Nysagric Collectives

What needs to happen?

It's a world of problems; so many things need to change -

People should get poison-less food; People should get nutrition at a fair price; Farmers should earn a fair share; Farming should be resilient to climate change and market dynamics; Human activities need to have least ecological footprint; Human activities should do less of pollution and least harm to ecological balance and so on...

What if there is a singular solution to all of these?

“Every Note that you spend is a Vote that you cast for the kind of Economy you want"

The modus operandi is to organize consumers as a SHG/Cooperative, then enter into a syndicate with farmers. The objective is to establish, maintain and operate a consumer~farmer syndicate, not just for mutual benefit, but also sustainability:

1. A unique contract framework aimed to offer agriculture as a service to crowds
2. Crowdfunding to create sustainable and state-of-the-art production systems
3. Unified land ownership for meaningful utilization of capital & natural resources
4. Partnered workforce to bring complete value chain under single umbrella

The aforementioned intervention is intended to build limits into our systems and bring harmony between the core ethics, namely People, Profit, Planet. The framework thus created serves as a socio-economic platform into which small agriculture efforts and agri-businesses can merge and operate with full scale, efficiency and sustainability.

Agro-Economic Framework

PREAMBLE

Core ethics of Permaculture

THE END

Any human effort of value creation and dissemination has bearing on society, economy as well as the ecology. So building limits into our systems is healthy. Measuring our efforts of value creation against three core ethics (People care, Planet care, Profit care) serves as a litmus test for sustainability, as per permaculture school of thought.

Agriculture as a value proposition in its current form is marred by a lot of issues in all the facets of core ethics, making it the least sustainable. All these issues are/were being continuously addressed by policy makers, organizations, individuals etc. Yet, history has always shown that impact is created only when larger sections of society involve.

The proposed agro-economic framework is intended to create business interventions and structural reforms to scale up social participation in the path to sustainability

All the discrete problems concerning People, Planet, Profit cares are better addressed integrally with an unified solution. A fragmented approach can only address the symptoms, but never uproot the problem. An integrated approach can reduce efforts significantly, at the same time will be impact-full.

Stable market is created when consumers unite and join hands with farmers
Economy of scale is realized when organized farmers are custodians of a unified land bank
Money meets & means sustainability when the crowds become healthy and keep so their environments

Who it is?

It could be YOU, if you believe “Every Purchase You Make Is A Chance To Vote With Your Wallet”

1. Are you the one looking for poison-less food at an affordable price?
2. Are you concerned about Indian farmers' fate?
3. Are you the one who loves to save environment for future generations?

If your answer is 'yes' to one or more questions above, here is a framework which you can build and be a part of the solution. A small adjustment in the way we spend, can be magnified in effect when it is done collectively.

Background

Agriculture is the lifeline of civilization. The first man-made value chain that is ever expanding, commingling with others to create new value chain forms. It is going to be existing forever albeit in different forms.

In its coarse form of farm to fork, agriculture is the only value chain where both producers and consumers lose and middlemen make the most. In a nutshell the entire equation of core ethics is skewed more towards profit, leaving behind people's care and planet cares.

Although we get to see a lot of reasons for this discrepancy, a careful consideration could reveal that it all stems from non-unity. Neither consumers are united nor farmers, except for a few scattered efforts. Amongst innumerable and unorganized consumers & farmers, finite numbers of sellers & distributors are able to take away a larger share of value, being oblivious to the remaining two core ethics (people and planet).

In the direction of changing this equation and getting the rightful share to the farmers, there have been many efforts. However, similar efforts tending to be customer centric are close to none.

Nysagric SHG aims to create a customer centric intervention in the agri value chain. The goal is to suggest interventions in the field of agriculture and agri businesses, that ensure - People care, Planet care, Profit care.

If we, the consumers are willing to pay for natural farming, it creates natural farmers to the order of demand; which many more virtues can follow.

The questions are

How to get them to pay for natural farming?
How to scale natural farming operations?
How to make environment a stakeholder in all this?

The Framework

Any human effort of value creation needs to answer four questions on - Market, Capital, Scale, Human resource. Let us study the current scenario in agricultural field, what are its strengths & shortfalls; then look out for possible interventions

The production & distribution models available in the market can be put into roughly the following baskets

Conventional distribution realized with APMC yards & mandis

Large retail like Bigbazar, Reliance fresh, Bigbasket, Amazon etc.,

Large aggregators like Ninjacart, Jumbotail etc.,

The proposed production and distribution model is as follows -

Consumer-farmer syndicate

Market

Fundamentally, the current agriculture and agri businesses are involved in commodity selling. That is, the income from agriculture and/or agri business is primarily based on the quantity of produce.

The quantity of produce available in the market at a given point in time decides what price a particular commodity commands; in other words demand & supply gap/match decides the price point
And the quantity of produce available with a farmer or seller at his/her disposal in that given point of time decides the total earnings

There might be other factors to it, yet the major influence is quantity. This quantity or productivity oriented approach to agribusiness has driven out farmers’ ethics to grow more & more from a unit piece of land using all sorts of exploitative techniques, and that too unseasonably to command more price. This has led to extreme practices of chemical farming and resource intensive non-seasonal, a-climatic cropping practices on the farmland. Entire economy and ecology is under stress due to this factor.

A policy intervention in this regard might sound non-democratic, so it’s hard to come by. The other route is to seek community support. Following is the proposal to draw consumer support for resolving this concern.

Intervention 1: Grow for kitchen, not market

Farming is better practiced as a service. If farmers set out to grow all the varietal needs of a kitchen and be able to consistently supply directly to individual families, the entire farming exercise can be pursued as service. Out of this direct consumer relation, they can claim a larger share of value in the entire chain. The extent to which Land, Water, Labour, Energies are used, can set the target price, which means environmental costs also get considered during pricing. This input based costing can change farming, the otherwise selling-business to a service

Business Model

The business model consists of two verticals - Non-working and Working. Voting authority is equally divided (50:50) among working and non-working verticals. The share of non-working vertical is further shared among Consumers and Partners (land owners and/or large investors) in accordance to their respective investment.

The core product line is "Vegetable farming as a service" and rest of the portfolio can be the framework to which businesses and natural farmers can plug and play as suppliers or customers

Page updated

Report abuse