When mid-life crisis hit Prateek Sharma, he quit his bank job and started growing vegetables.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00After spending 8-10 years into bank, I was not enjoying it any further and my inclination
00:19was towards agriculture and like you call a mid-life crisis, during that period I thought
00:25that I need to do something different and when I dive a little deep into it, I thought
00:32that agriculture is something which I wanted to do.
00:39My family, they are into agriculture and they have seen, they are actually seeing, they
00:45were seeing the problems agriculture has.
00:48So they were reluctant that you are already settled, you are doing good, why you want
00:52to get into something which already is troubled.
01:09The polyhull was ready and the crop was fantastic and I was very happy with it but the bigger
01:15realization came when we took the crop to the mandi and we got just 1-1.5 rupee for
01:21our tomatoes and we were incurring close to 6 rupees per kg as a cost.
01:27So it was nowhere close to even the cost forget the profitability.
01:38So as a solution, we thought that we need to go into organic, why organic because the
01:45chemical is zero.
01:48Also the opportunity is to reduce cost into your agriculture processes, why because majority
01:54of your inputs whether you talk about seeds or manure or say the pest management, everything,
02:02all these solutions are locally available.
02:04So your costs also go down.
02:06Third, the market also is better for organic because people they are not getting it.
02:12So organic things are either, they are not easily available or not they are affordable.
02:19So we wanted to reach out to end consumers directly, why again the price realization
02:24is the best when you get into a farm to cook, farm to kitchen kind of a model.
02:28So because of that we got into this kind of a model.
02:45It was friends and family initially, my bank friends, my society, my in-laws, my outside
02:53friends.
02:54So that's how with a small group of farmers and small group of consumers we started in
02:582016.
03:09Children from the farming background, they don't want to get into agriculture because
03:14they're seeing their parents struggling.
03:16But the people who are not from agriculture background or they are into job, they have
03:21seen the other side of it.
03:22So these are the people who want to get into it and I think this is a very good thing.