Agriculture and Innovation

A Tale of Two Tomatoes

by Weisen Li

It was the bigger of tomatoes, it was the smaller of tomatoes.  It was the taller of vines, it was the shorter of vines… 

I was in shock when I first saw the difference between two tomato fields that were sown at the same time 2½ months ago – one chemically fertilized, the other organically fertilized.  The difference was astounding!  The chemically fertilized tomatoes hung on vines that were about three feet tall and the fruits were so heavy that the vines needed support.  Right beside the chemically fertilized tomato field was the organically tomato field.  The plants looked paltry and sickly in comparison to its chemically fertilized sister field.  The vines were not as developed, leaves were not as green and the tomatoes were not as plump.  It looked as though the organically fertilized fields had seeds sown a month after the chemically fertilized one yet both fields were planted at the same time.

Vikas, the plant manager of Tasty Bite’s farm, was doing an experiment.  As a student of chemical fertilizer usage (Vikas studied agriculture at the University of Pune), Vikas was skeptical about the economics of organic farming.  Like most Indians, Vikas can discern the taste between chemically and organically grown fruits and vegetables and prefers organic though he is unwilling to pay the premium for it.  In his opinion, Vikas does not see the economic sense in organic farming for the average small Indian farmer.  A typical Indian organic farm is a self sustaining ecosystem.  It requires large amounts of land (for harvest and for feed fodder), dozens of cattle (for urine and manure) and additional labor (for de-weeding, planting, harvesting and composting).  This kind of resource (not to mention time – it takes 3 years to become organically certified) is not available for the 98 million Indian farmers who own <2.5 acres of land.  As such, many farmers don’t farm organically.

The next day, we visited Jayant Barve, a progressive farmer and an evangelist for organic farming in India.  Jayant started organic farming in 1988 after receiving an undergraduate and graduate degree in Physics at the University of Pune and worked as a chemical fertilizer salesman.  During his sales role, Jayant realized that Indian farmers were unknowingly abusing usage of chemical fertilizers by drenching plants with chemical fertilizers right before harvest and consumption.  He believed that everything should be “balanced” and natural.  Thus, upon his father’s death and his subsequent inheritance of the family’s 30 acre farmland, Jayant decided to convert the fields to organic farming.  After over twenty years since he first started organic farming, Jayant Barve’s farms now have equivalent if not higher yields than comparable chemically fertilized fields.  While the chemically fertilized fields are facing soil depletion, his land is getting richer every year as the microbial in the soil grows with additional organic compost.  He has turned what used to be an arid wasteland barely suitable to grow anything to a farming oasis.

This then leads me back to the Tasty Bite farm.  Why is there such a difference between the two tomatoes in Vikas’ field when Jayant Barve’s organic farming yields are higher?  I can only conclude that the reason for the variance is due to knowledge.  Organic farming is not a science, but an art that can only be mastered with training and experience.  Jayant Barve is not your average Indian farmer.  He is highly educated (able to quote Rachel Carson) and spent many years in organic farming.  He is also from a wealthier family that has 30 acres of land to sustain the ecosystem necessary for organic farming.  Unfortunately, the average Indian farmer does not have access to that kind of resources.  Moreover, they are getting bombarded with information from all sides – government, neighbors, businesses and non-profits – and many of these sources are giving them conflicting information that they don’t know who to listen to.  As such, they rely on look-and-see and stick to whatever methodology has worked for them.  In this case, chemical farming, as the results are much more distinct in the short run.  The market for organic food in India is there.  During our visit to the mandi, the middleman had told us that he would buy any and all organic produce he can get his hands on because they sell almost immediately.  I believe that in order to have Indian farmers adopt organic farming to reverse the damage done by the Green Revolution, education is vital.  Not all farmers can do organic farming because of the limited land they have, but for those who can, they need to be properly trained organic farming.  They need to be able to see for themselves the benefits of organic farming.  Until then, Indian farmers will continue to overuse chemical fertilizers and destroy their precious land.

  

Morning at the Mandi

By Weisen Li

The air was filled with spices.  I could hardly breathe without sneezing or tearing.  It was early in the morning and we are touring the mandi, a wholesale market run by the APMC (Agriculture, Produce and Market Committee, a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture).  This is the place where the farmers bring their harvest to sell.  At first glance, the mandi looks frenzied and disorganized – piles of vegetables littering the ground, trucks driving through crowded areas and people shouting over the noise.  However, there is order in this chaos.

An average farmer would travel 20 kilometers to a nearby mandi (each town or city has one) to sell their produce to an APMC licensed commission agent.  The commission agents take an APMC set commission rate of 6% for onions, potatoes and garlic, and 8% for fruits and vegetables.  They then sell the goods to a buyer in the form of a wholesaler, retailer, business or processor.  APMC takes a 1% cut of the transactions which is paid by the buyer.  75% of the goods sold are to wholesalers and retailers while only 25% is sold to businesses and processors.  However, businesses and processors have increased their share from 5% to 25% in the past 3-5 years as a result of increasing consumption of processed foods.

Prior to the trip, we studied the ITC eChoupal Initiative case where it mentioned that farmers were taken advantage of due to their lack of market price knowledge.  This, based on our observations and interviews, does not seem like the case as the farmers would generally have price expectation of ± 5% of actual price through cell phone communication.  With so many commission agents at each mandi, the farmers can just as easily sell their products to the agent next door.  Commission agents also have the incentive not to take advantage of the farmers as it could cause their license to be revoked.  APMC store space and agent licenses can be traded for up to Rs 2,500,000 to Rs 4,000,000 (~$55,000 to $89,000 USD) on the grey market.  With that said, farmers still bear tremendous risks.  Any cost as a result of spoilage or damage (as judged by the commission agents) is carried by the farmers. 

The real challenge for farmer income generation lies in timing.  Currently, limited access to cold chain and reliance on weather for water supply forces the farmers to sell their produce immediately after harvest.  Unfortunately, harvest time is also the peak season and as a result, goods are being flooded into the market at a low price.  NGOs like International Development Enterprise (IDE) are working with farmers to provide them with affordable water irrigation technology to solve the water supply issue but the country is in desperate need for more cold chain infrastructure.  Until cold chain infrastructure is freely accessible, the Indian farmers will have a hard time improving their income generation.

India Entrepreneurship Roundup

On our last day in Mumbai, the India Agriculture Study tour team got together to discuss and record their final lessons learned from two weeks in India. Our last session of the day involved identifying the top agricultural business ideas that came out of the trip. Here’s a number of them from all 10 MIT MBA students:

·         Create a Indian domestic chain of urban organic food stores
·         Start an organic food export chain for high value non perishables such as teas, spices, cocoa
·         Form an organization to build incentivizes for farmers to create cooperatives
·         Build a business around bringing back the originality of the agricultural products to the Indian domestic market
·         Solve the spoilage rate problem through low cost cold storage solutions
·         Create food transport hubs
·         Develop "on the farm" basic processing techniques
·         Build schemes to prepay farmers for products like organic milk
·         Form an organization to feed/support families during the transition from conventional to organic farming
·         Use the cold chain from other sectors such as health (vaccines) for perishables transport from rural areas
·         Encourage Indian consumers to buy plots of organic farms, taking part in the entire process
·         Create a Kiva model for farming (support networks, volunteer and travel programs)

While the class is over, our creativity around agricultural innovation is not. Teams of students are forming around some of our final debrief ideas. If you’re interested in getting involved, feel free to email me at edhawan@mit.edu.

Collective Identity

By Rodolfo Nobrega

My job was to follow and support the MIT group in the Brazilian Sertão, in Pernambuco State. Sometimes I’ve tried to give my point of view and sometimes to translate the farmers’ dialect. I also work with some communities in the Sertão of Paraíba State (neighbor of Pernambuco) in my masters (is about water management of small water systems: cisterns, alluvium systems, etc.).

The meeting with Diaconia on the first day was a typical research approach with NGO, except for one thing: the farmers’ participation. There we could hear and see some evaluation of the Diaconia’s work in their perspective. It was the beginning of our field work in Sertão.

My visit to the Ivan’s farm was with Reebie and Vimala. In their case, a new world called Brazil. Like children, when see a new world, they brought a lot of questions to me. These questions provoked me to review my perspectives. To me, in this case, the agroecologic initiative was a new knowledge to absorb.

The main discover in the trip – in my point of view - was realize how the farmers in this region are organized. I mean the collective identify.

I heard a lot of questions trying to find out why the systems doesn’t work like a business cooperative or a supply chain to feed the local (or even regional) food market. But first, we need to know what are their goals with the agroecologic bussiness, and what are the different points of view between the NGO and farmers. Collective identities are necessary if people are to believe that they can collaborate. These identities can develop when leaders and initial collaborative practices help frame ideas in new ways, cause networks to expand, build confidence among participants about their ability to work together, and led others to recognize a given set of actors as a group, as we saw sometimes.

In Brazil, new participative institutions (participative budgets, local councils of politics and managing plans) were established strongly since the current Federal Constitution of 1988, which opened space to something called “participative democracy”. In addition to it, the concept to social capital is inserted when is referred about the group’s capacity to develop a trust and cooperation network to reach collective benefits.

The influence of factors not only technical but also political, economic and cultural makes the process much more complex, and management style that tends to prevail follows a logical social-technique logical.

Collective identity need not exist prior to initial attempts at collaboration but its emergence often requires the strategic work of organizations and leaders who promote small-scale collaborative initiatives, connect previously unconnected groups and disseminate new frames about the nature of a group and the problems it can solve.

It is widely believed that resources are overused as a consequence of the inability of local communities to establish viable regulations that would guarantee a more efficient work. Commom NGO rhetoric, on the other hand, holds that local communities share common values about rights and management, that communal management guarantees equal access to resources and that all community members act according to locally established rules of bussiness management. This ‘ethno-romantic’ position tends to neglect power differential within communities that can lead to strong internal disparities in resource access and control.

But it is a hard challenge organizes all the structure. There are a big number and density of nodes (actors, like Ivan and Seu Baltazar) and links (interactions, like the farmers association meetings) in this governance regime, while deliberation refers to the power relations among these actors and the frequency, quality and depth of interactions, i.e. negotiation and coordination mechanisms, information flow, and approaches to mediation and conflict resolution.

However what happens when in the public arena of representative organizations there are not local authorities waiting to receive power or when there is no pre-defined ‘power’ to transfer? Maybe it is happening between Diaconia and Farmers Association.

People and institutions must be organized and synchronized, agendas must be defined decision-making and implementation capacities developed in ways that they were not before. Currently these labors intuitions don’t have any plan in medium- or long-term about it.

Government institutions have weak technical capacities and no good experience coordinating actions among functional agencies. Non-governmental stakeholders, inserted in the Brazilian social asymmetries, may not be well organized or have resources to cover the costs of lengthy negotiating process.

The question that thus arises is how do actors some to perceive themselves as stakeholders and as potential collaborators or negotiators around those issues? Maybe they follow the classic theory: ‘People only mobilize when the expected benefits outweigh the costs of mobilizing’.

Thank you, everybody.

Rodolfo with the MIT Brasil study tour in Afogados 

Brazindia Agriculture and Innovation Trip Comparisons

The 22 Brazil/India study tour participants got together today to share reflections from our trips - (12 students traveled to Brazil, and 10 to India, over 2 weeks in March to study agriculture and innovation).  Although we met with different sectors and researched different case study topics, a surprising number of similar observations from participants in both countries were discussed during today's meeting.  Below are the unpolished notes that I took during the session.

Similarities – initial observations

-   Communication and how ideas spread amongst farmers

o   Brazil – utilizes word of mouth teaching and communication methods, esp w/illiterate farmers,  which was seen as a very effective teaching tool

o   India – word of mouth is great, but farmers need to see the methods proven – ex. On their neighbor’s plot of land

o   India – There are so many ideas coming from so many places  (govt, NGO, farmer-farmer, etc) - “we were overwhelmed [with conflicting information], imagine all of the farmers!”

 

-   Assumption: organic agriculture is a ‘northern’ or elite concept

o   In both countries there was a demand among lower income communities for organics, and they could find it ... not only that, but prices were also comprable to non-organics

o   Brazil – we spent time interviewing consumers at the agroecological fair and they bought because the items were healthier for their families and the earth

o   India – the perception was that organic products “just taste better”, and are better quality than conventional, pesticide-ridden food

 

-   There are two pieces of the agricultural economy  - agrobiz and small farmers – and each sector doesn’t really even talk to one another.

 

-   Commodities / agribusinesses are needed to ‘feed the economy’

o   In India, gov’t subsidizes rice and wheat to feed the country

o   Agrobiz drives GDP in Brazil and India

 

-   But, small farmers are needed to ‘feed the country and its people’:

o   Brazil, 60% of food for domestic consumption comes from the country’s small farmers

-   Patience is a virtue when working abroad:

o   Last minute case research meetings in both countries produced very interesting results

o   ex. Cotton in Brazil, Dairy in India