This agritech is mobilizing wet waste of cities as compost that’s saving crops, soil and farmers in rural areas

• Pune-based agritech startup Kisanserv kickstarted an initiative to take the wet waste-turned-compost in urban areas to farmers.
• As per Indian government’s Soil Health Survey 2019-20, almost half of India’s soil is suffering from varying degrees of degradation.
• When soil is treated with compost every year, within 3-4 years, its health will improve.

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. A Pune-based agritech startup has taken this adage literally as it kickstarted an initiative to take the wet waste-turned-compost in urban areas to farmers who are struggling with deteriorating soil quality.

Fork-to-farm initiative
Niranjan Sharma, the co-founder and CEO of Kisanserv, a tech-enabled full-stack agritech company, observed that most of the 9,000 farmers in the company’s network faced a common issue – increasingly alkaline soil PH, which was making lands almost barren.

As per the Indian government’s Soil Health Survey 2019-20, almost half of India’s soil is suffering from varying degrees of degradation.

Sharma blames it on extensive fertiliser usage. “Around 20 years back, if farmers were using 10 kilos of fertilisers or pesticides on one acre of land, now they are using 100 kilos – and that’s a 10x growth. If this is the situation now, what will it be 25 years later?” asks Sharma who has spent over 20 years working in the agricultural sector.

At the same time, cities have another problem – increasing waste. Mumbai is offering a 10% rebate on property tax to housing societies that process their wet waste. Pimpri Chinchwad municipality in Pune has made it mandatory for societies that generate more than 100 kilos of waste per day, to process their waste themselves. The societies which have given in to the mandate, however, have too much wet waste that’s turned into compost.

“We decided to bridge the gap,” Sharma tells Business Insider India. They started this initiative three months back and currently haul 15 metric tonnes of compost from 200 housing societies and distribute it free to farmers. The target is to bring it up to 300,000 metric tonnes by 2023.

While rural areas too can prepare their composts, urban areas, which are consumer centres, produce the most waste. Farmers, Kisanserv says, are thrilled to receive compost. “They also keep asking us for sources to purchase compost from,” says Sharma.

Back to nature
Compost is prepared using wet waste, which is mostly food waste that has culture added to it. It can later be put through a machine that converts it into compost over time. This simply prepared material can become ‘Sanjeevani to the soil’, as per Sharma. In Hindu mythology, Sanjeevani is a cure-all plant that can even reverse death.

As much as 200-300 kilos of compost must be added to one acre of land and this can be repeated every year. If this treatment is continued for three to four years, soil health can change for the better with the necessary nutrients being added in.

Moreso, compost-treated farms need less fertiliser than others – in some cases as low as 90% less. This, Sharma feels, can trigger a virtuous cycle where fruits and vegetables produced with less chemicals can make urban consumers healthier. This produce is named ‘natural’ instead of organic where no chemicals are used.

Such organic farms, however, suffer from reduced yield. For example, a farm that is fully organic might produce only 1 metric tonne of tomatoes as opposed to 10 metric tonnes from a traditional farm that uses fertilisers.

Sri Lanka made the sudden shift to going organic, after synthetic fertilisers and pesticides were banned in 2021. Within six months, the country’s rice production dropped 20%, forcing the self-sufficient country to import the grain – thereby exacerbating its financial crisis.

“Loss of a yield of fully-organic farms is a huge issue. Though there is a class of consumers that pay a premium for organic produce, a large section of farmers going organic will create a hunger problem. So, our objective is to help farmers go natural,” says Sharma.

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