Shashi Kumar, Founder Akshayakalpa Organic, on Making Farming Viable for the Next Generation |Ep. 88 Brain Box Podcast
Updated: 9 hours ago
TL;DR: 00:00 - Introduction of Shashi Kumar, Founder of Akshayakalpa Organic 02:00 - The Inception of Akshyakalpa Organic 03:28 - The driving force behind Akshyakalpa Organic
Episode 88 of Brain Box - The Leadership Podcast explores how Shashi Kumar built Akshayakalpa Organic around a deceptively simple idea: farming cannot become viable for the next generation unless farmers have predictable income, healthier soil and a diversified business model. His journey from Wipro technology leadership to farming also offers a broader lesson in entrepreneurship: sometimes the real breakthrough comes when founders stop trying to change an entire system and start solving its most fundamental problem.
Key moments:
00:00 - Introduction of Shashi Kumar, Founder of Akshayakalpa Organic
02:00 - The Inception of Akshyakalpa Organic
03:28 - The driving force behind Akshyakalpa Organic
05:20 - Learnings so far
09:47 - Farmer Entrepreneurship
11:59 - Future of Farming
13:53 - Selection Criteria for partners & employees
15:26 - Consumer Responsibility
18:20 - Vision going forward
Why did Shashi Kumar leave technology for farming?
The idea was discussed among a group of Wipro colleagues. Eventually, nine of them left their jobs together, while 27 people seeded Akshayakalpa. Shashi describes the confidence they carried into the venture with some self-awareness. They were successful technology professionals and initially believed they could go into agriculture and change farming. What followed was a far more humbling entrepreneurial education.
Akshayakalpa was not originally conceived as an organic dairy business
One of the most revealing parts of the conversation is that organic dairy was not the original objective. The founders first spoke to farmers and asked what their biggest problem was. The answer was cash flow. A farmer could earn during one period and then have little or no income for months, forcing families to borrow money, sometimes at high interest rates, for education and other basic needs.
That changed the way Shashi thought about the problem. Soil management was important, but asking a financially distressed farmer to focus on long-term soil health without solving immediate income instability was unrealistic. Dairy therefore became the mechanism for creating regular cash flow. Once that foundation existed, farmers could pay attention to soil management and the broader health of the farm. Organic farming emerged as part of the food proposition rather than as the original reason for starting the company.
Forget about changing farming. Let’s start with simple things. Can you give him a regular income?
The biggest entrepreneurial lesson: the problem was much larger than the founders
Shashi identifies his first major realization as a humbling one. The founders had entered agriculture thinking they could change farming, but the deeper they went, the more they discovered fundamental problems that had to be addressed first. He now sees changing farming as a 200-, 300- or even 500-year vision rather than something one company can accomplish in a lifetime. The immediate responsibility is to build an organization and mechanism that can carry that vision forward.
The third realization was that agriculture could not be transformed by a small group of founders alone. It required community participation from farmers, consumers and investors. The business only began to understand value creation properly when consumers demonstrated that they were willing to pay a premium for what the farmer was producing. In other words, the journey from farm to value realization had to be understood as an ecosystem, not as a simple production problem.
A chance conversation in Starbucks became a lesson in investor alignment
Shashi shared a story that captures the uncertainty of Akshayakalpa’s early years. In 2010, he and co-founder Ravi Krishna Reddy were sitting in a Starbucks in Redwood City discussing what to do with the venture. Their financial situation was so difficult that Shashi was checking how much change he had in his pocket. A stranger overheard them speaking in Kannada about Akshayakalpa Organic and farming, joined them for coffee and later introduced himself as Ganesh Kadaba.
The next morning, Ganesh emailed them saying he wanted to invest ₹25 lakh. According to Shashi, that investment eventually grew to a value of around ₹12 crore. When Shashi later asked whether Ganesh wanted to exit during a Series C process, Ganesh declined, saying he had never invested to take the money out and that the work was commendable.
For Shashi, the deeper lesson was not about finding a lucky investor. It was about explaining the problem clearly and understanding that every stakeholder has a legitimate interest. Consumers want value, farmers need viability and investors want returns. The answer is not to declare one stakeholder right and another wrong. It is to find alignment and choose investors whose expectations match the company’s purpose.
Why Akshayakalpa treats farmers as entrepreneurs
Shashi’s view of the farmer is central to the company’s model: farmers are entrepreneurs. Instead of expecting individual farmers to buy and operate every piece of technology or service they need, Akshayakalpa invests in the infrastructure around them and delivers those capabilities as services.
He uses Wipro founder Azim Premji as an analogy. Premji does not need to personally service a diesel generator. What matters to him is that the organization has reliable power and the right people to maintain the infrastructure. Shashi argues that farmers should be treated similarly. If a farmer is the entrepreneur running the farm, the ecosystem around that entrepreneur should take care of the services required to make the enterprise work.
The company has tagged and tracked around 14,000 cows over 14 years, generating data on health, feeding, milk, rearing, veterinary issues, breeding and growth. Shashi does not believe the farmer should necessarily be expected to pay directly for the technology behind that data. The organization should absorb the investment where necessary and turn it into a service that strengthens the farmer’s enterprise.
What needs to change for young people to choose farming?
Shashi rejects the idea that the next generation can be persuaded to farm simply by telling them that farmers are important or that agriculture is noble. Those arguments may be culturally meaningful, but they do not answer the economic question young people are asking. Farming has to become visibly viable.
At Akshayakalpa, Shashi says the average farmer earns around ₹1 lakh a month and operates roughly two acres of owned land while cultivating additional leased land in some cases. He also points to the average age of their farmers, around 35, compared with an average Indian age of around 28 in the context he discussed. The objective is to make farming look like a credible entrepreneurial career rather than an occupation people inherit because they have no alternative.
The four dimensions of a resilient farm
Shashi describes the farm through four dimensions: economics, ecology, technology and diversity. Economics is obvious because the farmer must make a living. Ecology matters because soil, microbes, animals, trees and people form an interconnected system. Technology provides visibility into what is happening. Diversity reduces the risk of depending on a single source of revenue.
His argument is that the last two are not enough on their own. A farm should have multiple market-facing entities rather than depending on a single output. That is why Akshayakalpa’s model includes dairy alongside beehives, poultry and other elements. Bees can support pollination and generate honey. Poultry produces eggs and manure, with the latter contributing nitrogen to the soil. The result is intended to be an ecologically sound farm ecosystem with several revenue streams.
This is also why Shashi argues that input-focused and output-driven approaches alone will not work. The long-term objective is to reduce the farmer’s risk and exposure by building a more diversified farm ecology.
Why Akshayakalpa selects only one farmer per village
The company’s farmer-selection philosophy is deliberately community-oriented. Rather than taking multiple farmers from a village, Akshayakalpa works deeply with one farmer and expects that farmer to become a visible role model for the wider community.
Shashi Kumar, founder of Akshayakalpa Organic, confirms that they currently works with about 1,200 farmers across 1,200 villages. Each farmer is intended to become an example that changes the perceived economics of farming within the community.
Consumers are not passive buyers in the organic food ecosystem
Shashi divides consumers into three broad categories. The highest level is the consumer who grows their own food. The middle level is the consumer who knows who grew the food, where and how it was grown, what it cost to produce and something about the farmer. The lowest level treats food as a black box and simply consumes it.
His larger point is that consumers have a role in enforcing accountability. Brands should be able to explain what is on their labels and open up their operations to scrutiny. Akshayakalpa has had around 13,000 consumers visit its farms in the year he referenced, because direct exposure can build a level of confidence that a label alone cannot create.
This also changes the way consumers think about the price of organic food. Shashi argues that consumers should not simply ask why organic food is expensive. They should also ask why conventional food can appear so cheap when farmers often do not count their own labor as a cost. From his perspective, the real question is whether the food is authentic, how it was produced and what compromises may sit behind its low price.
The next phase is a diversified farm ecosystem, not just a bigger dairy business
Shashi’s five- to ten-year vision is to take Akshayakalpa from roughly 1,200 farmers toward 4,000 to 5,000 farmers while going deeper into the fundamentals of agriculture. The goal is not simply to expand the number of farms. It is to solve soil-management problems, diversify farm revenue and build ecologically sound systems that can remain viable over time.
That makes Akshayakalpa an interesting leadership case study beyond agriculture. The company began with a large ambition, discovered that the system was more complex than expected, narrowed its immediate problem to farmer cash flow, built an ecosystem around that problem and gradually expanded its ambition again. The lesson is not that founders should think small. It is that large visions often become executable only when the founder is willing to identify the smallest fundamental problem that must be solved first.
Key Takeaways from Shashi Kumar
1. Solve the fundamental problem before attempting to transform the system. Akshayakalpa’s journey began by addressing farmer cash flow rather than trying to “change farming.”
2. Treat stakeholders as an ecosystem. Farmers, consumers and investors can have different objectives, but sustainable businesses need alignment across all three.
3. Farmers can be entrepreneurs when the ecosystem around them is designed to support the enterprise. Technology and services do not always have to be sold directly to the farmer to create value.
4. Farming needs visible economics to attract the next generation. Cultural respect for farmers is not enough if the occupation does not provide a credible livelihood.
5. Diversification can make a farm more resilient. Economics, ecology, technology and diversity have to work together rather than being treated as separate interventions.
