Ploughing a Different Course

For almost 15 years, Pioneering Ventures, an incubator-cum-investment firm, has been silently solving the challenges in India’s food and agriculture system with bold bets and patient capital

- Varsha Meghani

Bhagubhai Patel stands tall, hands on his hips, in the shade cast by his vivid green banana trees. “My income has doubled over the last two years,” says the 70-year-old, pot-bellied farmer. “Because we are doing so well my son left his clerical job and has joined the farming business,” he chuckles.

Just a few years ago, Patel struggled to cultivate even two banana crops in three years on his two-odd acres farm on the outskirts of Navsari in southern Gujarat. Poor farming techniques, pest attacks and postharvest losses would affect the quality and quantity of his crop. Besides, he didn’t even know how to package the bananas for export given their short shelf life, explains Patel.

Since joining hands with Desai Fruits and Vegetables (DFV) in 2016, his fortunes have reversed. The Navsari-headquartered venture imported best practices from the Philippines and helped Patel to change his growing habits. As a result, his productivity per acre more than doubled—he now grows three crops in two years—proportionally upping his income and creating a new, international quality banana.

As he speaks, a labourer deftly targets one of the banana trees’ uppermost buds, the size of two cupped hands. He pierces it with a says Desai, referring to Pioneering Ventures, a Swiss-and-Mumbaibased outfit that has been silently incubating and developing ventures across India’s agriculture and food supply chain for almost 15 years now.

The global population is expected to rise from about 7.5 billion to nearly 10 billion in 2050. The United Nations estimates that 70 percent more food will be needed by then, but it will have to be produced on just five percent more arable land. As sprawling cities gobble up farmland, climate change alters soil health and agriculture productivity reduces, supply is not keeping up with demand.