When we look at poor smallholder farmers across the world, and particularly in my country, India, we often think that what they need is access to better tools, education, government support, markets and so on. Yes, they need all that. But what they really need is a reliable and regular income to live with dignity. A dependable income, even if it is as small as 100 dollars a month, is essential for them to stay out of poverty. Today, their incomes are in and out of poverty, which is extremely painful.
Growing up in South India, I could not overlook what poverty did to our farmers. I was about 17 years old when one day, I saw a farmer in my village sitting next to a farm stream and eating something from the ground. Something did not seem right. I walked up to him to see what was going on. I was shocked to see him eat mud. Mud. Brown, soft mud from the stream. I was afraid he might die. I yelled at him. "What is this stupid mud-eating business?" He looked at me helplessly and said, "I'm a farmer, my crops failed; my stomach doesn't know that my pocket is empty."
I walked away quite helplessly. That night, I shared this with my grandfather. He was a remarkable man, very clever. He was a part of the Indian freedom struggle under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Unlike me, he wasn't surprised at all. He knew of people who added rice starch to mud to calm their hunger. And he told me something profound. If you see a person walking on the road without footwear, it is important to understand the root cause: that the person doesn't have enough money to probably buy the footwear.
I finished my college, started working with a big company, but that incident kept coming back to me. Why are smallholder farmers in such abject poverty? What causes them to be so desperate, and why is it that, even in 21st-century India, one farmer dies by suicide every 51 minutes?
My cofounders and I spent about six months traveling across India, meeting hundreds of farmers to listen to them. It became clear that climate risk is the root cause that causes farming to be unpredictable and unviable. Farmers who make reasonable money in one season can fail miserably in the next. And farmers who could grow crops earlier in summers no longer get to grow crops in summers. Heat is so much more. The wells are drying up, every year, there are new varieties of pests and diseases. Farmers told us that this is all because of because of God.
I said, "What?"
"This is all because of God." God is the one who caused it, God is the only one who can solve it.
God, in that context, I did not see as a sign of hope. I read it as a sign of helplessness. We heard from the farmers. They knew the problem, but they could not use these two words: "climate risk."
So we got together a team of engineers, scientists, designers from about six countries, to cocreate a solution with our farmers, which is quite unconventional. And the solution is “greenhouse-in-a-box.”
We call it "Kheyti Rakshak." It’s a micro-greenhouse. It's a beautiful greenhouse which sits in a small portion of the farmer's land. It's easy to build, a small structure, covered with netting on all sides, which cuts off heat, prevents bugs and saves water. We can't cool the entire planet in one day, but we definitely can create a climate for a small portion of a farmer’s land to be suitable for farming. From our first experiences of growing vegetables -- staple vegetables like tomatoes, cabbage, cucumbers -- we observed that greenhouses can increase yields up to seven times and use 90 percent less water. All this was too good to be true. All these things are so difficult to happen, so farmers couldn't believe it, unless they actually saw it in action.
So to make this happen, we had to have the courage to reimagine agriculture -- reimagine agriculture for smallholder farmers. After all, this is not to grow tomatoes in an industrial setting in Alaska in winters. It is to grow tomatoes for a smallholder farmer, by a smallholder farmer, in sizzling hot Indian summers. So this greenhouse had to be small enough to fit in a portion of their land, easy enough for them to use and cheap enough for them to buy.
One of the biggest challenges that we could overcome in the process is financing. Thanks to our financing partners, today, this greenhouse is available with financing which is fast enough and cheap enough. The greenhouse costs about 1,000 dollars. Farmers pay a down payment of about 100 dollars, and the rest is financed through a loan. And this life-changing asset adds and extra 100 dollars of profit, on average, to a household, month on month. This is a good double of what they otherwise make. Marginal, five-ten percent increases in the incomes of smallholder farmers cannot move the needle forward much, because the baseline is way too low. We need a significant jump in their income, and that income has to be reliable and dependable. To ensure that farmers succeed, we also provide quality seeds, nutrition, training and advisory leveraging mobile technology. We rolled out the solution, after quite a few tests with farmers, about three years ago, and we are marching towards 2,000 farmers in this year and looking at 100,000 farmers over the next five years. Hopefully, every smallholder farmer in my lifetime.
(Applause)
The best technologies in agriculture can reach the smallest of the farmers if we do two things well: listen to the farmer with curiosity, empathy and compassion, and keep smallholder farmers, particularly women farmers, at the center of the design, and build solutions. Then, we can cocreate mini solutions like Kheyti Rakshak, which bring dignity, hope and stability to the lives of the farmers. In this big fight against climate change, we all have to remember that we should take our smallholder farmers along; it is our collective responsibility.
India is a home for about 100 million smallholder farmers. I dream of a day when "smallholder farmer" becomes synonymous with a happy farmer, and being forced to eat mud should never be a feature again, anywhere.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
