Sunday Reflections (Agrifood Life Sciences, Enshittification of Agritech, Exporting Water)
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Hyderabad, India. Welcome to Sunday Reflections where I reflect on what I’ve written and ask myself, In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?
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Reflections from Omnivore’s Bioeconomy Event: How is the Agrifood Lifesciences ecosystem evolving?
In 2021, Mark Kahn, Renuka Diwan and I co-wrote an op-ed in The Indian Express that talked about the need to strengthen the Agri Food Life Sciences ecosystem. How has the Agri Food Life Sciences ecosystem progressed since then? To find out, I took part in the Omnivore’s Bioeconomy event in Bangalore on 9th April 2025.
This event marked the inception of BioWave India. BioWave India is founded by Omnivore, Nucleate, and IndieBio and supported by Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), IKP Knowledge Park, Bangalore Bio Innovation Centre, Venture Center (Official Account), and Society for Innovation & Entrepreneurship -SINE IIT Bombay)
How has Agrifood Life Sciences ecosystem evolved so far?
💡Funding grew from USD 193M in 2020 to USD 748M in 2022, driven by large early-stage bets in bioinformatics, health, and agrifood. However, post-2022, funding fell over 60%, remaining flat at USD 269M in 2024, unlike other sectors which rebounded.
💡Biopharma and medical biotech, once dominant (61% of 2020 funding), declined to 18% by 2024. Funding has shifted toward sustainable materials, agrifood life sciences, and industrial biotech, growing from USD 11.5M in 2020 to USD 174M in 2024.
We are living through interesting times where we are seeing the industrialization of biotech wave besides the biologization of industry wave simultaneously. The question remains: Which of these trajectories can graduate to become digitally enabled agribusinesses?
Reflections on Bioeconomy and lot more data in a recent subscriber-only edition of Agribusiness Matters.
Enshittification of Agritech: A Dialogue with Feroz Sheikh
In my recent podcast, I asked Feroz Sheikh the fundamental challenge with respect to smallholding agritech: Can we address agency problems through technology?
Venky: is it genuinely possible to differentiate advice and sales as idealistically as we are speaking in the case of Europe and say in US vis-a-vis in India?
Feroz Sheikh: And that's where the question of enshittification or deshittification starts to become real, right? In Europe, for example, there are laws and regulations that actually force a decoupling.
The seller who makes profit from selling the product cannot also be the one who's advising. The separation between a pharmacy and a doctor, right? That the doctor cannot be the one who prescribes the medicine, which they only profit from.
And it's exactly that kind of a decoupling, which is by law in some countries in Europe. But in India, where the extension services or the advice that is limited to the grower, the only source of advice that they have is the retailer who's also selling them the input.
Now, this is where technology can possibly help is by creating advice and recommendations that are driven by data that are personalized for what the farmer needs instead of what the input retailer has sitting in their shelf that they haven't sold since last season.
But this will lead to other challenges. And maybe we need to talk about that as well. That if the retailer's financial interest is not served by what the grower buys, then the retailer needs to make their profit margin from some other part of this cycle. But I think this decoupling can happen.
And for a smallholder market like India, where we are talking millions of farmers, the only way for it to happen is through digital tools, through Agtech tools, which can use data and make recommendations about what seed, what variety they should be using, including probably even looking at macro patterns and trends.
Post Facto:
Nikhit Agrawal, whose paper became the trigger for my thesis on Enshittification of Agritech, wrote an interesting comment following this conversation.
“Aren't there recommendation platforms already that are also selling these products? Also, we killed the extension. Now, a few tech entrepreneurs came riding on the wave of solving problems - attempting to replace the dead system. Then, it became "enshittified," which is obviously a trendy (but erroneous in the social science sense) phrase to use. Finally, folks need more tech to solve the new problem. Does anyone else see a hype cycle here, or there's collective myopia?”
Of course, there is a hype cycle of apps → infrastructure → apps, as I’ve detailed earlier.
With DPI wave, there is a possibility of better public extension systems. But, unfortunately, government-sponsored extension system is rotten to the core and so we have private players spending lot more on extension systems. Can we reimagine digital public infrastructure to address this lacuna?
Arun Balamatti shared an interesting comment based on his experience:
“AgTech alone can’t decouple the farmer. Retailers offer credit, cash loans, and even buy back produce—at compromised prices. Farmers aren't naive; they have nowhere else to go!
We piloted a “prescription-based” innovation: agri-technologists as ‘doctors’, selling only essential inputs via an “agri-pharmacy”—often at or below market price. The result? Reduced costs, fewer unnecessary inputs, and lower environmental impact.
In four years, we served ~1,000 farmers/month with an annual turnover of ₹10 million. But struggled in scaling because we under-leveraged AgTech!”
The cherry on the top was Feroz detailing the strategic levers of Sygenta’s Cropwise followed by deep exploration of AI and Ontology in Agriculture. The first thirty minutes of the podcast is available for everyone.
Agritech Labour Arbitrage 2.0
With 45% labour force still remaining informal labour force, we see a peculiar paradox of India suffering from massive labour shortage, despite agriculture constituting 46% of the jobs in India.
How do we increase labour productivity in agriculture? We have three choices. 1) Intensification 2) Mechanisation 3) Intensification-Mechanisation Bundle As a Service
Agritech startups are now tinkering with the third option: Once basic infra is setup (electricity, irrigation), can we bundle intensification and mechanisation and design the business model on profit sharing basis with a mix of investment (involving upfront capital as commitment) and partnership to scale the farming-as-a-service model?
More on Agritech Labour Arbitrage 2.0 in a recent subscriber-only edition
Exporting Water Rice
My home state Telangana is gung-ho about being the leading rice producer in the country and wants to be the leading rice exporter in the country.
But here is the thing. The State willy-nilly, ends up exporting water, especially when India extracts more groundwater than China and the US combined and could run out of groundwater by 2030 if the status quo persists.
Few of my friends were involved in the export of 12500 MT Rice to Philippines. If you do the math, India exported around 37.5 - 62.5 billion liters of water.
Thanks to irrigation infrastructure boom, rice cultivation in Telangana has increased by 200% between 2013-14 to present.
Intensive rice farming practices significantly impact soil and water resources, contributing to a range of environmental and health challenges.
→ Puddling—used to reduce water infiltration during rice cultivation—leads to the degradation of soil structure, making soils more compact and less fertile over time (FAO, 2000).
→ Salinity is another critical concern in irrigated rice fields. Continuous water evaporation from rice paddies frequently leaves behind accumulated salts at the soil surface, adversely affecting soil health and crop yields. This phenomenon of salinization is exacerbated in semi-arid regions, where evaporation rates significantly exceed precipitation (ICAR, 2019).
→ Excessive fertilizer use in rice cultivation has contributed notably to nitrate pollution. Public data from the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) indicate that over 45% of groundwater sources in major rice-growing regions have become contaminated with nitrates beyond safe consumption levels, posing risks to human health and aquatic ecosystems (CGWB, 2020).
→ Rice paddies are significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. According to data from the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change (MoEFCC), carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions from paddy fields are approximately 5.65 kilograms per kilogram of rice produced. Annually, emissions per acre can range from nearly 6 to 13 tons of CO2-equivalent, making rice cultivation a considerable contributor to agricultural emissions and climate change impacts (MoEFCC, 2021)
→ Inorganic arsenic levels can raise dramatically and further cause toxic damage.
What are the unintended consequences of India exporting water in the name of rice?
Rice prices in Southeast Asia have sharply declined due to oversupply, driven primarily by India's recent resumption of exports after lifting restrictions on non-basmati white rice and broken rice.
Thailand and Vietnam, the world's second- and third-largest rice exporters respectively, have experienced significant price drops with Thai white rice prices falling 31% year-over-year to $412 per tonne and Vietnamese rice prices plunging 40% to around $400 per tonne, reaching their lowest in nine years.
Can India redeem itself from its over dependence on Rice and help farmers diversify towards millets, horticulture and other crops? This is a wicked problem we’re dealing with. There are no easy answers though.
Notes from Bengaluru Agripreneurs Meetup
Bengaluru Agripreneurs Meet was charged from zeroth minute when entrepreneurs started arriving at 755 am before the hotel could open. We were a group of 20 entrepreneurs- bootstrapped, funded, few aspiring entrepreneurs and one investor and one investor turned entrepreneur.
Siddharth Dialani shared Bharat Agri journey and was gamely to answer many questions bootstrapped founders had about managing investor expectations around growth.
Jagadeesh Sunkad beautifully spelt out the difference between growth and scale and shared lessons from his rich experience working in the agri industry since 1996
Chiranjeevi A R and Santosh shared fascinating perspectives around how the subsidy ecosystem shaped the legion of exporters and how the ecosystem is evolving.
We had a couple of aspiring entrepreneurs share their journey and plans and we also navigated the challenges in investor led farming models.
Ajay Sood and Tarun validated my current thesis around dairy being on top of the high expectations hype cycle. We had a new entrepreneur wanting to crack farmer financing and that led to interesting alleys around why farmer financing hasn't worked in the country.
I'm seeing QC space getting rapidly digitized and I see a lot of promising developments in building analytics layers on top of commodity QC data. We also had a couple of carbon financing players join us who are grappling with the challenge of aligning short term projects with long term mission such as soil health.
UKI Nashik Crosses 1000 Transactions!
These are early days and 1000 may not seem like a big number. However, when you see it in the context of DPI wave in Indian Agriculture, I see lot of possibilities.
🌾UKI is now home to:
• 500+ registered farmers, 1,000+ transactions in just 3 months
• 6+ live Network Participants including Amicus, AgriWatch, Haqdarshak, Fasal - Grow More, Grow Better™, Fyllo, Carnot Technologies.
• 6 live use cases with many more under development
• Onboarding now takes 1–2 weeks
Hemendra Mathur made a good presentation on this at the recent Startup Mahakumbh event. The highlight was this slide
Metcalfe’s Law would kick in and network effects would unleash at population level scale when multiple data stacks (including cattle stack and cattle Aadhaar) start interfacing each other and drive adoption. Until then, we have to keep head down and keep building and iterating.
On Product-Psyche Fit
This beautiful image from Paul Millerd is a good antidote to the hustler culture that is often glorified in entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship need not always be about falling in love with the taste of your blood.
It can also be discovering something that you so love doing that you don't feel like you've "done" something and yet you are rewarded handsomely.
One of the fascinating discoveries in my entrepreneurship journey has been this: There are times when you do one hour of work and it feels inside as if you are drained of the entire day's reserve of energy. And there are times when you do four hours of "work" and you feel charged as if you've done a good Yoga practice.
Discovering that piece of work which energizes you even after spending a lot of time at it violates every law of thermodynamics: How can you spend energy towards a particular activity and feel recharged at the end of it?
In tamizh there is a saying that can be loosely translated thus: Do you want to pay me for eating sugarcane?
When you discovered that piece of work that feels like eating sugarcane, you have discovered Product-Psyche fit.
In today's internet economy, it is increasingly possible to design your life and work put together based on "Pleasure as an Organizing principle" as Tiago Forte neatly put it in a fascinating blog post many moons ago.
Have you discovered your product-psyche fit?
So, what do you think?
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