**** | Status | Date | Last Updated | Tags | | ------ | -------- | ------------ | ------------------------------------- | | Draft | 04-03-24 | 21-06-24 | #agriculture #primaryfarmingecosystem | **** My foray into the space of agriculture came from my previous beat, logistics. It was where I harbored for 4 years as a young working professional. I was confident about my gained experitise in logistics and was searching for an entrepreneurial pursuit in similar domains. The original plan to foray into agriculture struck due to the size of the opportunity combined with my own naivety. The unaware, urban and privileged male was informed about the volume of trade taking place in procurement of pulses by government of India. Scale features as a pre-requsite in popular narrative on startups. The volume of trade, legacy domain and shorter supply chains led me to believe that I can build a large scale startup in this space by bringing efficiency to it. If I could go back to this younger self in late 2018. I would have wished him all the best with a sincere request to tread carefully. I was intrigued and took it as a domain of exploration. This led to the eventual start of a logistics company in mid 2019. The primary motive of the company was to bring efficiency in produce supply chains as a subset of commodity logistics. In the duration of next 4 years, I moved out of working in agriculture all together. I started as a budding agri-entrepreneur and left it with a burning resolve to return, albeit humbled in the process on the scope of challenge. In the end, I was burnt out from working in agriculture space. Now, I participate as a community volunteer helping founders in limited capacity. Being an outsider made agriculture trade a subject that I had to learn from first principles. I took the lens of economics to learn about the systems at play. Throughput my time working in agriculture, I tried to update my priors from my experiences I gathered along which deepened my understanding of the domain. This zine is my cohorenet articulation of everything I know, read and learnt while operating. I am angling to make it helpful in understanding the overall components invovled in Indian Agriculture Trade. I am writing this predominantly because I have been at the receiving end of reading misconstrued problems and ill informed solutions. After spending sometime in agriculture, it baffles me why we just don't lay out the map of the game we have to play instead of the one we wish to play. ****