PODCAST · business
Agribusiness Matters
by Venky Ramachandran
Straight talk on Digital Agriculture, Agritech and Agribusiness Matters. Because, let's face it. Agribusiness matters. agribusinessmatters.substack.com
Episodes
-
Vrikshayurveda (Indian Plant Science) Deepdive with A.V. Balasubramanian
One of the most amazing nonagenarian ayurveda vaidyas (traditional healers) I’ve had the privilege of knowing once told me something that I could never forget. In a moment of visible anguish, he turned to me and said, “My medicines are working more slowly these days because the food you eat is no...
-
AI in Ag Podcast with Rhishi, Preethy and Sheriff
When a woman farmer near Bannerghatta calls for help with her tomato plants, she does not say "My tomato has a problem." A male farmer might though. There are enough datasets to show how men are terse while engaging with the AI advisory systems. She says, “My tomato has black spots, I have been...
-
Artificial Intelligence Deepdive with Two Desais
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com Agriculture is perhaps the last valiant sector that refuses to kowtow to the juggernaut of digitization. Medicine got medical records, clinical trials, and PubMed. Law got case archives and statutes. Finance got...
-
Agripreneurship Journey with Raj Seelam
Raj Seelam is one of the Bhishma Pitamahas (read as pioneering doyen) of the organic food retail movement in India. A serial entrepreneur whose journey spans three very different ventures—a dotcom-era CRM startup, a high-security number plate manufacturing business, and then 24 Mantra...
-
Towards Regenerative Cardamom
Abraham Chacko is 70 years old. He has farmed cardamom in the high ranges of Idukki, Kerala for over four decades. In that time, he has witnessed three distinct eras of Indian agriculture play out on the same thirty acres of sloped forestland: the pre-chemical indigenous phase his grandfather...
-
State of Soil Testing (2025)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com How do you reinvent podcasts in the age of AI? When AI eats information asymmetry by commodifying intelligence, how do you reinvent actionable intelligence through the live-player medium of podcasting ? I’ve…
more -
Agripreneurship Journey with Lokesh Singh
Agripreneurship journey in smallholding contexts is not for the faint hearted. In feudal countries like India, you set out to build a business where culturally, agriculture is not treated as a business. Lokesh Singh is currently in his third agripreneurship journey and has navigated both…
more -
State of Bioenergy with Mateen and Ashwin
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com Registrations Open For the Fifth Agripreneurs Retreat. You can sign up here. State of Bioenergy with Mateen and Ashwin India has been the third largest emitter (if you measure GHG emissions) in the world since...
-
State of Water Systems with Dinesh Kumar
Dinesh Kumar is an internationally known water resources management specialist who has spent about thirty five years studying Indian and global water systems. This water systems masterclass podcast was special as it was my first time I hired a studio to shoot a podcast, thanks to Farmart who...
-
Agroecology - Agribusiness Dialogues
Agroecology Agribusiness Dialogues In the first part of Agroecology-Agribusiness Dialogues, we talked about what it takes to bridge Agroecology with Agribusiness. The central metaphor I explored in documenting the learnings involved two Systems - System B and System M. Agribusinesses today have...
-
Agroecology- Agribusiness Dialogues
Amidst the illicit romances we often hear in the Ag Overton Window under the garb of “Regenerative Agriculture”, let’s get this straight: Agroecology and Agribusiness have largely been unfriendly with each other. The former hates the latter for pushing soil health as a tertiary problem while the...
-
Bold Futures of Indian Agrifood Systems
Indian Agrifood Systems carry the best and worst of worlds. On one hand with a fork, we have economists like Tyler Cowen singing hosannas for India’s Food Being the Best in the World: “Why is the food so good? I have several overlapping hypotheses, most of them coming from my background as an...
-
Enshittification of Agritech: A Dialogue with Feroz Sheikh
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com Chronologically biologically speaking, I turn forty this year and I must confess that I belong to the technology romantic generation. I grew up reading Clue Train Manifesto as a gospel during my heady twenties,...
-
DPIisation of Indian Agriculture
It was around September 2024 when I started immersing in the world of Digital Public Goods/ Infrastructure (DPG/DPI). That was the time when phrases like “Population Scale X” began to hover around me. Now that I have spent a few months dealing with the messy challenges involved in unlocking value...
-
State of Agritech in Pakistan
India and Pakistan may be two warring countries that gained their respective political identities by the negation of the other. However, when siblings from both these countries speak in one room about agriculture, conversation flows like music and harmony pervades the air, even when they talk…
more -
Organizing the Forest Economy with Prof. Ashwini Chhatre
Prof. Ashwini Chhatre straddles the world of research and action with aplomb. He specializes in the interplay between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute…
more -
Unified Agriculture Interface: An Overview Followed by Discussion
Hello!! My name is Venky and I thank you for reading Agribusiness Matters, an endeavour to discover systems thinking in the real world - crumbling food and agriculture systems in an age of runaway Climate Change. If you like what you see, I encourage you to subscribe and receive exclusive perks -...
-
Making Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) Investable Assets
What happens when you bring together investors who have funded FPOs; agribusiness founders who have embedded cooperatives in their organisational structures and have received external impact capital; bankers who sit on the boards of FPOs and FPO financing organisations and last but not least,...
-
Myth and Reality of Rural Consumer with Mithun Madhusudan
Ruchir Sharma famously once said, “India consistently disappoints the optimists and the pessimists”. The fundamental question remains - Which India are we talking about? Ever Since Sajith Pai built a strong narrative around his India 1,2,3 framework - building on Kishore Biyani’s "It Happened in...
-
Living a Life of Idealism with Krishnan Subramanian
Now wait a minute. Did you sign up for the wrong newsletter? Why on earth am I talking about Mahatma Gandhi, idealism and meaningful livelihoods in a newsletter titled “Agribusiness Matters” which focuses on discovering systems thinking in food and agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change?...
-
Systems Thinking and Systems Washing with Mihir Mathur
At Agribusiness Matters, my long-term mission is to build a durable body of work that elucidates systems thinking principles from real-world agritech/ agribusiness contexts. Except for my Annual 2023 Agribusiness Matters Report Card, I have never talked directly about Systems Thinking in this...
-
AI for Agrifood Leaders
Few weeks ago, Rhishi and I conducted a non-technical workshop on “AI for Agrifood Leaders”. It was widely well-received with interesting questions from the audience all through the workshop (as you’ll hear in the recording) and terrific, heartwarming feedback. Since many of you reached out to...
-
State of Direct-to-Farmer Trade Commerce
Thus spake sufi saint Hazrat Zaheen Taj in one of my favourite poems: “Pani-Pani rat'te rat'te pyaasa hi mar jaaye!” Chanting 'water', 'water' endlessly, one dies of thirst We have been talking about the idea of buying directly from farmers for a very long time, while buying from traders,...
-
State of Irrigation Tech
Is irrigation tech the bellwether to the emergent servicisation phenomenon unfolding in the global agribusiness industry - whether through leasing, usage-based models, or irrigation hardware equipment-as-a-service or more broadly Irrigation as-a-service and Farming-as-a-service? Few weeks ago,...
-
State of Aquaculture
Whenever I sit down with friends from the aquaculture industry to corroborate the industry dynamics of aquaculture vis-a-vis agriculture, I am often left wondering: Is aquaculture agritech on steroids? Few weeks ago, I invited Pavan Kosaraju (AquaExchange), Aditya Dash (Frozen Shrimp Exporter)…
more -
State of Digital Agriculture with Sachi Desai
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com Sachi Desai has had a sumptuous twenty-year career in the world of digital and agriculture that could very well be the perfect synecdoche for the evolution of digital agriculture and where it stands today. Sachi...
-
Designing Games for Sustainability with Chhaya Bhanti
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti Career transitions often happen in those sacred moments when you realize that you cannot be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. The other day, my friend wrote to me this when he joined the...
-
State of Soil Testing
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com As an agritech analyst, I’ve been organizing Agritech Townhalls over the past few years on diverse agritech themes including the central question - Is Agritech Party Over - and the divergent agritech futures…
more -
Twenty-Nine Years of Marketing International Foods With Sumit Saran
If you want to find out how apples, which were once a winter-only fruit in India, became a year-round consumption phenomenon, you must speak to Sumit Saran. If you’ve entered any Indian supermarket, whether it is Grapes, Apples, Pears, Prunes, Kiwi Fruits, Hazelnuts, Extra Virgin Olive Oil,...
-
Meet the Incubator Gentlemen Midwifing Entrepreneurs from Rural India
How do you respond to a room full of 80 men and women in their vibrant twenties raising their hands in unison to the question “How many of you are poor?” Do you squirm and let the jagged ‘urban savior complex’ nerves kick in or do you step back and ask fundamental questions about who decides who…
more -
The Business of Plant Communication with Shely Aronov
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com Few weeks ago, when I wrote a follow-up to my deep-dive on Inner Plant’s agritech strategy, I spelled out their key strategic tradeoffs. * The core business will center on traits and not chemistry. * Because the...
-
Farmer Advocacy Matters with Ajay Vir Jakhar
If you’ve been playing the long game in agriculture, you would know that you can never hermetically seal off politics from agriculture. Although technocrats of my ilk love to fantasize about depoliticizing the domains of food and agriculture through data, the reality is that politics always...
-
Thirty Years of Agribusiness with Venkata Subbarao Kolli
Venkata Subbarao Kolli or Dr.Subbarao Garu, as I call him in this podcast, has had an illustrious thirty+ year career that could very well be a synecdoche for the evolution of agribusiness (more precisely the agri-input industry) in India. When I recently learned that he became an...
-
Organic Food Branding Master Class with Shashi Kumar (Akshayakalpa) and Ryan Siwinski (GoodSam Foods)
In my last podcast with Ramanjaneyulu GV titled, “The Future of Regenerative Agriculture is Agroecology”, we talked about putting together an organic food branding playbook for regenerative/organic food players and I am kickstarting this series with Shashi Kumar and Ryan Siwinski. Although Ryan…
more -
Is Agritech Party Over?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.krishidotsystem.com Dear Friends, On October 9th, I recorded probably one of the most important town hall conversations in the brief history of Agribusiness Matters. I am not exaggerating one bit when I say this. The visceral…
more -
The Future of Regenerative Agriculture is Agroecology: Dialogue with Ramanjaneyulu GV
* Why is there a fundamental disconnect in Indian agriculture between reading the signals of production and the market? * Why is Indian Agriculture so stuck in past, whether it is eulogizing over the green revolution of the sixties or a romanticised ideal of an ancient agrarian past? * Why is...
-
Corporate FPOs and FPOs as Corporations: Q&A with Ravishankar Natarajan
If you ask me, two trajectories of collectivisation are currently at play in India. 1) Corporate FPOs in states like UP, Odisha, West Bengal, Chattisgarh, and Jharkhand, especially in rainfed farmer contexts. 2) Industrial Agriculture in states like Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and...
-
Managing Water | Nicholas Brozović and Ankit Chandra
Dear Friends, Welcome to the second podcast episode from a brand new podcast season of Agribusiness Matters. Irrigation (and more broadly managing water) is a complex subject that carries paradoxes effortlessly in its sleeve. Flood Irrigation goes back all the way to the Bible and yet, today...
-
The Art of Agritech Survival
Dear Friends, Welcome to a brand new podcast season of Agribusiness Matters. Discover Systems Thinking in Agriculture in an Age of Runaway Climate Change Talking about survival is ironic. The moment you sincerely ask the question “Why does something survive?”, what you will end up with is least...
-
Audio Precis of 'All Agritech Marketplaces are not created equal'
Dear Readers, Hi! My name is Venky. I write Agribusiness Matters every week to help us make sense of vexing questions of food, agribusiness, and digital transformation in an era of Climate change. Feel free to dig around the archives if you are new here. Agribusiness Matters is read by those who...
-
Agritech Samvaad (Dialogue) on Organic Agriculture & Retailing
Dear Readers, Welcome to the second podcast episode of Agribusiness Matters. Earlier in Sep’20,I did my first podcast episode on Plantix’s agritech strategy. This is a 120-min long recording of the fourth edition of the Agritech Samvaad (Dialogue) on Organic Agriculture and Retailing. Special...
-
How do you make sense of Plantix Strategy in India?
Dear Readers, Welcome to the Sunday Digest Edition of Agribusiness Matters. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been doing a deep-dive on Plantix India strategy. I first published Plantix and Two Roads to Digital Agriculture and followed it up with Plantix and Jevons’ Paradox Revisited. As an...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
Straight talk on Digital Agriculture, Agritech and Agribusiness Matters. Because, let's face it. Agribusiness matters.
agribusinessmatters.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Venky Ramachandran
CATEGORIES
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Agribusiness Matters have?
Agribusiness Matters currently has 42 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Agribusiness Matters about?
Straight talk on Digital Agriculture, Agritech and Agribusiness Matters. Because, let's face it. Agribusiness matters. agribusinessmatters.substack.com
How often does Agribusiness Matters release new episodes?
Agribusiness Matters has 42 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Agribusiness Matters?
You can listen to Agribusiness Matters on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Agribusiness Matters?
Agribusiness Matters is created and hosted by Venky Ramachandran.
URL copied to clipboard!