Five years ago, as ERP Leader – India Region for GE Power & Water, Deepak Sabharwal’s Earth connection was mainly his weekend visits to his family’s farms in Pushkar, Rajasthan. Today as co-founder and CEO of Earthy Tales, he recollects, “It all began some 5 years ago, at our family farms where we have Amla (Indian gooseberry) orchards and vegetable farming patches. The fragrance of the “mitti”, the sprawling greens, and the open skies were my first inspirations to start spending my weekends at the farm while I was still working with General Electric (GE). I would work 5 days a week in the GE office in Gurgaon and then travel 420 kms overnight to spend my weekends exploring farming – I did that for 3 long years, almost all the weekends were spent doing hands on farming, but conventional farming.”
The trigger or the early seeds of Earthy Tales were planted when he got acquainted with pesticides for the first time when his farm supervisor was using it on their cauliflower crop, though the packing clearly mentioned that it was poisonous and that it needed to be kept away from livestock and used with precaution. A troubled Deepak couldn’t sleep well and went back to Delhi with a heavy heart. “The fact that my own farm was feeding something poisonous to the society didn’t go well with my conscience. I travelled back to the Pushkar farm, this time in the middle of the week to look for alternate answers. The first thing I did was to raze the entire standing cauliflower crop as I didn’t want that to be consumed by anyone!,” he said adamantly.
Thus, began the pursuit to find an alternate way of growing food. Deepak travelled within Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Himachal and spent days living with farmers who were still practising traditional farming, without using zero manmade chemicals and insecticides. He was caught by surprise, “I figured out that Organic farming isn’t a new technique or a fad, as it is made out to be. It was the only way our farmers knew to farm, living alongside nature but the advent and massive marketing of pesticides and insecticides ensured that they became mainstream and today Organic farming is being touted as a recent trend. What a pity!”
His own transition from a conventional farmer to becoming an Organic one, getting his farm certified (NPOP, NOP) and his struggles to get a market for his produce got him worried. He tried pursuing the neighbourhood farmers to convert back to how their forefathers did farming, but the lack of market linkages created a resistance.
Back in cities, people were falling sick, getting lifestyle diseases a lot earlier in age and began to realise that good, chemical free food is the way to good health of their families. Deepak realised that he needed to seize the moment, connecting the Organic farming community with these families and this became the vision behind setting up Earthy Tales.
The challenges
Commenting on the challenges of taking up organic farming in India, he rightly observes that Organic farming isn’t new to India but has lost its followers due to advent of Westernised way of farming, which is based heavily on use of man-made chemicals and GMO seeds.
He says, “The key challenge initially was to convince farmers to stop using these chemicals as they wouldn’t believe in this concept. To be fair to them, the eco system at a village level is more supportive and conducive of chemical-based farming, with chemical based agri inputs industry almost being run like typical FMCG companies, with dealer networks promoting the usage of these chemicals. As against this, the eco system barely existed to support organic farmers; be it the necessary knowhow, pest management or nutrition support for the crops.”
Deepak even realised that the farmers practising conventional farming would call you “mad” and laugh at organic farming practices. Added to that, the challenges around dropping of yield in the initial year of transition to Organic farming puts extra pressure on the farmer. While there are overall cost savings in terms of pesticide avoidance, the higher price realisation comes only when one is certified, he points out. Additionally, finding markets for such produce was a challenge and in the absence of that farmers would switch back to the conventional farming and sell the produce in local village mandis.
Digitising Organic farming
Farmers are one of the two key stakeholders in Earthy Tales model, the other one being end consumers. Deepak affirms, “We work with both the communities very closely. The model is to convert, create or adopt a group of existing organic farmers and help them with assistance around organic farming knowhow, inputs, certification help and eventually market linkages. There are regular farm audits, visits to ensure traceability and continuous communication to maintain quality specifications”
In fact, Earthy Tales is now developing an entire technology enabled agri backend which will ensure the following:
- Digitise the farm details, up till farmer level to further fool proof traceability – we will able to identify the farm level detail of a product using a simple QR code
- Creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based farm advisory system, specific to Organic farming – this will be the first such facility for Organic farmers in India
- The data collected through these organic farms will eventually help us improve yields, managed pest/disease /nutrition management more effectively, specific to organic farming format.
“The idea is to put the traditional wisdom of an old progressive organic farmer as part of insights, advisories and share it with our cluster of Organic farmers – this will help scale up our supply chain efforts and build a very strong farmer retention and stickiness for the brand Earthy Tales,” says Deepak.
Earthy Tales is pretty much present in the entire kitchen food space, starting from perishables like vegetables and fruits to dry staples like flours, oils, organic pulses, rice, organic spices, seeds etc. The company is certified with NPOP, NOP and also supports PGS certified farmers.
Deepak feels that the government has made the certification process lot easier with every state having certification agencies and in-fact the government has also launched lot of schemes to get more farmers into organic farming. He thinks it is a great step forward – what would also help to set up more labs for pesticide testing closer to farms, which today is limited to bigger cities.
Has Covid-19 changed the scenario?
Deepak is confident that the organic food market is at its tipping point now and very soon we will see it shedding its tag from being “niche” to” mainstream”. He states, “We believe that if specific challenges around authenticity and pricing of products are resolved, this market could grow 15x-20x in the next decade from the 25% CAGR growth that it has witnessed in the last decade. Secondly, from the farmer standpoint, this industry is poised to actually double their incomes, especially Direct to Customer (D2C) models like ours which eliminates middlemen – what we need to solve for is creating a farmer support ecosystem them with organic farming practices, agronomy and extension services.
He reiterates, “Covid-19 has changed the consumer buying behaviour permanently and customers are wanting to switch faster towards healthy, natural food options. They are also expecting complete transparency in the supply chains of the food that they will be consuming. We have seen new customer revenue as high as 40% of our total monthly revenue, clearing validating the above trend. While in India, we have now majorly solved the Food Security issues, the focus obviously will shift towards nutrition, quality and source of the food we consume and the Organic Food category will lead this transition”
A tech-driven supply chain
Supply chain is important for all the industries but it is the lifeline of the agriculture sector as a lot of wastage happens between harvesting and the produce reaching the markets. Organic food is no different but certain nuances make it more difficult for this food category. The need to maintain transparency and freshness offers unique challenges as far as building the supply chain is concerned including transportation, and logistics requirements are concerned. He suggests, “What is required is an Organic Agri Cluster approach, wherein we create these supply hubs comprising of farmers, with complete eco system of knowledge support, agri inputs, basic farm gate processing facilities and direct logistics to market places. Secondly, the logistic cost needs to be Direct to Consumer.”
Elucidating on the future roadmap for Earthy Tales, the company aspires to be India’s most loved and trusted Direct to Consumer organic food brand, by being the most trusted agri partner for Organic farmers. Deepak shares his vision, “We are building India’s first D2C Organic Food brand, nestled on a tech driven, backward integrated supply chain. As we look to expand beyond NCR, the aim is to create 15 to 20 Organic Agri Clusters across different parts of India and link them to our future demand fulfilment centres in different cities. We will enable organic farmers to access our farm advisories using our AI based platform that we are building, the first for the organic farming community. Secondly, as part of our product expansion, we plan to introduce value added products like ready to eat snacks, Superfood based products focussing on specific nutrition needs which we will help us procure more and diverse crops from our organic farmer community that we are building. Eventually, the bigger dream is to connect the Organic farmer to the end consumer using our D2C model and keep our farms and kitchens free from chemicals.”
