India, US, Canada, and Europe, the Agribusiness Matters community is steadily growing. I am also exploring newer research themes (Climate Change, Sustainability, Agri biotech) and exploring new ways to collaborate and engage with the agritech and the larger agribusiness ecosystem.

I am not a journalist. I work as an independent consultant in this domain and my hunt for insight is a question of my survival and my skin in the game. My objective in writing?Agribusiness Matters?is straightforward:?In order to survive and thrive in the future, how can we grapple with vexing?questions of food, agribusiness, and digital transformation in an era of Climate change?

These are vexing questions because issues surrounding food, agriculture, climate change are complex, involving?warm?data?(data?with?context), and not cold data (data?without?context).

And when you are talking of complex domains of food and agriculture,?you can't neatly isolate the problem from the solution. Every problem we define and every solution we propose to the agritech table for farmers has life-changing (good or bad) repercussions for farmers.

This is a matter of great responsibility. I hope to see some of you join the Agribusiness Matters community. Now that all the niceties are done, I want to share seven brief learnings from writing Agribusiness Matters in the first year.

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