Keeping profits human

“Over the decades, we’ve developed many technologies for small farmers and food-handling companies to reduce post-harvest losses and give food a longer, healthy shelf life. Grains can be stocked for around two years; fruit and vegetables are key to improving diet and need to be disinfected so that there’s no disease present as they go into storage & distribution system.” Any business needs to be profitable, says Shroff: “If food prices go down, who pays? The small farmers supplying the urban environments, who can’t afford to. We work with about 300,000 small farmers in the north of India to help them reduce their costs by sharing technologies the individual farmers couldn’t afford, like weather predictions and reduced use of chemicals.” The same farmers have a percentage of their land set aside for a few of their own fruit trees or cows, whose produce they can consume and share as they wish, separate from their main selling crops like rice.

“Zeba also improves germination,” explains Shroff, “which helps farmers avoid re-seeding. We’ve achieved 30 percent water reduction for farmers of irrigated crops, and even in field and root crops like cotton and potatoes.“ Water can also leach and contaminate subsoil water with fertilisers: our technology reduces this leaching by 75-80 percent, and farmers don’t have to re-apply fertilisers after heavy rain.” The whole world will see huge progress in the environmental aspects of agriculture over coming years, says Shroff. “ At UPL we’re very well-positioned to be part of that drive because sustainability has been part of our DNA since my father set up the business in 1969. We work with everyone from local village chiefs to big business and governments, and we’re very excited that the world’s organisations are on the same mission.”