Agritech Crystal Balling- 2023/2024 Retrospective and 2025 Predictions
January 2025. It’s the unofficial crystal-balling season, and every entrepreneur, investor, and analyst worth their salt is making predictions about food and agriculture systems.
Take your pick - Organic Farming (Europe Focus) - Agritech(North America Focus) - Regenerative Agriculture (US Focus) - Food Tech - Biologicals - Carbon Markets
As I’ve explained before, crystal-balling is a powerful social technology in thought leadership theatre that instils hope (and delusion) as our planet makes a full circle around the sun and drives the engine of progress towards things we deeply care about—our beliefs, hopes, and, more importantly, our business models and investments.
Rude of me of course, but allow me to clear the air about thought leadership.
There is no such thing as "Thought Leadership" in the abstract. It exists in the mind of perceivers who are led ahead to think by those who think ahead to lead. And what each one thinks it is, is what it is.
We have been peddling ideas as if "Thought Leadership" lies out there. This shouldn’t surprise us, because, that’s exactly what language does – project a subjective view, with its encoded mental maps, as the objective reality. In other words, we mistake the map for the territory.
Why do I continue to engage in crystal-balling if I don’t believe in thought leadership?
Good question.
The other day, a friend asked me what my personal purpose was. Since I was in a new year-planning mode, I replied the following:
"My personal purpose is to contribute towards a glorious future for Indian Agriculture and in doing so, live a dharmic life, exploring my highest and deepest potential."
I don’t know how the future is going to turn out. I can be honest about my larger purpose, try and read the tea leaves of the future without letting my wishful confirmation-seeking instincts take over and admit when my predictions go wrong.
Now that the prologue is dealt with, let’s get to work.
1) Agricultural Income to be taxed in India after 2024 elections when Narendra Modi returns to power.
While my confidence levels for this prediction plummeted in the first part of 2024, there were a few important reasons to increase my confidence levels during the latter part of the year. With the Draft National Policy Framework on Agricultural Marketing in place, we can now expect uniform taxation in the agricultural markets across India (much like the GST experiment underway in India) will pave the way for ‘improved governance, systems efficiency, mitigation of food inflation & price fluctuations.’
Of course, as I wrote yesterday, this is a bad deal for Indian federal states and the federalist structure of India. And yet they are likely to lap it up as it’s a deal they cannot refuse.
2) Indian Farmers will get fertilizer subsidy amounts deposited directly in their bank account.
Bingo! This is now rolling out as a pilot.
In January 2024, I wrote,
“Much like telematics data that can modify insurance coverage based on driving performance, we can expect variable subsidy amounts to be deposited in Indian farmers’ bank accounts along with carbon credit and ecosystem services payments based on drone, sensors, and earth observation data that are tracking various flows and stocks of the agricultural system.”
It will take a while to get each of these layers in place. The foundational wheels have been set in motion with govt. fine-tuning ‘the subsidy as per the need, based on land area, crops selected and also soil conditions’.