Code to Crops: How a techie took to farming

Shailesh Modak has pivoted from beekeeping to growing greens hydroponically to teaching people how to do soil-less farming

- Namita Shibad

PUNE: Shailesh Modak always had an impulse to do something different, something meaningful that could benefit society. Even at the height of a successful IT career that took him around the globe, his thoughts often drifted back to farming.

"I always believed that instead of people going to the farm, the farm should come to the people," he says.

With that belief guiding him, Shailesh dove into research and discovered that soil-less farming could be the future of sustainable agriculture. But before diving into hydroponics, he took a different route, by investing in bees.

He began with 60 bee boxes, each home to 10,000 to 150,000 bees, and launched a 'rent-a-bee-box' service. Farmers would lease the boxes for pollination, and the idea took off. Shailesh soon found himself earning ₹80,000 to ₹1 lakh a month.

However, the business wasn't without its challenges: logistics quickly became a buzzkill.

Says he, "The bees had to be transported to the farms during nighttime and back. During transportation, it would more often than not cause a spill of bees that bit anyone around very badly. Once the tempo overturned, the bees all got out of the box and bit me all over. I found it very hard to find people who would deliver these boxes to the farms."

And so he let out his business to a farm company, Amrawati Honey in Madhya Pradesh, which is adept at this. "We share the profits. I get 40 per cent of the rent they charge."

In 2018, Shailesh took a bold step as he quit his IT job and invested in a shipping container. "I had briefly dabbled in the import-export of agricultural products," he says, "but I stepped away from that space. Too many controlling factors, and too many middlemen. It just didn't sit right with me."

Around the same time, he noticed the large steel containers used for shipping and had a spark of inspiration: what if he could grow salad greens inside them?

Hydroponics