By Karthik Jayaraman
As I was boarding my flight at Schiphol airport, one number remained stuck in my mind: the number 3. As the rain battered on my window, I couldn't help but go back to this number over and over again. This airport, one of the world's busiest, and the largest hub in the global movement of horticultural products, and it sits 3 metres below sea level. Coming from a city that has been ravaged by multiple cyclones and floods in the past few years, and at the forefront of the battle against climate change, it was a daunting thought. I could see the magnitude of the challenge that the Netherlands faced when it came to climate change.
This is one of the many challenges that India and the Netherlands share. Both countries are quite centred around agriculture and are also most likely impacted by climate change. And while we face these challenges in our own ingenious, innovative ways, we share complementary capabilities which, put together, can address some of these challenges far more effectively.
The Netherlands has been a pioneer in the field of agriculture and innovations from soil to sale. Companies such as Agrico and Rijk Zwaan have been at the cutting edge in developing natural seeds that taste better, offer better product performance and in turn leads to better health. SV Agri, one of WayCool's portfolio companies, has partnered with Agrico over the past several years to bring some of these seeds into India and use its own innovative capability to produce these at scale to get them across the country. One such example is the ‘Carisma’, a new range of potato which has been launched in India, that has the lowest glycemic index in the world and is therefore safe to consume for patients who suffer from sugar. The significance of this in India is high, considering India is home to 16% of the global diabetes population.
Moving on from seed to crop protection, Netherlands has reimagined how crops are protected. I met the good folks of Koppert, a Dutch company with a significant presence in India that has developed integrated all-natural methods of pest management. Be it the use of predatory insects to target specific pests or the development and usage of bio pesticides, a lot of what Koppert has developed is very relevant to a country like India which has its own history of natural farming and affinity towards natural farming.
We have already seen signals from nature asking us to toe the line, and I was delighted to learn more about the cutting edge work done by Wageningen University and Research in this regard. Wageningen has developed algorithms that can help predict diseases based on weather conditions and can detect diseases using AI, which has been trained on millions of images. Predicting the impact of long term climate shifts is critical to climate adaptation, and when one can predict what areas will be adversely impacted by climate change, and what needs to be planted where, one can ensure that humankind's food remains secure irrespective of what lies in store for us on the climate front. These are important not just for the Netherlands and India, but on the global front as well. Wageningen University and Research is at the cutting edge of such predictive modelling.
Reducing food waste post-harvest has been a key area of focus in our industry and The Netherlands has a lot to offer in this area as well. From extending shelf life of products to low-cost sustainable refrigeration to management of the crop post-harvest Wageningen has been one step ahead of the curve. We also have other Dutch companies that are bringing technologies relevant to India. For example, the ventilation systems that Mooij, again a partner of one of Waycool's portfolio companies. has developed will help extend the shelf life and reduce damage of crops such as potato and onion in cold storages. Potatoes and Onions are two of the largest crops grown in India. The innovative machines that companies such as Kuipers offer, will help add value to the products and therefore help farmers get better realisations as part of the supply chain. And who can forget the phenomenal example of a win-win marketplace set up by Royal FloraHolland. The world’s largest flower marketplace, it is one of the world’s largest buildings that processes more than hundred thousand transactions in just three hours and creates a win-win for the buyer and the farmer/grower. While many marketplace models are being experimented in India, Royal FloraHolland stands out as an example from which all of us can learn. They are also proving that elephants can also dance. A hundred-plus year-old marketplace is now going digital. The kind of transformation that they are bringing to the sector is nothing short of exemplary.
The Netherlands has a lot to offer to India and countries like us. India also has a lot to offer to them as well. For example, India represents 8,000 years of civilizational continuity when it comes to agriculture. Its farmers learnt to sway with the land and live with nature and have an instinctive affinity towards natural farming. They are therefore capable of making very smart trade-offs between intensive and natural agriculture as and when they get exposed to new technologies. In short, they are smart, early adopters that use their common sense and are likely to produce better results with some of the sustainable farming technologies the Netherlands is developing.
WayCool's Outgrow regenerative agriculture platform offers a great platform for Dutch companies to bring their technologies into India and introduce them to farmers at scale. Safe experimental demonstrations are possible in various Outgrow Agricultural Research Stations (OARS) that WayCool is setting up across the country. These offer farm labs where some of these practices can be tested, demonstrated, and adapted for India, and farmers from all over the country can come and see these practices and learn from them.
India is a great solutions provider in IoT and IoT hardware. WayCool’s GWX platform is perfectly complementary to some of the algorithms that universities such as Wageningen have developed. Together, we can festoon the world with a network of sensors and actuators and through this we can capture information across the planet on soil, air, and weather conditions. We can capture insights on what this means for the crops and make global agriculture more agile, climate-adaptive and sustainable. Using lesser resources and adapting to weather changes, we are demonstrating our agility by preventing the occurrence of a problem rather than reacting to it. Indian ingenuity in hardware engineering & IoT design, and in building low-cost solutions combined with Dutch knowledge and depth of experience can genuinely transform agriculture.
When it comes to mobile-first solutions, India has leapfrogged. Our farmers have proven that they can adapt to mobile applications quickly and have started leveraging these applications to their best capabilities. The proof of this lies in WayCool’s Outgrow platform which has recorded more than 125,000 downloads in just two months and recorded more than 30,000 visits every month to identify diseases using AI, to get advice on the best cropping practices and so on. The Outgrow platform is available for anyone to use globally and to reach their farmers at very low costs. Many such platforms can be built out of India that are capable of native language engagement, that are scalable and are capable of even solutions such as voice-based conversations that will reduce the resistance to adopt technology worldwide and enable farmers to access information in a much richer form instantaneously and at low cost.
Indian application engineering capabilities are legendary, be it building low-cost electrical cars such as the Tata Nexon, or engineering fantastic food processing facilities such as what SV Agri has done in partnership with their Dutch principals. SV Agri has taken traditional machines and used them for entirely new applications such as Indian snacks and have built frugally engineered, highly productive lines that enable customers to add value to products. When value gets added, margins get improved across the supply chain and it becomes economically sustainable. Partnering with Indian companies such as these will give Dutch companies an edge in terms of solutions that are highly creative, frugal, and highly productive for their customers.
There are quite a few engagement models that are possible between Indian and Dutch companies. It may range from simple distributorship agreements, collaboration & joint ventures and could potentially mean investments by the Netherlands into India and vice versa. WayCool has been engaged in multiple such modes. We are, through our portfolio companies, partnering with companies distributing their products and machines, and have joint ventures with Agrico and Mooij for development of products and adaptation into Indian conditions. We are invested in by FMO – the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank and are in conversation with many other such potential investors from the Netherlands. We are also keen to invest in the Netherlands to bring in the right domain talent into our technology platforms. These partnerships together will serve one purpose – to make the world more sustainable for agriculture and to make sure the world stays well fed, healthy and happy in the face of intense climate shifts. Flying over the turbulent canvas of the North Sea, I could see how the Dutch had tamed the ocean to create their land. The Indians, on the other hand, had partnered the ocean to dominate commerce from Africa to China. We both knew how to work with the ocean. Perhaps, together we can reach a detente with the angry ocean, or even an entente in the future.
Karthik is the Co-Founder & MD of WayCool, India's leading agri-tech platform
