"Indian agritech, make no doubt, has immense potential in rethinking how we grow food that adds to health of consumers and contribute to the well- being of planet. There is a tremendous opportunity waiting right in front of us. That playbook hasn’t been cracked so far yet in a convincing manner for the kind of challenges we see in Indian Agriculture."
Having built Agribusiness Matters into a widely read platform, what leadership lessons stand out for you in building trust and credibility with such a diverse audience of farmers, founders, and investors?
Let me clarify few things first. I do have few farmers who read my newsletter. But the majority of the audience is largely agripreneurs, agribusiness leadership executives, people who work in agritech sector, people who work in Not-for-profit development sector and finally, technologists and young students who are plotting their way to enter the world of agriculture.
I have been writing on agriculture ever since Day 1 when I entered as a novice technologist who naively believed that he could build technologies that could solve the challenges in Indian Agriculture. One of my inspirations behind writing Agribusiness Matters is Gandhi. The frail old man wrote heck a lot (if you stack his Collected Works they can go upto the ceiling of your room) and kept in touch with incredible network of people. If you plot the network map of people, he wrote letters to, you would draw an incredible global network .How did this one man do all of this? Can I do something like what he did in the context of Agriculture. The man travelled all across the country in those days to the tune of around 14K kilometers (as one research found out). Can I keep writing and traveling and stay in touch with incredible innovators who are dreaming of better agrarian futures and building them step by step?
On sunny days, I like to think of Agribusiness Matters as a meditation retreat for agritech founders, executives, and investors to pause, introspect, flex their thinking muscles, and ponder over the hard, wicked problems they encounter in their everyday working lives. Can I write honestly what is true to me? Can I spell out the truth that no one is willing to admit? What would it take? Can I steer the innovators and entrepreneurs and investors through my work (whether through my retreats or writings or meetups) to think deeply and differently about Impact? These are the foundational questions that inspire me.
There are no leadership lessons. There are only lessons that I have learned from the school of hard knocks.
In your journey across consulting, investing, and community-building, how do you balance being a thought leader with being a practitioner who is close to the ground realities?
I am sorry. I hate the word “Thought Leader”. What is the point in leading thoughts, when thoughts are ephemeral and change continuously? I don’t believe in the idea of thought leader. The thought leader is bound by the framework he or she has buiIt and is actually a slave to it. Why would I want to be a Thought Leader unless I want to be insane and keep repeating the same things I said once? Today, bots can be thought leaders. But, even they are now being generative. Infact, on deeper thoughts, I don’t believe in leadering as well.
Today, both leadership and thought leadership are tainted and irreparable concepts that need to be thrown into the dustbin. They don’t serve the state of world we are living in today. Especially with how AI is evolving today.
Agritech is often described as a “multi-variable, multi-agent” space. What blind spots do you think most agritech founders and VCs still have when it comes to building scalable, sustainable solutions?
Most of us, including founders and VCs, don’t have the luxury of time to think deeply about these things. They are chasing targets and goals set by others. We are not wired to think in long term scales. Boabab tree can. We can’t. As one wise man said, “ fail-fast, iterative development mentality simply can’t work when the definition of ‘fast’ in agriculture is counted in years, not hours, days or weeks”.Building sustainable solutions carries conflict with scalable solutions. You cannot build scalable, sustainable solutions unless you put a hard limit on how much scale you can pursue.
As I’ve written before, The agritech ecosystem can be categorised in the form of a triangle: with scale, technology, and impact placed on three sides. You could select either two of these three – either impact and tech, or scale and tech, and so on. Cracking all three aspects has been almost impossible so far.
You’ve worked with both startups and large organizations. How do you see AI changing the way agribusinesses approach decision-making, from farm-level operations to global food supply chains?
The effects of AI are much more foundational and span every sector. Until AI, most technologies had causal loops. You can start from Point A causes Point B and arrive at final point. In the case of AI, we don’t know, even scientists who’ve built neural networks, don’t know how it exactly works. In which case, we are dealing with a new set of technologies. Can farmers benefit from these technologies? For that, we have to ask foundational questions. Do we have culture of keeping proper records of data? In the West, they do. In India, that culture hasn’t seeped in, except in few pockets. Only when we have diligently maintained a knowledge graph and repository of decades of data, we could do something interesting with AI.
In smallholding contexts, it will democratize knowledge work for sure. It can definitely help cubicle workers who get stuck with Bullshit jobs. But, can it help farmers grow better food? For that intuition is much more needed than AI.
With initiatives like the Unified Agricultural Interface, how close are we to truly interoperable Agri-digital ecosystems that empower farmers instead of overwhelming them with fragmented platforms?
Actually, building interoperable agri-digital ecosystems is an important step, but it’s not a pre-requisite for empowering farmers. Data sovereignty is much more important than interoperable Agri-digital ecosystems if we care about farmers. We haven’t built systems that help us do this well. It’s a great opportunity I hope the likes of Zoho or anyone else will come and solve. They have built some farm management platform, I am told.
Climate change is already reshaping agriculture worldwide. What role do you see Indian agritech firms playing in building resilient food systems for the subcontinent and beyond?
Indian Agritech has to unlearn a lot if it is serious about Climate Change. Very few folks are currently asking hard questions in building resilient food systems for the subcontinent. We’ve been so far spared by the monsoons. But, as this year showed us, with the crazy monsoons we saw in states like Punjab and other places, we can’t take it for granted that monsoon will get our agricultural engines revving every year.
Indian agritech, make no doubt, has immense potential in rethinking how we grow food that adds to health of consumers and contribute to the well-being of planet. There is a tremendous opportunity waiting right in front of us. That playbook hasn’t been cracked so far yet in a convincing manner for the kind of challenges we see in Indian Agriculture with farming only contributing only 30% of the income of farmers. This could get worse in the future (with more farmers leaving agriculture) unless we change our ways.
About Venky Ramachandran
Venky Ramachandran is an independent agritech analyst, consultant and researcher. He is the founder of Agribusiness Matters, a research and consulting firm that strives to address the structural problems of smallholding agriculture through agritech ecosystem engineering.
