State of Agrifood Tech - 13th August 2023
Programming Note 1: I turned 38 few days back and voila! you have a 38 per cent discount offer for the next four days to subscribe and become an annual member of Agribusiness Matters. Indian subscribers can do via UPI (venkat.raman.kr@icici) with the discount until next four days.
Programming Note 2: Members would have received the calendar invite for the upcoming Agribusiness Matters Townhall on Monday 14th August at 8 PM IST (2:30 PM GMT//730 AM PT). Hoping to see you in this members-only community experiment to recreate ancient guilds in agritech in 2023.
0/ Where are Culture and Agriculture Headed?
While the cultural zeitgeist is striving hard to unlearn diversity, the agricultural zeitgeist is striving hard to discover and thrive in diversity. Few reflections on the great food fight from Louisa Burwood-Taylor.
1/ Mapping the State of Agri-Input Biologicals in 2023
Shall we map the global agri-input biologicals ecosystem across three competitive cycles of Peace, War and Wonder? Why agri-input biological ecosystem in India is entering the War stage while those in the US and other mature markets are entering the Peace stage?
2/ Understanding Open Source Biologicals (courtesy Absolute Vs Bioprime)
Given that the agri-input biologicals ecosystem in India is entering the War stage in 2023, will the biological industry learn from how the IT cloud industry fueled its growth, thanks to a strategic lever called open source?
0/ Where are Culture and Agriculture Headed?
As an agritech analyst exploring systems thinking in food and agriculture, the moral speed breakers inherent in my line of work tend to veer me towards contentious alleys where the warring relationship between culture and agriculture gets played out in full-blown intensity.
For it must be obvious: Culture is to Agriculture what Yin is to Yang.
Although it is a dangerous slope to tread, I must point out one uncomfortable observation: At a time when culture is striving hard to unlearn diversity (after creating a boogeyman called wokeism), locked in siloes of mutually incomprehensible meaning-making, agriculture is striving hard to appreciate and thrive in diversity.
A recent op-ed on the great Food Fight from Louisa Burwood-Taylor threw precious light on this. You can map the political spectrum of agrifood technologies in shorthand by seeing farms as a mechanism on one end to an organism on the other end.
Depending on which technology you are betting on, whether regenerative or gene editing or alternate protein, your position in the agrifood ideological spectrum is going to exist somewhere in this spectrum.
What fascinates me is the entangled scale of the global food fight. The debate between George Monbiot and Allan Savory in the Global North over whether livestock grazing is essential to climate change mitigation has direct ramifications on which animal nutrition agritech startup in the Global South gets funded and scaled to improve the productivity of cows (especially when large cattle-culture countries like India are at the verge of drying animal number dividend)
"Agrifood purism is unhelpful for our climate and social crises…The problem is that if we do not collaborate on the issues, we will not create the systems-level shifts the food system needs to adapt to climate change and solve its social problems in the immediate future." - Louisa Burwood-Taylor”
To facilitate collaboration across the agrifood ideological spectrum, we need to change the language in which we dialogue about food systems.
Agribusiness Matters focuses on systems thinking in food and agriculture precisely for this reason.
Only when we talk in the language of systems, only when we move beyond narrow input-output logic to farming, only when we move beyond reductionist, linear economies of scale approaches to agriculture, there is a glimmer of hope for us to transform the messy, broken, warming food systems we humans have ended up creating in our midst. I hope we will:)