A Personal Update

Hello!! My name is Venky and I thank you for reading Agribusiness Matters, an endeavor to discover systems thinking in the real world - crumbling food and agriculture systems in an age of runaway Climate Change. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe and receive exclusive perks - invitations to join ABM Townhalls, special discounts on ABM Publications, Global Agritech 101, 201 cohort courses, and more.

If you are a movie buff, you might have heard about the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement of the fifties.

Here is a quick primer. A bunch of film critics and movie lovers realize that they are hungry for better cinema after World War II. One such critic was Francois Truffaut. He trashed bad movies so badly that he was called "Gravedigger of French Cinema" Few years down the line, he decided to make movies.

That’s exactly how it feels when I’ve been critiquing agritech platforms all along¹ and now suddenly finding myself again in builder’s hot seat.

I have taken up a part-time role of "Mission Director" of Unified Agricultural Interface (UAI). It's an exciting project. UAI is a community-led, local, open agriculture network with the farmer at the center.

It feels a bit surreal since I have been doing this unofficially since Day 0 of my entrepreneurial journey, striving for ecosystemic action and potential. Now, with the success of Aadhaar, UPI in India, there is lot of hope in the air to build ecosystemic possibilities through digital public infrastructure to address some of the pressing challenges in Indian agriculture.

Honestly, it feels like we are in the midst of the "Nouvelle Vague Movement" in the world of food and agriculture systems, with the “old guard” trying darnedest to acquire new tech skills to play the new game along with new entrants, who understand technology, but trying to grope this elephant called agriculture that is going berserk in an age of runaway Climate Change.

Unified Agricultural Interface has the potential to enable farmers, Farmer Producer Organisations/ Farmer Producer Companies and various service providers, each having their own platforms (across agri-inputs, services, advisory, output, logistics, etc), to discover/ transact with each other, and build trust/ reliability in transactions involving farmers.

The network leverages beckn protocol and aims to be eventually inter-connected/ integrated with other national open networks like ONDC and Vistaar.

I am planning an overview call on Thursday to discuss the vision of UAI and how agritech startups can collaborate and make this dream of a community-led, local open agriculture network come true! If you are keen to delve deeper into UAI, you are most welcome to join the orientation call. You can RSVP here.

P.S. Regular Programming schedule, including ABM Townhalls in Agribusiness Matters will continue. I will continue to build Agribusiness Matters on the side, drawing my learnings from this emerging world of digital public infrastructure.

P.P.S. Wish me good luck!!

1. That’s exactly not true. While I’ve been critiquing wearing the hat of “agritech analyst”, I’ve been working closely as an independent consultant with numerous agritech founders, shaping their agritech platforms and GTM strategies in visible and invisible ways.

Truth be told, I make sense of my work through the mental model of a “Clutch, ‘disengaging /re-engaging the drivetrain during gear-shifting, as operating regimes change and organizations feel the need to adapt behaviours.’

The moment I place myself in a project situation where I have to be "clutch", sitting in proximity to the management and capital, it completely changes the dynamics of what I bring to a project.