Every time I think about rural India, the first thing comes to mind is the acres of farmland and the vast areas of wheat, rice, mustard, corn that grow there. My impression of traditional farming was that it’s very ineffective, non-scientific and dated and hence in many cases unprofitable and to make it profitable you need to adopt a more strategic business-like approach towards farming. In my mind all one needs is a decent size farmland, water supply, access to financing and markets and you are a profitable farmer.
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| Entrance to Sriram's beautiful farm |
However the reality was far from it, it was this reason that I wanted to spend time with a farmer who is farming fulltime to understand the risks and rewards of farming. I was recently introduced to Sriram Parthasarthy – an ex financier who was the India head of a bank that relocated overseas and Sriram wasn’t keen on leaving India and decided to lease 20 acres of farmland near a village called Ranjangaon Mashid near Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. The trip from Hivre Bazaar to Ranjangaon Mashid involved a bike ride to Ahmednagar and a shared Tata Sumo to Supa where Sriram picked me up and we took the long winding dirt road to his farm just outside Ranjangaon Mashid.
I was very curious to know how someone goes from financier to farmer because the change in lifestyle is massive. I will share some of the obvious questions I had for Sriram and the answers to those questions
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| Sriram Parthasarthy on his daily assessment walk through his farm |
Me: Why farming
Sriram: I didn’t want to leave India and wanted to be an entrepreneur and was choosing between education and farming. Farming turned to be not as capital intensive as education and hence farming
Me: How do the local farm laborers react when you don’t look like them and you don’t speak their language?
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| Picking out baby corn with the farm laborers |
Sriram: They were a bit amused initially but it wasn't a deal breaker because at the end of the day you are providing a source of income to the farm laborers and that’s what matters. Language is not a big problem as most farm laborers speak Hindi and you eventually end up learning the language over time anyway
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| Onion on drip irrigation |
Me: How do you grow and what do you grow?
Sriram: You see what’s growing in the area depending on fertility, water availability and market demand. This is my first year and I am growing onion (Ahmednagar is one of the largest producers of onion), cauliflower, baby corn and corn. The local expertise of farm laborers is critical, as these laborers have been farming all their lives. You feel humbled coming from a corporate environment to the farm where you know nothing and you learn everything from people around you and through a lot of trial and error.
Me: How do you sacrifice a life of all the worldly comforts and luxuries to go and live on a farm with only the basics (stress on the extremely minimalistic basics). How do you come to terms with staying away from friends and family and stay in a remote location where you don’t know anyone?
Sriram: I think that’s the critical piece of any business. Lots of sacrifice and lots of passion and in many cases the passion makes you forget about the sacrifice. I spend 4 days in a week on the farm and the remaining days in Mumbai with my wife and 2 kids, I travel every week around 350 KMs back and forth. I don’t waste time on cooking and have the same 3 home cooked meals everyday when I am on the farm.
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| One of the farm laborers loading baby corn to be sold to a food processor |
Me: How profitable is farming
Sriram: I don’t know, I started one and half years ago. You have to stick it out in any business for 3 years to understand if you are making any profit. Right now I am just learning and I hope to do better this year from the lessons learnt from last year. You learn through trial and error, much like most businesses. Onions were selling at Rs.40/kg in 2010 and in 2011 the prices dropped to Rs.2/Kg and prices of certain essential crops are set by the Government, onion being one of them and it is very difficult to predict future government policy on prices.
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| The wear and tear to my slipper from just a 15 minute walk around Sriram's farm |
My main purpose behind meeting Sriram was to break my own rose-tinted view of farming and business in general. Doing a case study with porters 5 forces, SWOT analysis, and product life cycle is a very neat exercise during the MBA, but in real life the situation is very different – the core skill needed is to be able to adapt quickly. When I was with Sriram on the farm, the motor of one of the 3 wells that he uses for irrigation broke down, so he had an electrician who drove down 200KMs to deliver a new motor install it. This motor was extremely heavy and with the help of 2 farm laborers, Sriram and a little bit of me he managed to pull out the damaged motor and replace it with a new motor. The electrician completed the wiring and since there was no electricity he would wait till nightfall when electricity comes on to figure out if the installation is OK and if it’s not then the process starts again the next day. Eating the same 3 meals a day for 4 days in a week for over a year to spend less time cooking and more time working on the farm is something that I didn’t expect. Being away from you family, missing your kids soccer game, living in a place where you are the only human amongst other aliens or the only alien amongst other humans, giving up the comforts of the corporate world to live a minimalistic life in a remote village are just some of the sacrifices that an entrepreneur like Sriram has to come to terms with.
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| Kids of the farm laborers with their Jai Hind on |
But then walking through the 20 acres of farmland watching baby corn, corn, onion and cauliflower flourish right from germination must be a very satisfying feeling. It is this satisfaction that every entrepreneur has and it is this satisfaction that I am after.
Going from an idea to executing it must make it worth the effort!
