The Soilless Future of Farming

IN 2013, DHRUV KHANNA had just completed his masters in Singapore and joined a friend to start a consumer electronic company there. He soon realised that the field did not excite him and needed to do something more impacting. He was in a casual call with a Delhi-based school friend when he first heard about hydroponics. The friend’s mother had a degenerative lung disease and had planned to settle in Mohali and cultivate some land they owned. A doctor told them it would be even worse there because of pesticides. “During that time he was figuring if there were safer places to grow food without pesticides and while doing this research he came across hydroponics,” says Khanna.
The idea for doing something together in hydroponics started from that conversation. Khanna started research and found that the rooftop of his workplace in Singapore had a hydroponics farm. He spent his evenings there. “Once I was confident that this is a technology that worked, we started figuring out how to actually start this thing in India. I basically researched for three to four months and then came to India. We started a pilot project growing strawberries in Sainik Farms, Delhi,” he says.

That was in October 2014. With the help of consultants they grew around seven tonnes of strawberries in 700 square metres. “A lot of mistakes were committed but still we were able to grow that. We sold everything in the wholesale market. From there on, we started taking off,” he says.

Today, the number of founders of Triton Foodworks, their company, has come down from six to three, and including them, there are a total of 16 people. And from a location in Manesar, that has two greenhouses and a high-tech indoor farm, they harvest and supply 250 kilograms of vegetables daily. Unlike traditional soil-based farming, they can grow more, faster, without looking at the weather.

“Basically what we’re doing is giving everything the plant needs, not dependent on other factors like rain, summers or winters. That helps us produce year round. For example, in a greenhouse or polyhouse that is protected, we can control light through shade nets. If a specific plant like lettuce doesn’t need a lot of sunlight, we can block 50 per cent of it which also helps decrease the temperature. We control the ambient temperature and can get it down by at least 10 to 15 degrees Celsius when it is dry and hot. We’re able to give nutrients directly so plant groups don’t have to fight in the soil for a limited amount. Every plant gets nutrients at their roots, so they are very healthy and grow the same. We can also move them during the whole process. For example, take a crop of lettuce. Traditionally, you put the seeds in a nursery and after 15 to 18 days, you put them in the soil. What we do in hydroponics is divided into three stages. The first two stages are 18 days and 18 days. In those stages, the plant only requires 20 per cent of the space in the greenhouse. During the last stage it requires 80 per cent of the space. So we are able to optimise the space properly by moving the plants and in a hydroponic greenhouse we can grow around 15 to 20 times more of a crop like lettuce. We recently started an indoor farm in Manesar, Gurugram, which is very high-tech and fully automated and there we are able to grow close to 350 times of a soil farm,” says Khanna.

Rohit Nagdewani, a Delhi-based entrepreneur, had always been interested in a kitchen garden and he came across hydropoincs while doing research on that. “I realised it makes a lot of sense,” he says. In 2017, he decided to float a venture but information and support was sparse.

“I had to import a couple of apparatus from China. That became successful, so I moved on to a slightly bigger set up. It was a very rudimentary jugaad of sorts,” he says. A year-and-a-half back, he came across an Indian company that could provide him decent quality equipment and he started his first commercial farm in Delhi. “We ended up doing a commercial farm in Mumbai, then Hyderabad and now we are building India’s largest indoor farm in Delhi itself,” he says.

His Mumbai farm is an indoor one and does about 6,000 plants every month. The Hyderabad farm is a 10,000 square feet outdoor polyhouse and does about 8,000 plants a month. The Delhi one will do about 70,000 plants a month. “The Mumbai farm is as small as 600 square feet. In 600 square feet, we are producing 6,000 plants a month. Acre to acre we make between 70 to 100 times better (than traditional outdoor agriculture). One acre is 70 acres in an indoor hydroponics farm,” he says.

Nagdewani’s venture called FarmingV2 has a subscription model, where, for a price, he delivers leafy salad greens in a regular frequency to subscribers. His farms are strategically located. “We are right next to the city. In Mumbai, it is in Wadala. That too in a corner of Wadala so that we don’t have to pay crazy rents. One of our main goals is to decentralise the production of food and distribution. And that can only happen if you are producing right next to where the consumption is.” He says.

Nagdewani’s target audience is a buyer who is already informed about the merits of pesticide-free fresh produce and is willing to play a slight premium for it. He says his produce is not more than five to 10 per cent more expensive than the regular market price. “We are already experimenting with general crops like tomatoes, capsicum and cucumbers and varieties of cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, bell peppers, zucchini,” he says.

IF HYDROPONICS IS so lucrative, then why don’t all farmers shift to it and get out of the clutches of weather and soil? There are entry barriers. It requires substantial amounts of capital to invest. “It is very huge even though it has been declining in the past four to five years. For something like an acre, you are looking at Rs 1.5 to 2 crore,” says Nagdewani.

Khanna says that, besides capital, technology is also a deterrent. “A normal farmer gets seeds, prepares his land and starts growing them. But in this case, you have to build a greenhouse and then set up the hydroponic system. A lot of the cooling systems like ours use only Reverse Osmosis water for growing to prevent outbreaks of pathogens like eColi. It is also very difficult to hire good people, because there is very limited knowledge of high-tech agriculture,” he says.

A man who is trying to work around the problem is Vijay Yelmalle, a resident of Khargar in Navi Mumbai who, through a start-up called Rural Idea, is getting traditional farmers. into hydroponics. “We came up with a model where we could bring this technology to the farmer as well,” he says.

After working in Singapore in the chemical industry for 14 years, Yelmalle returned to India in 2014 with the idea of getting into farming. He had memories of a farm his family had once owned and had also come across sustainable farming in Singapore. “We had no equipment or knowledge. Everything was Google. We had to make our own makeshift equipment. In Khargar, I had a terrace flat with 300 square feet of open area where I started experimenting.” His first crop of cucumbers grew well and that encouraged him to pursue it further. He purchased a farmland in Raigad district and is now doing aquaponics. Traditional agriculture use soils for nutrient. In hydroponics, minerals are given through water in different proportions for different plants. In aquaponics, fish is grown in tanks and the water is circulated to those areas where the plants are growing without soil. So plants get nutrients from the fish water.

We are already experimenting with general crops like tomatoes, capsicum and cucumbers and varieties of cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, bell peppers, zucchini” says Rohit Nagdewani, founder, FarmingV2

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Yelmalle chose aquaponics because the model he had in mind involved co-opting farmers to be partners in the venture. A farmer with 300 square metres of farm would be trained in aquaponics to grow two tonnes of fish and five tonnes of vegetables in a year, which would be purchased, marketed and sold by his start-up. “Farmers get buyback guarantee and technology. They also get income from two sources, fish and vegetables,” he says.

The produce is being priced very high because it is fresh and pesticide-free, and he thinks there will be a demand for it. “Our vegetables come with the root. Because they are grown without soil, the plant can be easily transported without damaging the roots. The plant is sold with the roots still wet. Purchasers can keep the roots wet and keep the vegetable alive for another two days,” he says.

Yelmalle has just started selling such produce in Navi Mumbai a few weeks ago but it is only a precursor to getting farmers into the fold. “This setup takes around Rs 8 to 10 lakh to start. Farmers don’t have the money. And banks will only give the loan if we show the revenue model. So we are developing this model right now. Once it is ready, we will approach the financial institutions, tie up with them and get everybody financed,” he says. After first testing the market in Navi Mumbai and sorting out any issues that crop up, he will then move to the Mumbai market.

Yelmalle also gives some indication of just how much hydroponics has taken off in India. In 2015, he had been invited at an exhibition-cum-seminar in Gurugram to conduct a workshop on aquaponics. He liked the experience and continued holding such sessions. “Till now I have trained more than 3,000 people,” he says. “These are mostly urban people from all kinds of professional backgrounds.”

In developed markets like the US or Australia, hydroponics farms are huge. One of the few to match them in scale in India is a Hyderabad-based start-up called Simplyfresh. Its founder, Sachin Darbarwar, had been an IT professional in Australia for 18 years and got introduced to the technology there while developing software and hardware for the sector. With his parents ageing, he decided to return to India and launch a venture in agri tech in 2013.

“There were literally no companies then. I could not find any on the internet. We tied up with consultants from Australia and the Netherlands on our first project. They helped to train the team to set it up and get it going. We started with 10 acres. Today, our second project is on 150 acres. It is one of the largest in Asia right now,” he says.

Darbarwar says that hydroponics is a loosely used word in the Indian context. “We actually call ourselves more precision farming. Hydroponics is one of the mediums,” he says.

Simplyfresh grows a large variety of medicinal plants and fresh produce in climate-controlled greenhouses using, their website says, ‘farming technology based on AI, Climate Engineering and Hydroponics. Rain-harvested water is stored in a man-made lake on the farm and its capacity suffices irrigation utility for up to 6 months. All of this means, consumption of only 1/10th of the electricity and water than that required by traditional farming practices.’

They sell to retail and wholesale, and even export. It took them three years to break even. He says most hydroponics farms in India would be termed hobby projects abroad. “None of them is commercial scale. If it is a minimum 10 acres, you can call it a farm in Australia or the Netherlands. Anything below is treated as R&D and hobby,” he says.

Darbarwar thinks the market will get bigger and a lot of big companies are watching how it shapes up before jumping in. “Simply Fresh is growing at a very fast pace. We just completed 22 acres of production on the 150 acres. The second 28 acres have already started. So I think we will be doubling the production capacity every one-and-a-half years.”

Ultimately, he thinks, the future of hydroponics in India will depend on whether the consumer will pay a premium. “India being a price sensitive market, it will all go back to the consumer, whether he wants to spend a 1,000 rupees more a month on vegetables or not. I think it will come back to them, what they want,” he says.

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Madhavankutty Pillai

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