Corporate veterans turn agri-preneurs in quest to contribute

This professional-turned-agri-preneur’s venture, back2basics farm, was born when he chanced upon a vegetable vendor washing carrots with sewage water.

Srinivasan Madhusudan, an IIM-B alumnus and Bengaluru-based advertising and marketing veteran of 27 years, began farming in a 30x40 feet plot of land in 2011, learnt the basics of agriculture while growing organic fruits and vegetables, and now grows some 90 varieties on 180 acres in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

“99 per cent of our growers are also traders. We don’t buy or sell; no middlemen and no franchisees; we just control production,” Madhusudan, Chief Farmer, back2basics, told BusinessLine .

Of the 180 acres, back2basics owns nearly 60 and the rest is leased from others. “Contrary to belief in some quarters, agriculture is not a dying business. We have home-delivery in Bengaluru as of now and will soon expand to other cities . We also export and have access to 45 organic product outlets abroad.”

On 3.5 acres, he even offers experimental farming to his consumers so that they know how back2basics grows its vegetables.

N Balasubramanian, who graduated from the Institute of Rural Management Anand in 1989 and worked with the National Dairy Development Board, Godrej and some other food-related MNCs, always wanted to help small and marginal farmers. After having helped his friend Raj Seelam since 2004 in his Hyderabad-based organic products venture Sresta, he quit his lucrative job in the FMCG sector and joined Sresta’s start-up 24 Mantra Organic in 2010 as its CEO.

“We now have a network of 32,000 farmers producing 90 crops across 1.70 lakh acres in 15 States. We plan to expand to 1 lakh farmers and 5 lakh acres in the next five years.”

Explaining Sresta’s business model, he said the firm is not into contract farming. It helps farmers grow organic produce and pays market price for the produce. It currently markets across 145 cities in India, and has tied up with retail majors. It also has access to about 1,000 stores in 45 States in the US and has a presence in Singapore, Dubai and Mauritius.

Indore-based Raman Singh Saluja has a slightly different story to narrate. For three years from 1995, he was into wind energy; moved to exporting potato and pulses to West and South Asia before he realised the gaps in supply chain in agriculture. This prompted him to start a web portal and supply-chain initiative called Gram Mandi.com but gave it up in 2000 due to APMC (Agricultural Produce Market Committee) laws and poor web connectivity. He then returned to his family business of metal trading before finally, founding a start-up in 2010.

His rural solutions company Gramco Infratech offers farmers end-to-end services under one roof — from sowing to marketing end products, except selling machines. It helps farmers with seeds, fertilisers, bio-fertilisers, chemicals, water solubles, and warehousing. The company also has access to 250 acres of contract farming for soyabean and wheat in Madhya Pradesh. Farmers are free to market their products.

“We recently tied up with a fertiliser major. In the next three years, we plan to expand to 10,000 to 15,000 acres of contract farming.”

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