Will India’s digital push in agriculture help farmers or help exploit them?

Agritech is touted as a remedy for the perennial problems ailing the Indian farmer. But what about the challenges it might create?

Karishma Mehrotra
Yesterday · 
Amit Dave/Reuters



Ramanjaneyulu GV seethes with disdain remembering the times agricultural technology start-ups pitched to him over the past eight years. On offer was the full rainbow of services: market solutions and weather predictions for higher agricultural yield, better quality produce, more profits. Everything that, in theory, should be welcome.

“My opposition was not to the technology – my opposition was to the approach,” said the agricultural scientist who heads the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, a Hyderabad institute that teaches organic farming to cooperatives of 25,000 farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra.

What irked Ramanjaneyulu was the start-ups’ appetite for data. “They see that a major area of new control is in data,” he said. Ramanjaneyulu feared that the start-ups would give precedence to bottom lines over farmers’ interests – a fear that grew as those start-ups were bought by larger technology companies.

Galvanised by what he considered a disconcerting trend, Ramanjaneyulu set out to create his own solutions. So, four years ago, his Centre for Sustainable Agriculture made a weather advisory application, an online marketplace, a pest-and-disease surveillance app, a manufacturing inventory app and a quality management app – all integrated on a backend database of farmers.

This October, at the three-storey institute, close to labs for testing soil samples and an organic store, employees were hunched over their laptops, remotely training farmers around the country. In an adjacent office, lead certification analyst Chandrakala Pakki watched field operators feed in seasonal crop data.

On her screen was Rama Devi Challa, the field operator in charge of the Vijayanagaram cooperative. Challa gave Pakki a virtual tour of a farm and then pointed the camera at Yedla Krishna, a farmer she was collecting data from. Krishna read out information about crop yield, irrigation amounts and pre- and post-harvest facilities from his Sendriya Rythu Diary (a record book), as Challa duly fed it into a mobile app.

Rama Devi Challa, a field operator for the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, collects data from farmers. Credit: Centre for Sustainable Agriculture.

Back in the Hyderabad office, Pakki analysed the incoming data in a 40-column spreadsheet. The information was transferred by her team into a dashboard that integrates all the databases under a farmer group ID and QR code. Eventually, this consolidated picture will be used to certify organic foods, track supply for the market, and maintain traceability for the buyers.

“If we don’t build these databases, somebody else will and they will be in control of us,” said Ramanjaneyulu. “We need to come up with indigenous solutions. Saying that there should not be a Microsoft or Google won’t work. Even if they are there, how do we protect ourselves?”

The question has become central in the world of agricultural technology, or agritech in short, as the Union Agriculture Ministry finalises India’s first major governmental push in digital agriculture – AgriStack.

Formerly called India Digital Ecosystem Architecture, or IDEA, the AgriStack initiative is a “collection of technologies and digital databases” that will be used by the government to provide each farmer with a unique ID linked to their Aadhaar number. The initiative is set to be finalised in November by committees set up by the Agriculture Ministry and is awaiting the agriculture minister’s approval.

To build the database, the ministry is tapping into the prized data of 11.5 crore landholding farmers collected under the PM-KISAN programme. This will be integrated with other sets of data from initiatives like Faisal Bhima Yojana (a crop insurance scheme), the Soil Health Card, and satellite imagery from the Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre.

Eventually, if each farmer ID is linked, the database will be like the Unified Payments Interface system. Both private and public players will be able to tap into it for government schemes and corporate services.

The Agriculture Ministry’s AgriStack initiative centres on the idea of an Aadhaar-linked unique ID for every farmer in India. Credit: Manpreet Romana/AFP.

“The complete picture of this jigsaw puzzle is that once we have the data collected and validated... [it will] give us a pathway to bring digital technologies to the farmer,” said Vivek Aggarwal, the additional secretary at Agriculture Ministry who jumpstarted its digital agriculture division and has led the AgriStack project since the beginning.

The way the government envisions it, AgriStack will enable direct benefit transfers, assist in yield forecasting and price discovery, and maybe even address pest infestation and crop wastage. The government says the project will help “in effective planning towards increasing the income of farmers in particular and improving the efficiency of the Agriculture sector as a whole”.

The stakes are high. Agriculture remains one of the largest employers in India. Seventy per cent of its rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Of these millions, 86% are still small and marginal farmers, owning or cultivating less than five acres of land. In a day, an average farm household earns just ₹277, an abysmally low figure.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to double farmer income by 2022, incredibly ambitious to start with, could have probably been more feasible with corporate participation. But with the government forcing through three controversial farm laws, leading to protracted protests and farmer anger, the AgriStack initiative is viewed by many with cynicism.

“One must not approach problems through the perspective of only technology but rather a perspective where farmers identify the problems. It may be that not all the solutions are rooted in technology,” read a letter sent to the Agriculture Ministry by the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture. The letter was signed by nearly 100 agricultural or technology-related organisations.

Ramanjaneyulu shares a similar view. It’s not a question of no technology or all technology, he says. “My question is, will this be good for the farmer, or will it be market exploitation? Will this be useful for the people or just for the companies?”
Muddled Data

Agricultural technology, or agritech, is seen by its champions as a means of addressing food scarcity and buttressing climate resistance by minimising costs and resources. There are usually four types of agritech: 1. online marketplaces (which remain the dominant category); 2. financial tech with loan and insurance offerings; 3. precision technology with sensors or satellite imagery for analysing crops; and 4. information and advisories.

In 2019, India’s agritech market size was $204 million, with roughly 50 start-ups receiving private funding annually, according to Ernst & Young. The sector still gets a lot of fanfare and sufficient investments. But, as Ernst & Young and others have noted, the space is still small, capturing merely 1% of the total market potential.

The Indian government believes AgriStack will enable direct benefit transfers, assist in yield forecasting and price discovery. 

Credit: Bernard Gagnon/Wikimedia Commons.

“The start-ups have the technology... but one of the biggest struggles has been data,” said Purushottam Kaushik, who helped the Agriculture Ministry draft the AgriStack policy document. Much of the agricultural data in India, he explained, is messy or inaccurate, often based on paperwork that is disputed or in different languages.

Unless this fundamental land records problem is addressed, the agritech sector cannot move forward, experts say. “If the government wants to prioritise AgriStack, the most important layer is not the farmer ID – it’s digitizing the land records,” said Mark Kahn, a well-known agritech investor who has worked in India for over a decade.

Still, whatever data the government does have is “hugely valuable” and the private sector has its eye on it. “If you talk to companies like CropIn [a farm analytics firm] and SatSure [a satellite technology firm], they invest a lot of resources just to capture the data,” said Kaushik, who has worked with Karnataka and Telangana governments on building initiatives like AgriStack.

Missing Safeguards

In the past year, the Agriculture Ministry has signed at least nine memorandums of understanding with companies like Amazon Web Services, Patanjali, Microsoft, Cisco and Jio to “prove the concept” of AgriStack in a set of districts or villages, said Aggarwal. “They are drawing on the database, validating the data with farmers on the ground, taking their consent, and onboarding their apps [to the farmers’ devices] to complete the solutions,” he added.

For one of the projects, the government provided AgriBazaar, a private online marketplace for agri-commodities, the land records of a block in Madhya Pradesh’s Guna district. Left on its own, the company would have taken five months to scrape this information from public databases, says AgriBazaar’s Head of Institutional Business Atul Chhura. Once this hurdle was overcome, AgriBazaar’s field staff began gathering further data from farmers about their farms, said Chhura. Next on their to-do list is the task of triangulating the information with satellite imagery and onboarding local government officials to use this data and provide advisories.

This writer spoke to several farm leaders and farmers in Guna to gauge their response to the AgriBazaar project. None said they were being surveyed.

Varun Pratham Singh, the head of a Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Guna, is sceptical of some agritech ideas, although no one has come to his area to sell solutions. He says he runs at least nine WhatsApp groups through which he distributes advisories almost every day to farmers in his tehsil. “They all use WhatsApp, but no one sells or buys anything online,” he said. “That won’t work in villages – they aren’t high-tech enough and no one would go that far to sell to them anyway.”

Away from the villages, the pilot projects have raised eyebrows, even within the agritech world. “I would question them a little: why Jio?” asked Kahn. “Why are these pilots going to the largest companies in India? This is a question of corporatism as opposed to capitalism.”

Experts advise caution: they fear that farmer data may be misused to exploit them. Credit: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP.

Even some of those who helped develop the AgriStack blueprint express concerns. “My personal views were that signing these MoUs was not the idea in the way it was planned,” said Abhishek Singh, CEO of the National e-Governance Division in the IT Ministry and the head of one of four AgriStack committees. “It should have been more like the National Digital Health Mission... Anyone who wants to build the solution is welcome.”

Critics have other questions. Why were farmer organisations left out of the drafting of the initiative? What happens to farmers who, for some reason, get excluded from the database? Who will ensure that farmer data is not used for land acquisition or exploited for insurance and loans by private companies?
Growth Story

Answers to these queries may be a long time coming. Until then, there is no denying that farmers are no longer just producers of food but, increasingly, data.
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Fasal is an agritech company in Bengaluru that uses sensors to measure crop conditions and advise farmers on irrigation, fertilisers, disease control and more. It boasts that its two-metre white sensor can be installed in the soil by farmers themselves, without any assistance. Another source of pride for it is that while the India Meteorological Department has roughly 75,000 weather stations across the country, Fasal has as many in just four Maharashtra districts.

“We eventually want to primarily become a data company,” said Fasal founder Ananda Verma, who hails from a farming family.

Ananda Verma owns an agritech company, Fasal, that uses sensors to measure crop conditions and advise farmers on irrigation, fertilisers, disease control and more. 

Credit: Fasal.

At the moment, the company has 2,000 farmer subscribers covering 50,000 acres. “We know what these farmers are growing, what they have done on their farm, and what kind of quality they are going to get,” said Verma. Each farmer is currently charged a monthly subscription of up to Rs 750. But once the company gathers enough data and monetises it through a data platform shared with product or insurance companies, Verma says, the subscription fee may be waived.

“With the kind of visibility we have, there will be a point someday when Fasal will be able to tell Monsanto that Nashik will require a particular chemical because there is a disease build-up,” Verma pronounced.

Undoubtedly, data lends itself to economies of scale. “Even if agricultural data are ‘open’, farmers are not necessarily equipped to conduct the right sort of analysis that can add any value,” writes Alistair Fraser, a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Ireland’s Maynooth University. Besides, the isolated data individual farmers might have is not as valuable as a large collection of data points.

Fraser predicts “a landscape in which farmers submit data, even via open toolkits, that only the largest firms will be able to use effectively.” He told this writer that he was particularly concerned about how data projects could increase average plot sizes in the Global South, reducing the number of food producers.

Nachiket Udupa, a member of the steering committee of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture, links AgriStack to the broader arc of the controversial farm laws, one of which allows farmers to sell outside Agricultural Produce Market Committee mandis. “It all stems from the same mindset,” Udupa said. By deregulating agricultural markets and allowing contract farming, any government could enable an e-commerce website to control the market, he says. The result would be similar to how ride-hailing apps lured drivers with attractive rates, only to change the contracts later, says the letter to the Agriculture Ministry from the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture.

Some of those in favour of AgriStack find this conjecture dubious. Hemendra Mathur, a venture capitalist who heads FICCI’s agritech taskforce, says the Global North’s large-scale agriculture is inherently different from India’s small farms – and that is unlikely to change. “In this sector, I’m 100% confident you won’t see an Amazon or Flipkart or Byju’s or OYO,” he said. “You will see hundreds of thousands of winners.”

Ajit Korde uses Fasal’s scanner on his 70-acre tomato farm in Maharashtra’s Satara district. Credit: Ajit Korde.

Besides, AgriStack supporters argue, does the farmer even care? “The Indian farmer is different from the Western farmer – at the end of the day, they just want to make money,” claimed Verma. “They are ready to provide the data and they aren’t concerned if it’s taken by Monsanto.

Support for this view comes from Ajit Korde, a farmer in Maharashtra’s Satara district who owns a 70-acre tomato farm. In April, Korde paid Rs 50,000 for Fasal’s scanner that came with a free year-long subscription. Using the scanner has reduced his water consumption by 30%. “The algorithm remains in the background,” he said. “The application gives information – how much water to give, what disease is there. It helps make decisions, but the cost is a lot. The average farmer cannot afford this.”

Karishma Mehrotra is an independent journalist. She is a Kalpalata Fellow for Technology Writings for 2021.

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

Op-Ed: American Farmers Face Crippling Prices at the Hands of Fertilizer Oligopoly

In an op-ed written by NCGA CEO Jon Doggett, he says fertilizer executives are bringing in climbing profits at the expense of farmers, referring to those fertilizer companies as the "Fertilizer Oligopoly."

(File Photo)

By AGWEB GUEST EDITOR November 16, 2021

The following op-ed was written by Jon Doggett, CEO of the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA). 

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If you’re looking to make a killing off the stock market, forget about Amazon, you should invest in fertilizer companies.

While other corporations and firms are attracting public scrutiny for how their practices impact Americans, fertilizer executives are making out like bandits at the expense of the people who feed and fuel America. Let’s just refer to them as the Fertilizer Oligopoly

What has the Fertilizer Oligopoly been up to? It is using the government to elbow the competition out of the way and taking over the American fertilizer market.

One of the most Machiavellian moves by the Fertilizer Oligopoly came when the U.S.-based company Mosaic, which produces fertilizers sold here and abroad, used severe weather conditions in 2017 and 2018, which reduced fertilizer purchases, to manufacture a crisis that it convinced the International Trade Commission was the fault of imports. ITC fell for this nonsense hook, line and sinker, and in March it imposed 19.7% tariffs on phosphate fertilizers imported from Morocco and Russia.

It goes without saying that this development has caused a real crisis in the farming community, where corn growers and other farmers are telling me that fertilizer prices have gone up as much as 200% in one year. As prices increase for these products, farmers are also dealing with supply issues that are hiking costs for seed and crop protection products.

This is all a gut punch to the American farmer.

Meanwhile, the Fertilizer Oligopoly is profiteering. Mosaic’s August phosphate fertilizer sector earnings were up $200 million over its 2020 profits, and the company is gaining a near-monopoly over the phosphate fertilizer supply in the U.S. In fact, Mosaic’s phosphate market has grown from 74% to over 80% as tariffs have been placed on imports. The tariffs along with other factors, such as natural gas prices, are raising the cost of fertilizers to historic highs.

But the plot thickens. Right when it looked like Mosaic was the biggest and best in the world of Fertilizer Oligopolies, CF Industries, took a page out of Mosaic’s playbook and filed a petition with ITC to place tariffs on urea ammonium nitrate solutions, which are used in liquid fertilizers, imported from Russia and Trinidad & Tobago. While CF Industries’ complaint remains under consideration at ITC, the company has closed some of it plants in England, which further impacts fertilizer supply and drives up prices for American farmers.

While severe fertilizer shortages are being felt across the country, farmers need not look to the Fertilizer Oligopoly for help, as Mosaic no longer sees the U.S. market as its only priority. After all, it recently increased exports to Canada and has started exporting fertilizers to Brazil.

Farmers out in the American heartland, stuck with exorbitantly high prices for fertilizers, are furious that corporations have been able to use a government entity to consolidate a market and hike prices on inputs. As one farmer put it, “I struggle to understand why a company that has 73% to 74% of the market share needs the International Trade Commission to impose tariffs to help them get to 80%-plus.”

Our organization recently joined several other groups in issuing an amicus brief in a case brought to the U.S. Court of International Trade by a fertilizer company from Morocco. But the court won’t rule on the case until 2022, which means farmers will have to go through at least another season paying inflated prices for fertilizers.

We hope the court will reverse the decision on phosphate tariffs. We also hope the executives at CF Industries will realize the effect tariffs are having on American farmers and withdraw their petition to impose more tariffs. Most importantly, we want Americans and policymakers to understand that corporations are profiting at the expense of family farmers.

We also encourage fertilizer companies will remember who their customers are. Rather than spreading inaccurate information about the threat of imports, they should be helping farmers spread affordable fertilizer.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by the author are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of Farm Journal.

‘Farmers are digging their own graves’: true cost of growing food in Spain’s arid south

Intensive agriculture’s insatiable thirst for water is turning wetland to wasteland, draining rivers and polluting groundwater

Las Tablas de Daimiel national park in central Spain has been dry for three years. Photograph: Nacho Calonge/Stockimo/Alamy

The age of extinction is supported by

Stephen Burgen in Tablas de Daimiel
Tue 16 Nov 2021 

A wetland without water is a melancholy sight. The fish are dead, the birds have flown and a lifeless silence hangs over the place. “Everything you see around you should be under water,” says Ecologists in Action’s Rafa Gosálvez from the lookout in Las Tablas de Daimiel national park. The park has been dry for three years and where there were once aquatic species such as ducks, herons, egrets and freshwater crayfish, as well as tree frogs and the European polecat, now the wildlife has mostly vanished.

Las Tablas de Daimiel is a unique wetland in the vast, almost treeless plains of Castilla-La Mancha in central Spain. But the park has had the life sucked out of it to slake intensive agriculture’s insatiable thirst.

Sixty-seven per cent of the water used in Spain goes to agriculture, according to the OECD, but this rises to as much as 85-90% in the south-east, says Julia Martínez-Fernández, technical director of the New Water Culture Foundation, which promotes the sustainable use of water.

Common cranes fly over Las Tablas de Daimiel. 

Photograph: Beldad/EPA-EFE

Las Tablas’ ecosystem relies on water from rainfall, the Guadiana river and a huge aquifer, but the climate crisis has resulted in Spain’s periods of drought getting longer. The Guadiana is drying up, while agriculture has depleted the aquifer and polluted the groundwater with phosphates and other chemical fertilisers. In 2009, the wetland was so dry that subterranean peat fires broke out.

The 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of Las Tablas are all that remain of what, according to the World Wildlife Fund, was once a system of 50,000 hectares of wetland in Castilla-La Mancha.

We need to wake up to reality, there is simply not enough water to meet the demand for irrigation 

Rafa Gosálvez, Ecologists in Action

Gosálvez says the water needed to irrigate Castilla-La Mancha’s vines, olives, pistachios, onions and melons exceeds available resources and short of a run of several years of heavy rain, the wetland can only be saved by transferring water from the Tagus river – except the Tagus is overexploited and almost dried up four years ago.

Much of the problem dates from the 1970s, when the Spanish government embarked on a plan to turn Murcia and Almería in the south-east into Europe’s market garden. The plan had one major flaw: there was no water.

Spain’s south-east is arid and none of the country’s three major rivers flows near it. The Douro and Tagus both rise in north-central Spain and flow west into the Atlantic at, respectively, Porto and Lisbon, while the Ebro rises in the north-west and empties into the Mediterranean nearly 400km (250 miles) north of Murcia.

The solution was to transfer water from the headwaters of the Tagus through almost 300km of pipeline to irrigate the barren south.

However, rather than satisfy demand, the transfer has served to incentivise unsustainable intensive agriculture that has led to the exploitation of groundwater, with disastrous environmental consequences.

The spectacle this summer of thousands of dead fish floating in the Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in Murcia once known for its crystal-clear waters, was the result of fertiliser polluting the groundwater that drains into the sea. The nitrates trigger vast algae blooms that deprive the fish of oxygen.

“The Mar Menor disaster is the result of intensive agriculture which continues to expand in a manner that isn’t sustainable, both in Murcia and in many other parts of Spain,” says Martínez-Fernández.

Pockets of water seen in Las Tablas de Daimiel in 2020 after emergency wells were opened to prevent fires breaking out. 

Photograph: Beldad/EPA-EFE

Neighbouring Almería – where the greenhouses making up the famous “sea of plastic” are visible from space – produces an estimated 3.5m tonnes of peppers, tomatoes, cucumber and melons a year. Together with Granada, it supplies about 50% of the European market. Every year Almería also produces thousands of tonnes of plastic waste, much of which ends up in the sea.

The Tagus water transfer is not enough to meet the growing demands of agriculture in Almería, however. Over the past 40 years the amount of water that reaches the Tagus headwaters has fallen by about 40% according to estimates, and is continuing to fall. So Almería is increasingly reliant on desalinated seawater for irrigation.

In an attempt to deal with the problem, in 1985 the Spanish government brought in a new water law to regulate its use. But it was forced to concede that anyone who had a well or access to water had the right to exploit it.

Today, the government recognises that the situation is unsustainable. Teresa Ribera, minister for ecological transition, is under pressure for Spain to conform to European standards on water quality and quantity that come into force in 2027, and knows this can only be achieved by reducing irrigation.

In presenting the country’s five-year water plan, Ribera recognised that water resources are in decline and parts of Spain face desertification.


The five biggest threats to our natural world … and how we can stop them

“In this context, water plans can’t continue to support the sort of practices that have led to the overexploitation of aquifers, the contamination of groundwater and the deterioration of our rivers,” she said.

Although agriculture only accounts for about 3% of GDP and 4% of jobs, the farming industry has considerable political clout. When Ribera announced reductions in the amount of water that could be transferred from the Tagus, there was an outcry from farmers.

Lucas Jiménez, president of an association of farmers that depend on the transfer, warned Ribera “faces a battle in the courts and in the streets”.

“The problem is that the solution to the water issue will put any government in conflict with numerous sectors such as agriculture, hydroelectricity and property developers,” says Miguel Ángel Sánchez, a spokesperson for the Platform in Defence of the Tagus.

“Madrid knows this can’t go on, but they won’t take the bull by the horns and it’s the regional governments that have authority over water,” says Gosálvez.

Las Tablas de Daimiel remains dry even after the rainy season. 

Photograph: Nacho Calonge/Alamy

He says the EU’s common agriculture policy is partly to blame for encouraging intensive farming that is both environmentally damaging and wasteful, leading farmers to dump produce to maintain prices.

“The EU pays farmers to plant more, leading to overproduction with the result that the market price barely covers the cost of production,” he says.

“We need to wake up to reality, there is simply not enough water to meet the demand for irrigation. The farmers are digging their own graves.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

UK

Regenerative farming: The theory and the farmers doing it

© Tim Scrivener

Regenerative agriculture provokes strong opinions and passionate debate. There are those who are sceptical of the claims being made in its name, while others have completely bought into the idea that it is farming’s future, and the way to solve climate change.

Soil health is at its heart. The aim is to improve or restore soils that have been degraded by rebuilding soil organic matter and increasing soil biology.

Soils that are structurally sound and rich with organic matter and micro-organisms are better able to retain water and store carbon.

See also: How one Northants farmer is using cost maps to cut crop risk

The theory

The theory is that healthier soils lead to healthier plants and, hopefully, healthier profits, while helping to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Typically, most regenerative farmers follow these four core principles:

1. Minimising soil disturbance
There are more micro-organisms in a teaspoon of soil than there are people of Earth, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

These living organisms create soil fertility, but disturbing them through tillage or by using chemicals destroys the soil structure that acts as their home.

2. Keeping the soil covered
Nature always works to fill a vacuum, and bare soil is no different. Keeping it covered protects it from wind and water erosion, while preventing moisture evaporation and weed seeds germinating.

Most growers choose to keep soil covered by maintaining living roots in the soil as much as possible through the year – typically by growing cover crops in the gaps between cash crops.

That also helps retain nutrients and food supply for the micro-organisms in the soil.

3. Maximising plant or crop diversity
The theory is that pests, diseases and poor nutrient cycling in crops are due to the lack of diversity in our farming system.

Increasing the range of crops and animals in the system decreases pest and disease pressure while supporting biodiversity and improving soil health.

4. Integrating livestock
Livestock grazing of cover or cash crops on arable land not only provides a natural source of organic matter, but also encourages new plant growth, which stimulates the plants to pump more carbon into the soil. This drives nutrient recycling by feeding biology.

Three-part series

The interest in regenerative farming has never been higher. So, in this new series, Farmers Weekly will be following three growers from different parts of the country at different stages of their regenerative farming journey to highlight how they are implementing the principles on their farms.

Over the course of the series, we want to delve deeper into regenerative practices, from minimising soil disturbance and cover cropping to integrating livestock into the arable rotation and reducing inputs.

We will provide tips and advice for those who want to switch to this type of farming, and further inspire those who already have.

Meet three farmers doing it

Edwin Taylor
Durhamfield Farm, Consett, Northumberland

Edwin Taylor © Richard Allison

Northumberland grower and Base-UK chairman Edwin Taylor grows just over 800ha of combinable crops alongside 300ha of grassland and 170 native breed suckler cows plus followers.

He is an early adopter of the principles behind regenerative agriculture,

There’s also an area of native woodland in a designated site of special scientific interest (SSSI)

Farming in partnership with his father, their “journey” – as he describes it – started back in 2002, with the aim to improve soil health and the condition of thefarm for the next generation.

Farm facts: Durhamfield Farm, Consett, Northumberland

• 1,100ha mixed farm
• 800ha arable growing wheat, barley, OSR, pulses and linseed
• 170 suckler cows plus followers
• Practicing regenerative agriculture principles since 2002

The three major management changes to their system include:

• growing 20-40% spring crops, rather than 100% winter crops as had happened previously
• the introduction of one- to two-year rotational pastures with legume mixes to make use of the livestock within the arable rotation and help tidy up grassweeds
• and minimal soil disturbance.

Cover crops are part of the mix, but Mr Taylor admits these are challenging. “Being in the north of England, our harvest is much later, which leaves less time to establish them successfully.

The ones we’re putting in are legume-based, nearly a living mulch, with the aim to keep some of the white clover for the following spring crop and depress the weed burden.”

He also is trying to direct drill winter wheat into a permanent clover living mulch to help reduce fertiliser requirements, some of which is made on the farm.

“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to farm – it’s what your personal preference is. But for me, I think this is the right way to achieve what we’re trying to achieve.

“It’s been a steep learning curve – every day is a school day,” he says. “We’re continuing to evolve and try new things, reduce cost, maintain output, try to be a little more environmentally friendly than our neighbours are, while at the same time trying to appease the bank manager.”

Nick Padwick
Ken Hill Estate, Snettisham, Norfolk

Ken Hill Estates on the west Norfolk coast was a blank canvas – albeit with owners who had a clear direction they wanted the farm to move in – when farm manager Nick Padwick took over two years ago.

“The key driver for the owners is the environment. That’s going to be really high on the government’s future agenda.”

The estate was just coming out of a Higher Level Stewardship agreement when Mr Padwick, a former Farmers Weekly Farmer of the Year, arrived, and he was tasked with planning the estate’s future direction.

Farm facts – Ken Hill Estate, Snettisham, Norfolk

• 1,400ha estate
• 600ha arable cropping
• 400ha rewilding area and 400ha traditional conservation
• Practicing regenerative agriculture since 2019

The result has been splitting the 1,400ha estate into three distinct areas:

• a water-penning structure has been introduced on the freshwater marshland to increase the water level for waders and wildfowl
• 400ha of marginal arable land and woodland bordering the marsh has been converted into a nature restoration area
• the remaining 600ha of arable land is being farmed regeneratively.

Cover crops have been introduced on 90% of the arable area, and a traditional winter crop-heavy rotation ditched for a much more spring-based regime.

Input use is being reduced dramatically, adds Mr Padwick. “The owners believe in using inputs in a responsible way, but want us to start focusing on whether there is the need to apply and whether there is an alternative.”

Max Chenery
Whatton Estate Farm, Long Whatton, Leicestershire  

The move towards a regenerative system for Max Chenery’s 675ha farm increased in 2018 with the purchase of a Horsch CO8 drill with narrow openers, ironically from Edwin Taylor.

“It started as a commercial decision – the environment is very important – but we wanted to do some things differently to make some more money.

The old method isn’t working particularly well financially, and it’s going to get worse when we lose the subsidies.

“If I can knock £100/ha off cultivation costs and keep the same yields, that’s pretty important.”

The switch has been gradual, however, as Mr Chenery gains more experience and confidence with different practices.

Farm facts – Whatton Estate Farm, Long Whatton, Leicestershire 

• 675ha mixed farm
• 370 Belted Galloway and Limousin cattle
• Practicing regenerative agriculture since 2018

“We’re concentrating on soil health, and doing whatever we can to improve it. We’re working towards no-till – some fields are no-till, on others we will light disc to level or subsoil on the heavy clay soils where we need to.”

Another important driver for the farm is the desire to reduce artificial inputs by increasing crop diversity and using companion cropping.

“If possible, I’d like to reduce nitrogen by 40kg/ha in wheat, cut herbicides by 15% and trim fungicides to only two applications across the farm.”

He’s happy to experiment to see what works best in his conditions.

With cattle on the farm, he’s comparing lucerne and red clover for silage, while another small area has been drilled with white clover to create a living mulch to direct drill wheat into, with the hope it survives through a four-year rotation.

LNG industry launches 'carbon neutral’ framework

CREDIT: REUTERS/CHINA DAILY

An international liquefied natural gas (LNG) body on Wednesday launched a framework for rules to declare cargoes carbon neutral as it seeks to make the practice of offsetting emissions a last resort.

PUBLISHEDNOV 17, 2021 
By Susanna Twidale and Marwa Rashad

LONDON, Nov 17 (Reuters) - An international liquefied natural gas (LNG) body on Wednesday launched a framework for rules to declare cargoes carbon neutral as it seeks to make the practice of offsetting emissions a last resort.

Environmental groups are sceptical about the use of carbon offsets and say the ability to pay for emission reductions elsewhere could prolong the use of fossil fuels.

Around 30 cargoes, or less than 1% of global LNG trades, have been declared carbon neutral to date, but the number is expected to grow as companies seek to differentiate themselves through their environmental credentials.

"There is a wide disparity in the nature of these (carbon neutral cargoes), which is why we created this framework," Vincent Demoury, secretary general of the International Group of Liquefied Natural Gas Importers (GIIGNL) told Reuters.

The framework outlines a series of steps, with the first requiring companies to monitor and verify their greenhouse gas emissions intensity.

For a company to declare its shipment carbon neutral, it would need to show transparent emissions data, make the best efforts to reduce emissions at its operations and use offsets for any remaining emissions for the cargo's lifecycle, including scope 3 emissions, or those generated when the customer uses the fuel.

Not all of the 30 shipments that have claimed to be carbon neutral to date include scope 3 emissions and therefore would not have been able to make that claim under the GIIGNL framework, Demoury said.

He said the aim was to encourage emission cuts primarily at a company's own operations.

"Offsetting the residual emissions is better than nothing but this shouldn't be seen as the primary objective of the industry," he said.

The framework did not specify which type of offset, which can cost as little as 50 cents, should be used, but said they should meet criteria, such as being independently verified and retired from circulation once they have been used.

Singapore's Pavilion Energy Trading & Supply Pte Ltd said on Wednesday it had jointly developed with suppliers QatarEnergy and Chevron Corp CVX.N a method to calculate greenhouse gas emissions for liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Bill Hwang made a huge, secret bank bet before Archegos collapse

Sridhar Natarajan and Katherine Burton, Bloomberg News

Bill Hwang , Photographer: Emile Wamsteker/Bloomberg

It’s a move that’s almost unthinkable even for Wall Street’s most maverick investors, for fear of landing in regulatory crosshairs.

But buried in the billions Bill Hwang wagered and lost, the man behind Archegos Capital Management used derivatives to secretly build a more-than 20 per cent stake in a U.S. regional bank, right under the noses of financial watchdogs, according to people with knowledge of the situation. That sent the stock on a wild surge, and when Archegos collapsed, a dramatic plunge.

What’s more, Archegos and the bank had private conversations about a significant investment that wasn’t revealed to other shareholders, said the people, asking not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. As the stock soared, executives at the Dallas-based lender raised record new capital from unwitting investors.

The events at Texas Capital Bancshares Inc. offer a rare look at what happens when a risk-taking investing whale such as Hwang dives into a stock -- let alone one belonging to a highly regulated bank. Authorities have long discouraged outsiders from potentially influencing institutions that gather deposits, even thwarting the likes of Warren Buffett from beefing up some of his favorite bank bets. But their concerns also extend to the danger a big shareholder could quickly retreat, sending a lender’s stock into a tailspin, and rattling counterparties and customers.

The extent of Archegos’s involvement with the Texas bank adds another dimension to a saga that’s already prompted probes and reviews around the world. Watchdogs including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have said they’re examining whether the rules themselves need to be rewritten to close any loopholes and eliminate gray areas to ensure investors like Archegos disclose outsize wagers.

“It goes against the intent of what the regulations and laws were set up for,” said Bill Dudley, the former New York Federal Reserve President. “If people go around and circumvent those laws and regulations, then you have a problem, and you’ve got to do something about it.”

Archegos’s enablers -- the prime brokers who effectively helped Hwang gamble away his fortune -- showed up in filings as owners of more than a quarter of the outstanding shares by the end of 2020. They included Credit Suisse Group AG, where executives grew uneasy after discovering their firm alone owned 9 per cent of a regional U.S. bank, and Morgan Stanley, which in the midst of the stock’s surge helped Texas Capital raise more money.

The question of whether Texas Capital should have disclosed Archegos’s role in driving up the stock price comes down to how much the bank knew and whether it was material information. In the months since the episode, no regulator has publicly accused the lender of wrongdoing.

The wave of purchases sent the battered stock soaring 93 per cent in last year’s second half, making the company the top performer in the S&P Midcap Financials Index tracking 63 lenders. This year -- since Archegos imploded -- it’s among the worst.

“It’s one thing for Archegos to have big stakes in commercial companies, but with a depository institution, the risks are much greater,” said Jeremy Kress, a former banking policy attorney at the Fed. “If a big holder sells it could trigger a run.”

The descriptions of Archegos’s wagers on Texas Capital, the firms’ communications and Credit Suisse’s internal deliberations are based on interviews with five people close to those companies.

Spokespeople for Archegos, Texas Capital, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley declined to comment. Regulators haven’t brought claims against any of them, and no signs have emerged of a probe targeting Texas Capital.
 

'BRUISED' BANK

Texas Capital was born in 1998, founded by Jody Grant, who'd just finished a high-profile stint as finance chief of Electronic Data Systems through its spinoff from General Motors Corp. The aim was to build a regional powerhouse that could bankroll an economy bigger than the likes of Canada, Russia and Australia.

By the mid-2000s, Grant helped one of the lender’s investment bankers at Bear Stearns, Brian Jones, start a private equity firm with backing from Texas Capital. Jones kept that firm, BankCap Partners, going when he later joined Archegos and became its head of research. Hwang invested in a BankCap fund that’s still in operation. 

Jones encouraged Hwang to take a look at Texas Capital and connected him with its management, according to the people close to the situation. The shares had been beaten down over the years by misadventures in energy lending, management missteps and what the bank called a “bruised” brand. As the COVID-19 pandemic set in, the stock tumbled to its lowest in a decade. Hwang decided it was time to go big.

His family office had honed a strategy for placing outsize bets on stocks without drawing attention to itself. Prime brokers would typically buy up a company’s shares and, using a swap agreement, let Hwang reap the gains or losses as the price moved. In a number of cases, his firm placed parallel bets with a roster of prime brokers. In regulatory disclosures, those middlemen -- not Archegos -- were listed as the stock’s owners. 

In late 2020, Texas Capital’s stock soared as Archegos built a position that would peak somewhere above 20 per cent of the shares, two people familiar with the matter said. In addition to using swaps, Archegos also bought some stock directly. But because that portion of the wager was shy of a 5 per cent stake, the family office concluded that it didn’t need to disclose it. 

Inside Archegos, some staff members voiced concerns about whether regulators would be upset if they learned about the bank’s total position. Hwang and his team brushed off those worries, the people said, assuring staff that lawyers had vetted the strategy of using swaps and that it was OK. The contracts gave Archegos the economic effect of holding the stock, but not direct ownership.

Archegos told Texas Capital’s management that it was building a stake in the bank both directly and through swaps, though it’s unclear whether the amount was specified, the people said. The spokesperson for Texas Capital declined to comment on whether the bank knew the full extent of Archegos’s wager or sought to find out.
 

'POTENTIAL FOR ABUSE'

“Everyone knew about the positions of Archegos” and its status as a large shareholder, said Grant, the Texas Capital founder, who said he spoke with executives at both firms. Still, he said he was led to believe that the stake was less than 10 per cent.

Grant who stepped down as CEO more than a decade ago, said he remains close with management and holds the bank’s stock. He emphasized that talks with Hwang’s family office were friendly and that it expressed support for the bank’s current managers. “They didn’t attempt to assert influence.”

Swaps and friendly discussions wouldn’t do much to assuage regulators’ concerns, Dudley said.

“There’s potential for abuse,” the former banking regulator said. “The Fed doesn’t want to adjudicate whether the person who has acquired the stake is friendly or not friendly, or could turn unfriendly tomorrow.”

While Archegos’s wagers sent the stock price on a tear, Texas Capital didn’t publicly address the family office’s role and why a slate of prime brokers was suddenly appearing on the list of its largest holders. Some analysts and investors attempted to explain the mysterious move by pointing to the appointment of JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker Rob Holmes as Texas Capital’s new chief in January -- the third man to lead the bank in under two years.

Then in February, the Dallas lender sought to bolster its capital, tapping Morgan Stanley -- also listed among its biggest holders -- to help raise US$300 million, largely from retail investors. The preferred-share fundraising was the biggest in the history of the regional bank.

Just before that deal closed, the SEC published fresh guidance to companies looking to raise money in the wake of recent stock jumps, underscoring that executives should flag any risks to investors.

“In general, a public company raising capital is under an affirmative obligation to disclose risk factors,” said Joshua Mitts, an associate professor at Columbia Law School. If management knows there is one large investor whose buying spree is temporarily inflating the stock price, and doesn’t disclose it, then that could spell trouble, he said.
 

EXECUTIVE'S WORRIES

In the weeks after Texas Capital’s fundraising the company’s market value briefly touched US$4.5 billion. Then Archegos ran into serious problems.

Another company in its portfolio, ViacomCBS Inc., decided to use its elevated stock price to sell more shares, also tapping Morgan Stanley to lead the deal. The announcement of the secondary offering sent the stock down 9 per cent the next day, taking a bite out of Archegos’s highly leveraged portfolio and leading to an avalanche of margin calls. Prime brokerages soon began racing to sell off a basket of holdings that, at their peak, had exceeded US$100 billion.

On the weekend of Archegos’s collapse in March, an executive at Credit Suisse reviewed the Texas Capital positions and later expressed concerns to colleagues that the size of the holdings might have run afoul of U.S. rules, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations. Yet there was also a measure of relief among Credit Suisse executives: At least they hadn’t been tapped to help raise capital, the person said.

In the six months after Archegos’s implosion, the SEC announced it’s working on a series of measures to force hedge funds, family offices and other money managers to reveal more information about their swaps dealings -- potentially even giving the public access to aggregate data on such bets.

Over that time, Texas Capital’s shares plunged by well over a third.

But the bet on Texas Capital was smart, Grant suggested.

“Had Archegos not imploded,” he said, “they would have made a ton of money on it.”

VULTURE CAPITALI$M

Icahn protege, former Canada PM Harper to launch activist fund

Gillian Tan, Bloomberg News  

Nov 15, 2021

Former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper speaks at the 2017 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in Washington, Sunday, March 26, 2017. , The Canadian Press

Stephen Harper, the former Canadian prime minister, is teaming up with ex-Icahn Enterprises LP portfolio manager Courtney R. Mather to launch a “constructive” activist fund, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The duo have begun discussions with prospective investors ahead of a formal launch of their firm, known as Vision One, in 2022, said the person, who requested anonymity because the talks are private. 

Vision One plans to bet on undervalued mid-sized public companies and to try to create value through governance improvements and other changes, said the person. The firm will focus on companies with market values of US$2 billion to US$10 billion, especially in the industrial and consumer sectors, the person said. 

Mather and Harper didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mather worked at billionaire Carl Icahn’s firm between 2014 and 2020 and served on boards of companies including Caesars Entertainment Inc., Freeport-McMoRan Inc., Newell Brands Inc. and Cheniere Energy Inc., his LinkedIn profile shows. He previously spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Mather is set to be chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Vision One while Harper is to be chairman. They plan to work together to generate investment ideas and engage with target companies and other stakeholders, the person said. 

The two are working with Dennis Wallace, Vision One’s head of business development, a former managing director at Canadian pension fund manager OPTrust, the person said. Wallace didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Harper, who was Canada’s prime minister from 2006 to 2015, has been active in the business world. He is a board member of Good Works II Acquisition Corp., a blank-check company, as well as real estate services firm Colliers International Group Inc., securities filings show. He’s also chairman and CEO of Harper & Associates Consulting, through which he works with companies in the financial services, technology and energy sectors, according to its website. 

Harper, 62, has been traveling in recent months, attending meetings in Belize, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and the U.K., according to his Twitter profile.

Other Icahn veterans, including Keith Meister of Corvex Management LP and Alex Denner of Sarissa Capital Management LP, have founded rival activist funds.