The Gods of Agriculture Must Be Crazy
Few reflections on a panel discussion I facilitated at Development Dialogues'24-"From Microbes to Bioregions-Designing for Sustainability"
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The Gods of Agriculture Must Be Crazy
If you have come here so far, it must be obvious.
Books are dangerous. They are heretic dragons with a soft bum. If you dare to be vulnerable, they can strip you of your cherished beliefs. Just when you get comfortable and snuggle in, letting your imprisoned wall of ideas loose, they can pull the rug under your feet and expose the naïveté of your thinking.
Ever since I read Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s Elephant in the Brain, I’ve been looking at conferences differently.
For starters, they are not places where humans convene to share their ideas, knowledge, and wisdom. They are places where status-seeking apes (and that includes yours truly as well) play status games through participating, asking questions, and speaking, increasing their social capital substantially in that order from L-R
If this is the case, how can we design a new context for conferences that help us navigate the turbulent waters of climate chaos collectively?
Thanks to Shravya, I’ve been curating Development Dialogues’ Agriculture panels since last year and starting to feel at home. So much so that I could sing one of my favorite lines of Sufi poetry from Hazrat Zaheen Taj before I started my panel discussion with a mouthful of a title: "From Microbes to Bioregions: Designing for Sustainability" (thanks to a lecture from John Thackara from where I stole this title)
Pani-Pani rat'te rat'te pyaasa hi mar jaaye!
Chanting 'water', 'water' endlessly, one dies of thirst
Every time someone utters the word ‘sustainability’ around me, I cannot help but remember this line. If George Bernard Shaw were around to witness the 2024 Climate Chaos, he might have muttered. “The single biggest problem in sustainability is the illusion that it has already taken place”.
When you are working in the domain of sustainability where changes happen over decades, transitioning to a green and sustainable economy often feels like a lot of hard work.
When we attempt to unpack this question, we soon discover the immortal insight that was beautifully articulated by Einstein: You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
What happens when a manufacturer of microbial consortia (Manohar), a storyteller of tribal and ancient food systems (Lakshmi), and a renegade investor with an activist’s urgency to transform food systems (Sameer) come together to talk with yours truly about sustainability?
The central design behind this panel was this. Can we explore what it takes to design for sustainability from an ant’s eye view and a bird’s eye view simultaneously?
Take this picture of a local shop in Madikeri, a hill town in Southern India famous for its coffee plantations.
Why is it that almost everything you see in the shop has come on the back of a long truck at the end of a long supply chain?
Even the humble broomstick you see in the front had to travel several miles.
When you calculate the energy required in packaging, storage, and wastage in transporting each of the products with nothing going back to the local economy, there is a glimmer of understanding of how broken our supply chains are and how far we have to go to move towards localization and sustainability.
This transition is important if we want to improve the resilience of our food systems and those who man those food systems and supply chains. If we are serious about designing for sustainability, we need to think both in macro terms (bioregion) and in micro terms (microbe).
Microbes hold a lot of promise in helping farmers move towards sustainable agriculture, At the same time, by calling "microbes", biofertilizers, we risk coopting new wine in an old bottle. Few decades ago, we did treat microbes as "enemies". How do we tap the potential of microbes in our collective efforts to make agriculture sustainable? Do we go for one silver bullet solution as we are used to in the earlier synthetic chemicals paradigm or do we rethink the idea of silver bullet?
The concept of bioregions holds equally a lot of promise among those who have been weary of the "development" paradigm which mindlessly applies linear "value chain" approaches to the cyclical phenomenon of agriculture. How do we map bioregions across the world and regenerate them, even if it means blurring political boundaries?
Here is the most fascinating thing.
Bioregions inverts the idea of the value chain for it starts from the ecology and builds the market, rather than starting from the market and forcefully building the ecosystem around it.
The legend of St. Isidore, patron saint of farmers and crops, went something like this.
“Isidore never owned any land but worked as a tenant farmer on an estate outside Madrid, Spain. He left the house early every morning to attend Catholic mass before arriving at the fields. As he plowed or harvested his crops, he would pray. His neighbors said they saw angels guiding his plow which helped him accomplish three times as much work as other tenant farmers.” (Source)
No matter whether you are religious or not, if you carefully dig six feet under this story, what you find is fascinating.

Isn’t it all we striving to discover with cutting-edge developments in Mycorrhizal Fungi where growers working in phyllosphere levels of the macrobiome are better off if they understand the microbial angels working in the rhizosphere, where most soil microorganisms live?
When scientists talk of cooperative behavior in plant-mycorrhizal symbiosis, they talk of ‘ancient biological markets that take place beneath forest floors’. Why on earth is it sounding similar to the fable of St.Isidore?
Or take the Hindu God Ganesha.
Have you wondered why humans who came before us created a divine imagery of a man wearing an elephant head sitting on top of a rat? Were they hinting at a symbiosis of micro and macro approaches to designing for sustainability?
It’s fun to speculate such questions until you look at facts that confirm the impact of Climate Change on Agriculture.

“Evaluation of the nutrient profiles of the harvested grains showed that rice and wheat, which meet over 50 percent of the daily energy requirements of people in India, have lost up to 45 percent of their food value in the past 50 years or so. At this rate, the grains will become impoverished for human consumption by 2040, they estimate.”
The Gods of Agriculture must be crazy. Can we humans get our act together?
So, what do you think?
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