The factory approach to farming

Why should our villages be any different?

Collaborative farming (c-farming)

The factory approach to farming

Travel from an Indian city to a village and you will see a stark difference. There is severe lack of basic amenities like roads or other such infrastructure. Farmers struggle to make both ends meet. Whereas the cities have some quality of life, the villages, in several cases offer a choice between life and death, forget about the quality part, with many people choosing death over life - The reason why you hear of so many poor farmers committing suicide.

Agriculture is one of the 3 pillars of any economy, beside services and manufacturing. If you look back at history, the reason why manufacturing grew so much is because of organization and the fact manufacturing institutionalized a lot of core processes. Due to this, they could manufacture more with less. With services, it is similar - organization and institutionalization. These are noticeably absent from agriculture, in general. Any country or region that has sought to imbibe these attributes in their agricultural landscape has prospered.

We need to do the same thing at the smallest village in order to make farming a profitable sector. Organization adds discipline, robustness and guarantees success compared to chaotic farming. Run farming like factories should be the motto.

In this model, a village must organize itself as a partnership firm. The landowners come together, forge a partnership and investments and revenue are distributed in the same proportion as the landownership. The owners also appoint an agriculture expert to help with the right selection of crops. The expert need not be attached to a single village but can work at a district level or several districts together.

How would lease work?
Typically, their is an agreement between the landowner and lessee on the monetized value of the produce, say 50%. In such cases, the lessee would make full investments and income would be shared with the original landowner after adjusting for the investments, essentially, the in one and investments are shared between the lessee and landowner.

An example of the cFarming model
Imagine a village with 100 acres of land with 50 families, for sake of simplicity, each family occupies 2 acres. A farming specialist and an accountant is appointed by the village to advise on what to produce and to manage overall accounts.

Each family makes an investment based on the ratio of their ownership. In this case, equal for all the families.

The revenue accrued is divided amongst all the families- in this case, equally.

Economic Benefits of the c-farming model
There are several benefits with the c-farming model. I will list down only three: gain economies of scale,  increases profitable farm produce and enriches quality of life of rural farmers.

Social benefits of cFarming
Almost all villages have a very degree of social tension, enmity, family feuds, etc. CFarming will gradually inculcate the culture of social collaboration and make the villages an extended family. The social fabric would get enriched with this model.

Also, such a model is expected to generate better income for the families. What this means, is that families could send their children to schools and make their kids better farmers.

Making Change Stick with cFarming
Collaboration in any arena is always easier said than done. Collaboration in farming and agriculture is even more difficult. The mindset from an individualistic approach to collaboration and sharing is not an easy shift. Besides, in villages, their are lot more factors involved - personal relationships, enmity, local politics, casteism, religion, to name a few. But once people start seeing the rewards coming in, the new mindset will gradually start sticking.

The future village
If the villages progressed, urban migration would reduce, since their would be no genuine need. Villages would offer almost the same experience as any city in terms of basic and luxury infrastructure. A village with a shopping mall would become a reality and not a dream anymore.
Collaborative farming is currently leveraged at Australia and few countries and have met with success. There is no reason to believe why they could not be implemented successfully in any country.

Of 5f, 3s and from snake charmers to mouse charmers

It is not very often that you read about someone spanking the ball out of the field in the very first ball. Narendra Modi did just that, when he addressed at SRCC in Delhi recently. Unlike other “iconic” speeches of recent times, Modi’s speech was not old-school. It focused on today and a better tomorrow. It talked about how we can leverage our existing strengths to move to a bright future and achieve Vivekanand’s vision for the country.  

Here are some key takeways from the speech. You could argue that he said nothing new, but what is new is the speed and scale of the implementation of the ideas. These are thoughts that have seen the light of the day and not just on paper:

The 3 pillars of our economy: We keep talking about inclusive growth, without really understanding its meaning or significance. Modi spoke about the economy comprises of 3 pillars viz. agriculture, services and manufacturing. There is a need to strengthen all three. Only then true inclusive growth can be achieved. In this objective, there is no mention of any caste, creed, color, language or religion. And the idea is to balance growth in each pillar; in the event of an economic downturn in one of the pillars, the remaining two can support the other.

Technology upgrade: I would generalize this and include anything we do today. The most fantastic discovery may become commonplace in no time. There is a need to keep re-discovering and updating ourselves. Modi provided an example of how the old textile industry of Ahmedabad got wiped out due to lack of technology upgrades. The most innovative companies are the ones that understand the trends and use technology to provide better customer and employee value.  

Education: Indeed, Modi spoke a lot about education, Forensics University, special university for the police force and train the teacher concept. However, as Modi pointed out, merely opening a university doesn’t change the equation. We need good teachers. Bill Gates frequently talks about the need for good teachers in our system. I also touch about the need to bring good teachers to our rural areas in another blog 


The 3s – skill, speed & scale: I think this was the icing on the cake. Modi spoke about the 3s linking his vision to its implementation. India being a young country, needs adequate support in skill building. There is no fun just in numbers, but it is fun to have a high quality number. His vision and some of the work he has initiated on skill building are very scientific and provide the youth with multiple options. Secondly, it is good to have ideas. However, more important is the speed of implementing such ideas. We all like “quick wins” – there are always low hanging fruits and speed is achieved by quickly grabbing them to deliver quick wins. And finally, the scale of implementation has to be big. The world is our market. Having the skill to build something new, the speed or velocity to deliver in quickly and the scale of the world as a market to service/deliver – this will help the nation stand out and progress rapidly.    

Hope and Change are the new buzzwords in the political arena. Remember, they were used and practiced to perfection by Obama in his 2008 and 2012 elections. And Modi’s speech, too, was laced with hope and change to an aspiring nation. 

We may all have various degrees of opinion about the man, but you can't deny that he is the only leader in Indian politics today that has established sufficient credibility in inclusive development. He didn't deliver a speech, he simply shared his experiences on good governance and provided examples of how his governance model has helped the state achieve significant growth and why his model is the new benchmark not only for the other states, but also for the nation as a whole. 

Indeed, he came, he delivered and he conquered!
 

The importance of Delhi elections

Elections in Delhi are scheduled for later this year and this will be an election that has the potential of changing the political landscape of the country for years to come.

The Delhi assembly elections will not be a Congress vs. BJP eve, but rather an AAP vs. non-AAP parties’ affair. The party has been raising lot of local issues, which are really pertinent in the context of assembly elections. There is a sense of identification and trust being built with the local people. AAP has also taken a stand that it is people's responsibility to vote and not the politicians’ responsibility to ask for votes. This is a new paradigm, unheard of in Indian politics, since Independence; the positioning being that AAP, despite being a political party, is indeed a people's movement.

So far, everyone including the media has been pretending to ignore them. But not the people who cast their votes. The media too has been supportive of politicians since the politicians are in collaboration with the business persons. And it is the same business persons who run the media houses.

If AAP is voted in or at least constitutes the lead opposition, the entire political landscape will change. No media will be able to ignore AAP. And AAP will become a serious player in 2014 national elections. So far, the 2014 national elections are being touted as a BJP vs Congress – Narendra Modi vs Rahul Gandi. This could change with AAP coming to power in Delhi. The third force, which has been absent will emerge with Arvind Kejriwal taking the cake away from the regular politicians.2019, if not 2014 elections may well be Narendra Modi vs Rahul Gandi vs Arvind Kejriwal.

In the event, AAP comes to power and are able to achieve something major e.g. cut down electricity costs by 30%-40% (as they have been claiming), they will immediately be catapulted to be the most serious contenders nationally.

It will also be interesting to see how the personality’s wars shape up. Narendra Modi stands for “Development first, corruption will reduce along the way”.  Arvind Kejriwal stands for “Reduce corruption, development will happen by itself”. Rahul Gandhi is yet to build his persona, but really his persona is his last name. So, it doesn’t matter what he stands for.

Which paradigm will the nation vote for? Only time will tell.