You should start by sitting down (along with your spouse and any partners, financiers or managers) and assessing your situation. Have a brainstorming session; write down your thoughts or record the session. Don’t be afraid to dream, to imagine some pretty wild ideas. Think big. Imagine you could do anything; don’t be limited by practicality at this stage. Think of goals. Try to fill needs or supply possible markets. Think of new ways to use a resource you already have.

Get additional ideas from what others are doing and from published resources, watch for new and developing trends, such as public concerns about saturated fats, or growing biofuels.

Get realistic

After you have brainstormed for ideas, then it is time to be more realistic. What are your short-term and long-term goals and needs? Just for supplementary income or to start a whole new business? Do you want steady year-round income or will a seasonal operation meet your needs? Go through your ideas and pick out several that seem the most promising.

Naturally, you would like to make a profit right away, but many ventures will have sizeable start-up costs and/or may not get into the black for several years, such as growing tree fruit or pulpwood. Can you round up the needed capital—from loans, grants or investors? Check into the possibility of grants or matching funds from state or federal agencies or from private foundations. What is the likely cash-flow?

Make out a detailed (as best you can) business plan and projected budget—for each year for five or ten years. If this is too much for you to handle, there are professional small business advisers available. Some government agencies provide their service at no cost.

Now, do you still want to try that idea? Is it a wise, practical idea? Think about it for a while. Discuss it with your family and others whose opinion you trust. Could your new venture survive an unexpected disaster such as illness or injury, or a devastating storm? Don’t rush into anything. Probably it would be best to start small and see how things go. Don’t risk everything at once.

Suggestions

Following are some pointers from the book How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres by Booker T. Whatley (1987):

Produce only what your customers want.

Produce high-value commodities (plants or animals) in such a way that different ones are ready to market at different times of year, thus providing year-round income and employment. Diversify into unusual products.

Be located on a hard-surfaced road within 40 miles of an urban centre of at least 50,000 population.

Run a pick-your-own operation, so that much of the labour is done by the customer.

Have a guaranteed market with a clientele membership club with an annual membership fee (community-supported agriculture).

Be weatherproof, with drip and/or sprinkler irrigation.

Avoid middlemen. Market your products directly.

Looking at the production figures, it is quite evident that farmers provide the foundation for economic growth, and are in reality wealth creators. But when we look at farm incomes, the misery and pain with which farmers somehow survive remains rather unexplained. And yet, instead of helping them directly with measures and programmes that can enhance their income, and that includes providing a guaranteed price, the focus of policy makers has been to strengthen the supply chain, which implies supporting the players at the two extremes

When Glenn Davis Stone, a distinguished research professor of Environmental Studies, and author of ‘Agricultural Dilemma: How not to feed the world’, tweeted the other day, saying: “I’d separate agribusiness from farmers. Most federal aid has been to the former at expense of the latter,” I realised how truly he had summed up the dilemma that policy makers, policy analysts and the media encounter, and how wrongly we are made to believe that any aid or support to agribusiness construes support to farmers.In my response, I tweeted: “In India too, most analyst equate support to agribusiness as support to farmers. That is why agriculture continues to grow while farmers are left behind.

“At least, this is what I have observed over the years. While the profits of agribusiness companies, which provide inputs like chemical fertiliser, pesticides, tractors and other farm implements to farmers, continues to swell with their stocks rising, farmers are faced with a severe agrarian crisis. At the same time, reports of irate farmers throwing their tomato, garlic, onion, potato and brinjal harvests, to name a few, into canals or being put to fire, appear regularly in the media. With the market price not even sufficient to cover the cost of production, farmers are left with little choice but to dump the produce.While the farmers suffer the consequences, I have never seen traders (and that includes organised buyers) incurring losses as a result. In Punjab, for instance, more than 16,600 suicides by farmers and farm workers were reported in the 15-year period, between 2000 and 2015. But we hardly hear of suicides by traders (unless for personal reasons) and by input suppliers. In other words, the agricultural supply chain is so cleverly designed that both the players at the two ends rake in profits, while only the farmers take the hit. That is why despite producing a record harvest year after year, farmers continue to languish at the bottom of the ladder.

I have often wondered why is it that while the FAO estimates that India’s gross value of crop production in 2018 (report released in March 2021) is at $ 289, 802, 032 million, and that of gross food production at $400,722,025 million, farmers continue to live in misery. After all, India stands next only to China, with a gross value of $418, 541,343 million, and yet farming continues to be faced with a terrible distress. This is depicted by a Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households for the year 2018-19, estimating the average farm household income at Rs 10,218 ($124.7) per month. While this includes income from non-farm activities, but when seen alone, income from farming operations, comes to a paltry Rs 27 ($0.33) per day.

Looking at the production figures, it is quite evident that farmers provide the foundation for economic growth, and are in reality wealth creators. But when we look at farm incomes, the misery and pain with which farmers somehow survive remains rather unexplained. And yet, instead of helping them directly with measures and programmes that can enhance their income, and that includes providing a guaranteed price, the focus of policy makers has been to strengthen the supply chain, which implies supporting the players at the two extremes.

A simple and easily understandable answer is provided by Venky Ramachandran, a techie who runs a resourceful website called Agribusiness Matters. Imagine an iconic emotive smiley, and take out the U-shape from the drawing which depicts a smile (see the attached figure).

On the two extremes at the top are agricultural input manufacturers on the one hand, and an agricultural output buyer at the other end. At the bottom of the curve is the producer. While the two ends of the supply chain are reeling in profits, it is the farmer who lies at the bottom of the heap. The ‘smiling curve’ therefore provides a simple answer to a sad question that most people tend to ignore, and then he asks: “Why are farmers not making money when everyone else around them in the world of agribusiness is?” As I have often explained, despite new technology improving efficiency and thereby increasing productivity, farm incomes have been on a decline. As Canadian author and critic Darrin Qualman has shown in an analysis, while the wheat price (adjusted for inflation) has come down over a period of 150 years, from $30 per bushel in 1867 to $5 per bushel in 2017, bread prices have been on a rise. In the past four decades, bread prices have jumped several times.

Similarly, take the case of bananas exported from Latin America to Europe. The farmer’s share of the end consumer price is so low that it doesn’t even cover the cost of production. Farmers toil for over nine months every year and yet live on pittance. But agribusiness companies at both the ends of the supply chain have no complaint, whatsoever.I remember a US farmer tweeting sometimes back that the price of corn he received in 2020 was less than what his father had received in the early 1970s. The point I am trying to make is that farm distress is global, and the smiley diagram aptly captures the tragedy.

The lesson here is obvious. When a budgetary boost is provided across agricultural value chains, with emphasis on building up a digital public infrastructure and for setting up a dedicated fund for agriculture start-ups, the question that needs to be asked is how will it translate into a higher income for farmers? Even in the case of Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), while a lot of excitement hinges on the ability to aggregate and therefore negotiate a higher price for farmers, in a majority of cases the price being provided to farmers is much lower than the Minimum Support Price (MSP).

The proposed Agriculture Accelerator Fund as announced in Budget 2023 too aims to support agriculture start-ups to find innovative solutions to challenges faced by farmers, and it remains to be seen whether it ends up nurturing the technology-provider or in reality ends up building the entrepreneurial ability of the farmer. I am not against technology but as the ‘smiling curve’ shows it hasn’t helped farmers to be equally profitable and thereby become economically viable.Perhaps a better way would be to guarantee a minimum share of the end consumer price that the agricultural supply chain must ensure to farmers.(The author is a noted food policy analyst and an expert on issues related to the agriculture sector. He writes on food, agriculture and hunger)