To The Manure Born

I, V, M. So, yeah, we are meeting up with some friends and they are from the agricultural sector. So, just going around and one of them was telling me about the agricultural situation in India, and especially the fertiliser subsidy part of it, which always was large to begin with, like my emit riff has gotten only larger. I mean, I think we should acknowledge at this point that inflation is off the charts.

I have to apply to all of our mitt riffs as well. I will actually tell the audience I have been meeting Tony in person for a long time, and I was very happy to not have been gratified to note that he has a nice little mitt riff as well. So, I am not the only guy with the pot Billy here. We are all about the riff.

Top riffing, bottom riffing, mitt riffing, whatever. So, the south, eastern part of Maharashtra is definitely not on the coast, and I am guessing there is not a lot of rain either. Yeah, it doesn't get a lot of rain either. It is a very, very flat part of, you know, the azetica plateau.

And it was a big go. It started off near the sea, but then in plateau it would also be protected in the sun. Yeah, so it is architectural. It is very nice.

It is very nice. Someone from Bombay, everywhere you look, you see high-rise buildings. Right. Lathur, you know, it is just one, yeah, it is just ground in one store.

That is very nice refreshing and very hot as well, but charming place. Right. And yeah, I mean, there is also one terrible joke I made about Lathur. I told my host that, see you Lathur, Alika, he was like seriously.

He didn't do a Lathur joke. Such as it is, that was my Lathur joke. Very nice. And what's the primary crop in Lathur?

I think it is Soyabeen and Turdal for some reason. It's two seasons of one. I think it's, like Soyabeen is three months, Turdal is another four months. Right.

And there is another crop, I think, ground, I'm not sure. No. Yeah. And it's like a big center for, you know, for rural Marasar.

It's literally the pulse of the... Yeah, literally the pulse of, yeah. Oh, the niche idea. Yeah.

And I don't think there are any serial killers. Yeah, Lathur. Right. No, thank God.

But yeah. And it's, I was, and I learned a lot about, I knew zero about agriculture. So every little thing that I learned was a lot. Yeah.

And he basically told me that this year, the agriculture sector will probably do very, very well because Soyabeen prices are almost doubled. Cotton prices are like tripled. Turdal prices have gone up a lot. Sugar is doing very well.

So a good part of Lathur also grows sugar. I don't know how, because there isn't much rain there. I guess it's irrigation, too, but whatever it is. And so sugar cane is the usual, is the ideal cyclical industry.

Right. So if sugar cane crop is very good, sugar cane prices drop. Yeah. And mills make a lot of money because they're in per cost quota.

What do farmers suffer? Because, you know, they get very poor prices. For the next season, they don't grow sugar cane. Right.

So there is a lot less sugar cane on the market. So sugar cane prices go up, which mean that the sugar mills, you know, they make a lot less profit. Yeah. And then in the next cycle, all the other sugar cane farmers have seen, that, you know, the prices have gone up, they go sugar cane again.

So it's one of those cyclical investors. Can you gain this or like? Yeah. So I'm sure if with the data analytics and machine learning and those kind of things, but yeah, lots of crypto investors are listening to us in the past.

And I will keep for like safer options to gain. So sugar cane in Lathur. Go for it. Go for it.

Yeah. So he was also telling me that, you know, we are actually, there is a huge crisis looming on the fertilizer sector, because there are basically three big fertilizers that require. One is urea, which India makes a lot of. It's subsidized.

It is enormously subsidized. And the reason for, so I have to go a little into the background. Yeah. Are you going to go to your famous nitrogen cycle?

Yes. For whichever. Yeah. He's the guy to blame me.

He figured out nitrogenous fertilizers and the great for the thing for crops. And you know, it really solved productivity problems. The problem was that India didn't get those fertilizers still a lot later. Green.

And in, yeah, the Green Revolution, the 1965, apparently we had a really bad drought. Yeah. So that way, I mean, all of India was early a doubt, but that year it was like really, really bad world. A lot of people died.

Yeah. And Lalbato Shastri was the prime minister then. And he decided that something had to be done. And he started to kick started this.

There was a guy named Northman Burlum. Yeah. So he, you know, they, I don't think he did it, but people like, you know, sort of transplanted his model here. Yeah.

But I think there was like a special variety of meat to something. Yeah. So they did a high yielding variety. Yeah.

They improved the irrigation. Yeah. And they introduced fertilizers. And it was expensive.

Right. So the government said that we needed to and. So I mean, very like tangential aside much like, you know, on brand for simplified, but where I ended up learning swimming was at my mother's house. Like in the very interior interiors of Kerala, I would say like not even close to a town for that matter.

But like it was an irrigation canal, which was part of some. A proper long linear equal depth, which will be safe. But I'm guessing that's part of like some large irrigation project. It was obviously named Jaural Nehruk.

Like everything else. So I'm guessing it's probably around the same time that irrigation picked off in a big way. Yeah. So I actually, as I, one little, I know this was the Green Revolution, start from three states.

Yeah. Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. And for some reason, it did very well in Punjab and not so well in Tamil Nadu. Oh, okay.

I think that's because Tamil Nadu andhra Pradesh didn't have that much irrigation. These guys, the Punjab already had a system of irrigation. It had it had reverse and it had a network and everything. Right.

But I should tell you that there's one variety of rice, which is called IR8. High yielding semi-druff dwarf rice variety. Developed by the International Rice Research Institute in the early 1960s, obviously I'm reading this over the video. It was the work by Peter Jennings and Henry Bekel.

But whatever, the only reason I know this IR8 is because if you've seen the movie, Anyan, I don't know what it's called in, Aparijit in Hindi, Aparijit do whatever. It's basically like Vikram having like split personalities or whatever. And like he's trying to woo this girl. Okay.

So he is trying to describe her features in the best way possible. So he basically like tries to describe her eyes like a fish, which is pretty common. Right. But there is a description of her teeth, which says IR8 to Palakari, which is like, IR a girl with teeth like IR8.

Wow. Especially if IR8 was, I think it was small and it was very white. Perley white. So yeah, yeah, I'm not sure how much it took off in Tamil Nadu, but I think like it was still pretty popular.

That's such an awesome reference. Can make IR8 with fertilizers. Yeah. Yeah.

So because they took off, they started consuming more fertilizers. And initially, the government said that, okay, you can't blame the government either because they have also to keep an eye on food prices. So if food prices go too high, a lot of people will starve because they won't be able to buy them and things like that. So they decided that the smartest way to go about it was subsidizing the fertilizer.

Yeah. And this thing, Can I make another digression of these? But I remember like at some point in time. Actually, you can make all the digression because what I know of fertilizers subsidies can be written on the back of the plastic.

And still space left over for what I know about agriculture. Yeah. So this one was two things. One is that we thought for the at least, you know, Malayal is growing up very like a hot tea culture, but not hot tea culture.

Like just hot tea about our own like a brain and like what is native to us. And like I used to be here the longest time. How can you make Sabudana from tapioca? They're like, really, step you can actually came from cassava from elsewhere.

It's not like a native. By no means native. And you're staggered when somebody tells you how recent it is. Exactly.

In my world war two times. Yeah, again, like there is going hungry, you like transplant some crop, which is easy to grow. And like tapioca is now universally acknowledged, melodious. Like if you want to have kappa biryani or kappa and mean curry, please go for it.

If it doesn't taste good, it's because you're in Bombay. But anywhere else in the world, it'll taste beautiful. But the question was like, I remember my parents and my uncle's and aunt's all like being nostalgic in like not necessarily a happy way about the time when they were air dropping macaroni. Like macaroni used to be what they call it.

Like I'm guessing like this is another time of food shortage and times like that. I think world war was that. Maybe but like macaroni never picked up what tapioca did. So like, yeah, I mean, we were a very, very poor and hungry country.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, my grandfather told me, my grandfather started a small restaurant in Bombay. And it did very well. And at the entire generation, my father's generation, they got a good education.

And everyone did very well in life because of the education. You know, India was growing at that time. And everything turned out well. All because of this little restaurant that he started.

So why did he start a restaurant? Because when he was back home in his village near Mangour, there wasn't enough to eat. There were five or six siblings and nothing to eat. And he was growing.

He was 13 or 14 years old tired of going hungry. So he ran away from the house. He went off to the kitchen or someplace because someone promised him a job. And he didn't get that job.

Then somebody else told him that what are you doing here? It's not a place to go to Bombay. So he went to Bombay. Then he lived at some relative's place and then he started a small restaurant.

Somehow he managed to make ends meet and then he started doing that. So he was telling me at that time that starvation and death by starvation was very common. Yeah. Right.

So when people starve, for some time they feel hungry. It's what he told me. And he said after that time they stopped feeling hungry. Oh wow.

And then they just died. Yeah. Oh wow. Okay.

And that, I don't know if this is true, but it is so... Yeah. No, it's possible. I mean, of course it's true, but it took a dark turn because I wasn't connected to people who do intermittent fasting in Keto and all.

Because the first month is always the hardest. And then after that you stopped feeling hungry. No, that's not the only thing that we do it out of choice. And you know that you have to take nutrition.

And even though you're not hungry, you make sure you have... But what was like... You don't really want to be a waste of it. After some time, you were just like...

You're completely wasting. So the Green Revolution was very opportune and this fertilizer subsidy probably helped in doing that. The problem is all government interventions started off with the noblest of intentions, but then it ballooned into this huge unmanageable monstrosity. And really didn't want to know what to do and think about it.

So now to give you one idea of the ironies of things, Yulia is approximately one fourth of the cost. Like in India, it sold at about one fourth of the price. It sold in Bangladesh. Oh wow.

Because of subsidies. Because of subsidies. And what people do, especially in the border, I'm sure is not very rampant. But basically the Smuggen- Right.

Yulia is a popular nation. Those kind of things happen. But in India, I have a niece named Rhea. Who recently got married.

And I think she lost a great opportunity. Whenever her husband had some kind of friend that I would say, I love Yulia, she should have bought a 245 rupees bag of 45 kg of Yulia. And she missed that. Oh my god.

That's so sad. So Rhea, but you can still do that. I'm sure your husband is going to say I love Yulia. I love how you are your modified family.

So I just simplified it. We still like not been through whatever else is there. That's great optimism. Okay.

I want to take a deviation and ask you about the science of things. Like nitrogen is like 70 plus percent, 78. 78 percent. 78 percent in the atmosphere.

Why is it so hard to think? Yeah. For some reason, nitrogen is absolutely, you know, it's like one of those do school. Yeah.

So they don't want to mix with anyone. Yeah. Like, you know, yeah. So both.

And it takes a lot of energy to convert it into ammonia. Okay. Which is nitrogen and nitrogen. And that's the receiver or something else.

So it used to happen in nature by lightning. Yeah. Whenever lightning happened, you would, you know, you would have been that much ammonia was enough for the plant. But famously lightning was like, same place in the next season.

So pretty shaburr, at that time. So how this started was they were trying to make potassium nitrate. Yeah. So potassium nitrate was an explosive.

Right. And the Germans want, it was mine. So potassium nitrate occurred in nature in rocks. Yeah.

And there were like three or four key mines. Yeah. And all of them were under the control of the British. Oh.

And when, you know, when there was a belligerence happening, they sort of locked up those places. These guys couldn't get enough potassium nitrate. So this guy said we have to make our own. And he figured out how to synthesize nitrogen.

You need a catalyst, you need a lot of energy, you need nitrogen. Right. And you need, but you're basically plucking it out of the air. Or is that not out of the air.

And then you synthesize ammonia and then it becomes ammonia, whatever it is. It becomes different form. But now the nitrogen is what they call fixed. So once the nitrogen is fixed, you can keep changing.

And the fixed nitrogen is full for the plant. Okay. What is fixed nitrogen? It's in this elemental form.

It's not elemental form. It's in the elemental form. It's there all around the breathing. When it's combined with the hydrogen, then it's like, unless available to the plants.

That's how it happens. And not explosive. And explosive also. So they wanted to make it.

In fact, that is one of the, you know, you can take nitrates and make. Yeah. I think all the five works are made of that. T and T try and nitrogen.

So whatever the military uses the farmer lethal, I don't think they're nitrates and all. But back in the day, that was what they would use for cannonballs and things like that. Yeah. We are, I mean, at least my generation.

I want to say our generation. There's more use to nitrogen in like, Heston, Blumenthal, ice cream, liquid nitrogen, and supposed to like, you know, using it for fertilizer, etc. But like, it is such a big deal to play in the whole, you know, production of food, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And then it was accidentally discovered. It was, they wanted to make it an explosion. Then they found out that it is terrific for crop, like incredibly.

So your crop yields went up 10x. And it was officially the end of world hunger. Except that, you know, politics being what it is, you didn't want it getting to other people. And for several decades, it didn't go out into the entire world.

That's why less developed countries like us and Bangladesh and Ethiopia. So, Mali, all these places, there was a lot of starvation. In India, it stopped, I think around the 70s. After that, I don't think we had any famines of that level.

But I think in Africa, they had it well into the 90s. Yeah. Yeah. But even now, I mean, we are in the middle of a new cycle where there has been like, talk about meat export and Utah and all of that.

So. That was a very fascinating. So, apparently, when fertilizer discovered, US was one of the countries with huge amounts of arable land. Yeah.

And all the technology started growing wheat like anything. Yeah. And corn. And what they did was, instead of giving other countries a technology, they decided to give other countries the grain.

So, as to keep them sort of satellite nations, or sort of subservient to United States. But even that backfired. Because then India had a huge famine in 1965. They gave us some wheat, apparently, which was so bad that even the horses wouldn't eat.

Some such story. And that was when the Indian establishment, in a rare moment of sincerity, decided to actually do something about it. And they did it. They actually ushered in the green revolution.

But it went crazy after some time because Yuri is so cheap. So you need Yuri, you need phosphate. Okay. There's something about this.

Sorry, what was the green revolution? So green revolution is productivity improved almost tenfold. By basically discovering fertilizers at mass. Three things.

Irrigation, seeds, and fertilizers. So all three things at the same time in a plant manner, offered to farmers at subsidy. What happened was, you also needed, apart from this, farm equipment. Because you want to make money, you need a large farm, you need tractors.

Farm and a little bit cheap. Or cheap manual labor. Or cheap manual labor. People had, you also needed mechanized farming.

You also needed pesticide. So those were not subsidized, they were expensive. So some farmers, like in Punjab already had rich farmers. Because it was a farming land.

So they were farmers. And they had great natural irrigation. Yeah. So they did very well.

And they went in for mechanization. Rest of the country took a long while to catch up. So that's why stage like Bihar and Orissa are really backward even today. Okay.

Because they just didn't have those resources at that time. Right. And they couldn't develop. And population increased, farm sizes decreased.

We used to have a professor who used to say, you know, the problem with India is that people of India are more fertile than the soil. But it was actually very sad. Yeah. It was like, you know, people just weren't able to make ends meet.

You know, so they everyone stayed on the farm. I think my prof used to use this procreation is the recreation of the poor. Yeah. Very disparaging.

Yeah. Disparaging and insensitive kind of thing. Just because you're born in a particular place and time, you can make whatever. But anyway, like it's like a hard.

It's like a very interesting experiment. Someone I read about. You are very small change in the initial conditions. Right.

Can have a very sort of traumatic change in the outcome. So what they do is there's an experiment, a simulation experiment. There is a, you know, earn containing balls of different colors. Right.

And you, every time you pick out a ball, Yeah. You replace it with two balls of that color. Same thing. The same color.

Yeah. So let's say you have red, green and blue. Right. So if I pick out a red ball, I put in two red balls.

Yeah. So now slowly what happens is the probability that I'm going to, the next ball is going to get picked is slightly higher. Yeah. And every time it gets replaced with two.

So it starts, keeps in clean. So purely by chance, if I pick up one, Yeah. And I do like a hundred iterations. Yeah.

The entire one will be right after some time. Or, you know, like a very, you know, almost nothing will be red and blue. Yeah. So that shows how initial conditions.

So it's like, like Kerala, for example, Kerala for historical reasons, probably travel core, probably other reasons, whatever. They had higher literacy. Right. They had better sort of educational outcomes.

Yeah. And golf happened. Yeah. And there was instant and like historical terms.

Yeah. If you would be able to die, I'm going to go to the Gulf. Yeah. Yeah.

And even, you know, even marks, you know, the golf thing. But it really people went there, earned money because they were clever. They had education. They had something, they couldn't be absolute country bumpkins and do well in their Pakistani.

I went to the UAE a couple of times. And I saw, well, so I had a Pakistani driver for one visit. Yeah. And there are people sitting on the roads, like, you know, interested in Patani.

Yeah. So I asked my driver who these people were. And he said they were all Pakistani laborers. Right.

Who basically come, like, you know, on some kind of fraud visa. Yeah. And they're looking for daily labor. Yeah.

So I said, wow. Yeah. But, you know, it's only Pakistani. Only Pakistani.

You'll never see Indians like that because they get great jobs. No, actually, I think it's like probably one generation to remove. But the first ones who went used to go in this, like, small boat, it's called a patani. I'm referring to the name of the boat.

It was a movie called patani. It shows like they applied. So they are basically illegal immigrants. So what happens to the boat can take you only to, like, I don't know, like, severe distance away from the shore, like one kilometer to kilometer.

Then you have to swim in the sea and not be caught by the guards there and somehow infiltrate into the land and find jobs. So first generation of these guys obviously like found some jobs and set it up so that the ones who followed could come in. So they had some kind of a establishment. But like the initial condition and the Indian situation, I think it's brought to life by that one example of this person who said, all I need is on the chess board for one rice green to be placed at a unit.

Yeah, yeah. So the legend is the inventor of chess. The king said, whatever, namely, I'm about to name him. So he says, I won one grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third and so on.

And king said, this is trivial and I'll do it. And he wrote out of grain by the time he reached the 18th or 16th square. So then if he had gone to 2 power 64, there would have been enough atoms in the universe to, yeah, probably cover that. So yeah, yeah.

So that's, but yeah, I mean, just to remind you, this is still an episode on fertilizer subsidies. I think that's a good place for a break. Yeah. So let's go for a break and come back and talk about what Narayan, you will talk about.

Yeah, which is fertiliser subsidies. Thank you. So welcome back to a simplified with Tony and Arin, this episode. And we are talking about a lot of things, but actually, Narayan, I wanted to talk about fertiliser.

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I was talking about and a problem actually is that we have basically three kinds of fertilizers. One is urea that in nitrogen is, one is phosphatic, that is, phosphorus. It's there's a fertilizer called di ammonium phosphate. And there is a potassium, that is, there is something called mu rate of potassium.

So these are the three main things. There are others, there is calcium, there's sulfur, but they are not required in nearly as great a quantity. So there's nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which is. Yeah, and a natural way to get this one.

Like potassium, I think, was ash. Potassium is ash. It is ash from wood traditionally. Yeah.

And I don't know how it's made in the present day. Okay. I bet there's mine. I know that all these fertilizers require a hell of a lot of energy.

So you can synthesize them out of anything. Yeah. So they come out of a cow. Yeah, that kind of thing.

Yeah. And it needs to be synthesized using a lot of energy and catalyst. Great. So energy rich countries, such as Russia and Ukraine.

Yeah. They have sources of gas. Gas is notoriously difficult to sell because you have to pipe it or you have to bottle it or do something like that. But if you have any industry which needs a lot of energy, you can directly use the gas to provide that energy and make it.

The product of that industry is a lot easier to transport, such as fertilizers. So Russia and Ukraine apparently produce a lot of alpha. It is that unfortunately for the world, they are the guys who are really fighting hammer and tongue at each other. Yeah.

And so, potash prices and especially phosphatic fertilizer, DAP prices have gone through the roof. Yeah. So now the government needs another extra 40 or 50,000 crores. Yeah.

If it has to, if it has to provide subsidies, if it has to keep the prices the same. Great. And the problem with the problem with the... Yeah.

Yeah. Another division. I'm sorry. But I'm sure like a lot of listeners have simplified, no, at least one Russian potash fertilizer producer and exporter, which is called Uralkali.

Okay. This is basically a sponsor of an F1 team, which is going bankrupt in the previous season. And basically the owner of like one of the chief executives, his name is some massive in. It's like, I will sponsor the team as long as my son?

I know my son keeps telling me about, I think he sort of means that I said that massive in buying an F1 team for his son. Yeah. What are you voting for? Yeah.

Yeah. So potash fertilizer can get you an F1 team as well. That's how it's there. So basically till the Russia Ukraine thing happened, for one full season he was driving, then obviously like they took off the sponsor and they had to find another one.

But yeah, there's a lot of money in the right. Yeah. And do you like the... Poops provide some 50% of the world's phosphatic fertilizer something like that.

So now because of this war, energy prices are impacted, fertilizer prices are impacted at least four times that. Because not only like rest of the world doesn't even have the manufacturing facilities, you know what they will develop them. You're getting fertilizer cheap from there. And it's needed because if you don't put enough phosphatic fertilizers, it'll affect your crop and food prices will go through the roof, which means people will still die of starvation.

Despite producing enough people will suffer. A lot of more people will suffer. So they watch Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka had the same problem. Sri Lanka had this problem in advance, even before the war.

They are... So what they tried was they went and told everyone that let's go for all the panic. The thing let's not buy fertilizers, let's conserve our farm exchange. Right.

And what does organic farming mean? So organic means you don't use chemical fertilizers. Okay. So there is a sort of, you know, there's a debate about that.

Okay. People say that organic, true organic farming, because all natural fertilizers and chemical fertilizers synthesize fertilizers have the same active ingredients, which is nitrogen or phosphorus or potassium or all three. Okay. But to be truly organic, all you need to do is not use pesticides.

So pesticides are the harmful chemicals. These are not just one point of view. Another point of view say is, I think this is the licensing. So if you need to, if you want to get an organic license, all you have to do is not use pesticides.

I think that's, I think that's good work. But a lot of purists feel and this is true. Overuse of nitrogen and overuse of fertilizers in the soil, contaminates groundwater and leads to... So there is one condition called blue baby syndrome, which is a particular...

Oh, it seems to know water system. Yeah, excessive nitrogen in the water. You have extra children. So there are many such, you know, and pesticides.

But it doesn't do anything to the cropers. The plants take whatever they need and the rest of it just leeches into the cropers. So technically, why should I as a consumer buy something organic as opposed to the crop? Yeah, so if because the output is maybe a third, if you don't use synthetic fertilizers.

Right. So it just like... So it's like... The crop will be three times more expensive.

It's a CSR. Yeah, it's CSR. And you know, for people like you and me, our food expenses are typically a very small fraction of your total expenses. Yeah.

But this may not be the case for a minimum wage or something. Yeah, no, I'm only asking because like, I think at some point for when we had a baby, we still have a baby, but like it's older. Like, I think the baby aid would be organic. But like there's no real science in that way.

I, apparently not. Yeah. So a lot of people swear that there is really no benefit to be gotten from. But it's great marketing to say that there is a benefit.

So people, there are chains in the US. Yeah. I think Whole Foods is one which stock exclusively are these kind of... But it's more like the green washing thing that we spoke about on one of our episodes.

Yeah. It's more a marketing ploy than really... So I would think, yeah. But you know, on the whole it may be because if I read somewhere about the...

So America is a big beef eating nation. Yeah. And it's brutal, okay? The cattle industry there is horrible.

Yeah. And the reason it eats America so much beef is the... The meat is really, really cheap. Okay.

So back in the day, like 70, 80 years ago, Americans would eat beef once in a month or once in six months. Because it was expensive. You had it only as a feast. The rest of the time we just ate vegetables like the rest of us.

Yeah. But then, you know, the conda evolution happened. And they started mass producing cattle. And then everyone has beef for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

So in order to... Now it's a race. So in order to sell that much meat or grow that much meat, they have to give it all kinds of antibiotics and steroids and all kinds of food supplements. Yeah.

Some of that which sort of seeps into humans as well. So world famous reference to I think is like probably the first or... One of the first few episodes of the scene in the Unseen where Amitwarma talks about how, you know, some change in medication or diet took cows led to like the parc way of death. So, yeah.

Final rights being changed completely. So there is one ingredient, one medicine called dichrophonic sodium. That is given to cows for some reason. It's an anti-inflammatory.

It's given to cows for some reason, like cheap. Yeah. And for some reason, it is extremely toxic to vultures. Yeah.

So vultures will basically eat a cow. Dead cow. Which has been eating, which has been fed dichrophonic. Yeah.

And that vultures will basically die. Yeah. And parcs, they are disposed of dead to the birds. Yeah.

They are not enough birds to eat them. And so they had to stop their practice. Right. Yeah.

So yeah, unintended consequences. So fertilizer subsidies do that. So they lead to orisole. Someone told me that nitrogenous fertilizers, jurea is price controlled.

Right. And urea is one fourth or one sixth or something in the price of the other fertilizers. So though you need all the fertilizers, like you know, you need urea, like nitrogenous, urea is nitrogenous. Potassium.

But the potassium, they can't afford to buy the potassium and the phosphorus one. Because they're more expensive. Yeah. They overuse urea to get crop yields.

So they use as much as 10x or 20x or what is it? Just because it's cheap. This was cheap and they have to, you know, they just, every year they see a diminishing yield. So they just keep adding more, using more.

Right. And the correct way to do this, all this apparently, is to have soil testing. So if you, you have to measure this, sort of inspect the soil, find out what is missing. And use only that much.

Yeah. But soil testing is an expensive and sophisticated thing. You can't have it in every village. Right.

And so this is what happens. Yeah. And fertilizer subsidies is directed to blame for that. OK.

So that is basically the whole story of this simplified episode. Which we finally have. That fertilizer subsidies are not great. Right.

But they doesn't seem to any way out. Because you stop the fertilizer subsidies, your agricultural production will go down, grains will be expensive. And both people won't have anything to eat anyway. Yeah.

I didn't let you complete the silicon customer. You were a very, very organic. Yeah. So they went organic and they had a precipitous drop in their output.

Yeah. And I think they ended up having to import food in order to just survive. So, you know, it's really fun. For the reasons for their economic collapse.

And for the years. Also, they had two important crops. I think tea and clap over are no ones. Yeah.

Which were cash crops. Yeah. That took a hit as well. Because of the decision to go completely organic.

Yeah. So you need fertilizers, but not. I mean, it's again like a fine balance. Yeah.

It's very difficult. I mean, it's scary. It's one of the scary. You don't, I mean, I as a city slicker never even knew that all this goes on under the hood.

I don't even know there is a countryside. I don't even know there are crops. I just sort of imagine the rice growing quite into bags and coming to my house. So there's an entire universe out there.

And so I thought I was just, I was just brimming over with a mix bench. So I thought, you know, it might be some, I'm sure many simplified listeners already, you know, know a lot more about it than I do. But on the out chance that someone doesn't. No, it's totally fascinating.

I think like two things that one of my Pepsi friends, the famous friend from the Mango Ship, shake incident, Prachi once told me once is that, I mean, she's obviously not working for Pepsi anymore than God. But like apparently, Lace tells farmers to cultivate a particular variety of potato for its chips. But you can't use that to grow anywhere else. So like they can literally sue you for growing that variety of potato if you're not selling it to PepsiCo or something like that.

So yeah, so as like land holdings become divided and corporations become larger, there's obviously this like giant tension that lays out and obviously in favor of the corporations. Yeah, yeah. Seeds are another thing. So there was this GMO seeds thing.

So cotton was cotton is a big cash crop. You can't eat cotton. So you know, that's a difference between cash crops and regular crops. So if you grow your own rice or wheat, a part of it you consume and part of it you sell.

Yeah. But if you're so, you know, but if you grow cotton, you can't. If your crop fails, you'll literally your bankrupt. You have nothing.

You've taken all your money, you spend it on seeds, you spend it on fertilizer. So you don't insecticide, so cotton had one particularly dangerous pest, lethal pest, which took a lot of insecticide to kill, ball, vomit, those cotton. And these ones had to develop a variety, where it transplanted the gene from a vaxillus into that and made it resistant to that ball. Wow.

And the Indian government banned it because they said that it was bad. It was genetically to modify GM, there's that and the other. And Gujarat farmers smuggled in some seeds, made sort of copies of that, you know, sort of, and they really did well in cotton. Wow.

And in Whidharva, they had such disastrous like outcomes. There were a lot of suicides in one particular year, if you remember. Right. The farmers committed suicide because they completely devastated it.

It's completely bankrupt. No, I mean, the shameful thing here is that I know about this only because there was a Twitter hashtag called hashtag while farmers are dying. Yeah. I mean, it was used semi-jokingly in one context, obviously, because you're not close to it, but I'm guessing the origin side like.

Yeah. So that was because people are making, you know, they were sort of using that argument. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. They were farmers kind of like a lot of things happen. A lot of things happen. A formative formative.

Formative. Yeah. Without actually, so you have no intention of solving the problem doing anything to help anyone. Yeah.

You just sort of, you know, make yourself look like a saint by repeating those drops. That's what happened. Yeah. So we'll end on cotton, but before the other thing that I wanted to say was apparently like, I think in Hainan was somewhere there was this new thing that came about, which in one knew what it was.

Till, I mean, basically it landed off on the supermarket shelves and it was called Jugni. Like Jugni, I think is five life. Is that correct? Jugni is five life life.

Like Jugni is a woman. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, irrespective, it was called Jugni, but actually, you know what it was. It was basically zucchini, which was suddenly like became a cash crop and was cultivated. But I think the greatest sort of story to end agriculture and cotton, like you mentioned, and also podcast is this tree thread that Latif Nasir from Radio Lab had posted, which is, he claims, he says that this story was actually told to him by Robert Kroll, which the founder of Radio Lab, so good note to end. Basically, if you look at the voting patterns of the US, the South is overwhelmingly red, but there is a democratic swoosh that comes across.