The newcomers and the new agric innovation revolution

The headline in the Financial Times Weekend of August 19 and 20, 2017 was the ousting of Steve Bannon from the Trump White House, the fourth senior advisor to leave in as many weeks. The stock markets’ reaction to this, it was reported, was a positive rally. The lesson: Never underestimate the power of one.

However, that was not the story that I was interested in. What caught my attention was on the front page of the paper’s Travel Section, a story by Snigdha Poonam on young Indians’ return to their villages from the cities, an almost unimaginable idea only a few years ago.

“Young Indians are increasingly convinced that if they want to prosper, they can rely on no one but themselves,” Poonam writes, describing the motivating factors driving young Indian professionals from the cities back to their villages.

These professionals have been working in the technology and other industrial sectors of an Indian economy that grew at seven per cent last year. What are they going to do when they get back to their villages? Become farmers! These are people with solid critical thinking skills, appreciation of business, operations management, marketing, sales and process controls in high-pressure environments. And they are going to go back to their villages to become farmers!!

The effect of this on agriculture may be the equivalent of the invention of the printing press. Finally, Ag Innovation Revolution is here, not by plan or design but by happenstance.

Agricultural productivity in India, Ghana and other developing countries has been low compared with developed countries. This has contributed to agriculture’s inability to deliver improvements in food and nutrition security and poverty reductions despite being the largest “employer” in the developing world.

While the affordability of modern technologies provide partial explanation for the low productivity, there is increasing evidence that farmers’ education may be more critical.

Agricultural production has never been promoted as a credible professional alternative for young people in developing countries. This is evident in both public policy and in family support. It is also evident in the dependency programmes that many development agencies pursue.

The foregoing explains my interest in Poonam’s article. Suppose highly educated engineers who choose to leave the city and return to their villages to farm unleashed new creativity in agriculture by bringing their curiosity and knack for problem solving to agriculture’s perennial challenges.

Imagine the newcomers looking at drought, not as a rainfall issue but as a moisture availability problem and developing irrigation and hydration systems akin to network flow architecture. Imagine them developing apps that continuously update a farm’s potential output to enable its customers to make appropriate processing and procurement adjustments to minimise operations costs and maximise total chain net benefits. Because they understand the cost, price and value relationship, imagine them organising production processes such that everyone combines their resources effectively to produce the highest value, and in the process, reduce price’s relevance in transactions. Envision these newcomers moving agriculture from a commodity mindset to a branded product experience.

These imaginations are possible because of the talent and the world-class operational excellence the newcomers bring with them into agriculture. They are unlike the surgeons, attorneys, politicians, and business tycoons who come into agriculture as investors motivated by altruism. The newcomers are entering the business of agriculture with the same vision that drove them in their prior professions.

Unlike the retired surgeon I met in Ghana who told me he invested in his poultry farm to “create jobs” for his people, these newcomers are seeking to become rich in agriculture. That is, they are not retiring into agriculture but building their wealth in it. This is a game-changer and provides hope that agriculture can finally become the engine of economic and social development bit it inherently is.

The newcomers will bring new business models that reduce or remove entry barriers and encourage ease of profitable participation by people currently viewed as disempowered. Their experience about the benefits from mass adoption that fuelled adoption in the technology industry will definitely be deployed and adapted to facilitate the transformation promised by the Ag Innovation Revolution.

Like the information technology industry, the traditional agricultural production system will exist beside the new business models. We need to allow entrepreneurs, motivated by dreams of becoming rich and/or famous, to invest and the market to provide the discipline needed for sustainability.

Consciously limiting the government’s role and directing it towards requisite education and research may be a prudent public policy in developing countries. Failure, a necessary school for sustained performance improvement, will be part of the experimentations that produce breakthroughs that make the Ag Innovation Revolution a reality. They must be celebrated, not ridiculed.

Despite everything that the newcomers to agriculture will do for agriculture, the most transformative contribution will be the professionalisation of agricultural production. Farmers will no longer be seen as incapable victims who need public support to survive the cruelty of the marketplace.

They will receive their due respect as the professionals supporting all other activities in society. We have seen some semblance of this professionalisation in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Vietnam and other places where agricultural productivity has accelerated in recent decades. At the same time, the cancerous nature of the dependency and victim mentality remains real.

Addressing the challenges posed by these transformations, especially those unable to adapt to the changes arising from this professionalisation, could be informed by lessons learned from how we dealt with the changes unleashed by information technology on various segments in the economy. These challenges should engender boldness not fear, affording us the courage to support agriculture’s transformation arising from the Ag Innovation Revolution driven by entrepreneurial newcomers. — GB

• The author is an agribusiness economics and management professor at Kansas State University. He may be reached by email at vincent@ksu.edu.