Saturday Sprouting Reads (2023 Indian Agritech Hype Cycle, Satsure, eChoupal 4.0)
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Hyderabad, India! Welcome to Saturday Sprouting Reads!
About Sprouting Reads
If you've ever grown food in your kitchen garden like me, sooner than later, you would realize the importance of letting seeds germinate. As much as I would like to include sprouting as an essential process for the raw foods that my body loves to experiment with, I am keen to see how this mindful practice could be adapted to the food that my mind consumes.
You see, comprehension is as much biological as digestion is.
And so, once in a while, I want to look at a bunch of articles or reports closely and chew over them. I may or may not have a long-form narrative take on it, but I want to meditate slowly on them so that those among you who are deeply thinking about agriculture can ruminate on them as slowly as wise cows do. Who knows? Perhaps, you may end up seeing them differently.
Programming Note: As I come back from one break (meditation retreat) to head to another (vacation) while you are reading this, I’m experiencing deep liminality between the recently concluded Season 3 of this newsletter (“Is Agritech Party Over” dialogue helped me bring a closure) and the emerging Season 4 of this newsletter that will explore agritech deeply from the frames of Climate Tech and Bioeconomy. Regular programming will start once Season 4 begins. Thank you for your support.
Next Members-Only ABM Townhall: ‘Divergent Agritech Futures’ with Emmanuel Murray and Jagadeesh Sunkad. Members can RSVP here
{Subscriber-Only}: 2023 Indian Agritech Hype Cycle
Exactly a year ago, in Oct’22, when I did a detailed reality check on the Agritech Hype Cycle, I sketched this Gartner hype curve and elaborated my thoughts.
One year later, in Oct’23, if you ask me, the 2023 Indian Agritech Hype Cycle currently looks like this
So what really changed in this one year? In the recent subscriber-only ABM town hall dialogue, we discussed each of these aspects in a fairly detailed manner. Trust Shubhang to distil the fundamental lesson we’ve learned the hard way.
{Subscriber-Only} Making Sense of Satsure’s $15 Mn Series-A Funding
In light of Satsure’s recent funding announcement, what caught my eye was their CEO Prateep Basu’s comments.
“Over the past 6 months or so, we have quietly expanded our scope of work to building analytics on aerial imagery, and its fusion with insights generated using satellite data. This is SatSure 2.0, where the 'Sat' doesn't stand for satellite alone, but is an acronym for Satellite, Aerial, and Thematic. I have our senior advisor Dr. Vinay Kumar Dadhwal sir to thank for this quip, which actually converted into business and tech strategy for us in the U.S.
Sensor data fusion, where its among satellites (SAR - Optical - Hyperspectral) or between satellites - aerial - IoT, is the way to go because at the end of the day we are all trying to solve certain real life problems. At SatSure, we have always believed in a 'problem first' approach to building solutions, instead of force fitting something that we are good at on the customers.” - Prateep Basu
Prateep Basu’s framing of ‘problem first’ (Horse Before the Cart) approach finds echoes in EO Market Analyst Aravind’s framing of Problem-Driven vs. Technology Driven in EO Ag
Although I am not an expert in EO data, I find this sensible, as in my experience, EO has hard limits on accuracy. In the ‘EO in Ag’ implementation projects I have closely monitored, I haven’t seen more than 60-70% accuracy. Mind you, no matter how sophisticated your tech gets, ground truthing is inevitable.
In a recent subscriber-only edition, I looked closely at Satsure’s funding announcement and the limitations of EO in an agricultural context.
{Subscriber-Only} ITCMAARs and ITC e-Choupal 4.0
To understand ITCMAARS (ITC Meta Market for Advanced Agriculture and Rural Services), you first need to understand eChoupal from an inside-out lens
“I went to study the eChoupals in Malwa in December 2002 to understand their financial sustainability and the possibilities of empowerment of farmers through the use of information technology. Surprisingly, I discovered that the internet centres had no major role to play in the project at all. The eChoupal consisted of a set of warehouses established by ITC-IBD where farmers could come to sell their soyabean. These warehouses or hubs competed directly with government-owned market yards ( mandis) where licensed traders also purchased soyabean from farmers along with many other commodities. The role of the village internet centres seemed largely symbolic, although company employees assured me that, eventually, the internet would become relevant.” - Richa Kumar, Rethinking Revolutions, page 4
You don’t have to look any further than ITCMAARS to see how the Internet would become relevant in its fourth stage of evolution of eChoupal.
When you see how each of these layers adds and reinforces each other, there is a strong case for a powerful agritech GTM playbook to be made on ITC’s matryoshka agritech gameplay.
Why do I write Agribusiness Matters?
Few days back, Maitreya Prithwiraj Ghorpade and I recorded a podcast in which Maitreya asked me a profound question.
Masanobu Fukuoka San once said, "The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.". Maitreya asked me if this was relevant to my agritech work or if it was too idealistic. The question stumped me on many levels. It made me revisit the core WHY that animates the work I do in Agribusiness Matters
Masanobu Fukuoka San's iconic book, "One Straw Revolution", was the first book I read and devoured when I started discovering agriculture way back in 2010. Back then, I had never met a farmer in flesh and blood. Life, as it always happens, had interesting plans.
Who would have thought that one would end up meeting an organic farmer in your strategy elective course in a management school of all places? This organic farmer who later gifted me this book started the Strategy Elective course with a fascinating premise.
On the very first day of the class, he asked us "Whom do you think is the world's greatest strategist?"
We started naming our favourite heroes in the management pantheon- Michael Porter, Peter Drucker, Lao Tzu, Lee Iacocca et al. I remember shouting 'Gengis Khan' that day.
After patiently listening to all of us, he coolly wondered aloud, "Isn't nature the greatest of all?. After all, she never hurries. Yet everything gets accomplished".
The response was expected from a farmer, the last brave man on Earth to pursue a life-long, intimate romance with the most mysterious woman ever known, yet, it stumped us completely, as we suddenly came to close terms with our limited world-views, tunnelled after decades of playing by the rules of the middle-class life-script our parents had imposed on us.
The enlivening fires of my passion towards Agriculture were lit by such amazing people I've been fortunate enough to meet and learn from. If you've been reading Agribusiness Matters, you would know that I am obsessed with Systems Thinking in Agriculture.
Our well-being depends on the six inches of soil and yet when I look around, there are hardly people exploring the relationship between humans and soil and how our health depends on the food we eat.
Now, if we have to ask honest questions about the food we eat, we have to ask another deeper question, "Is Agriculture a Business?". In Indic thought, there is a concept of 'Shesha prashna'. In simple terms, it points to those questions which remain unanswered.
1) What is the relationship between Agriculture and Technology? 2) Is Agriculture a Business? 3) What is the relationship between culture and agriculture? 4) If Agriculture gets replaced by "Agritech", what will happen to culture?
Writing Agribusiness Matters is a religious ritual for me to stay anchored in the everyday present, ask these unanswerable questions day in, day out and help agritech founders, investors and executives in their bold quest to re-imagine the future of our food and agriculture systems.
So, what do you think?
How happy are you with today’s edition? I would love to get your candid feedback. Your feedback will be anonymous. Two questions. 1 Minute. Thanks.🙏
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