It has to do with a personal philosophy, right?
Business is business.
But you want to get into a business that has some impact.
You need to be in good business, and I'm not saying running a social enterprise.
I'm saying business itself.
Business for profit can be for good causes.
[MUSIC]
My name is Sriram Gopal.
I'm the founder, CEO of Future Farms, and I'm from Chennai, India.
Future Farms is a vertical farming and hydroponics company based out of India.
We build alternative technologies for farming, and
create cost effective, viable solutions for the farmers.
I remember, when I was in school, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Because my father was an entrepreneur, so that was my biggest motivation.
So he was my role model, and I wanted to be a better entrepreneur than he was.
I really wanted to do something, to create something back.
Five years back, I was watching a YouTube video, and I stumbled upon this concept,
hydroponic farming, and I was completely blown away with its possibilities.
When we started, I went to some of the government bodies, and
then I wanted to get some expert opinion, because it was really new.
They just brushed it away.
They said it's just not viable, because the cost of technology is too much, and
it won't work in India.
I somehow was not convinced with that fact, and
we kind of wanted to be the black swan, we wanted to prove them wrong.
Future Farms has been in existence for the last three and
a half years, and I still remember the day we started.
So it was just my dad and I in our old factory, and
we started building small kitchen garden, home and hobby kits.
We sold that made money from that.
And then we started building slightly larger farms, and
we built farms on rooftops.
We did farms on parking lots.
Then we got a big breakthrough, and
one of the large corporates wanted to set a huge farm in a hill station.
We did not even hesitate for a minute.
We took that opportunity, and set up the first quarter acre commercial farm.
The upside for hydroponic farming is that you save 90% water.
It's very labor efficient.
This is not like traditional farming.
It's not really strenuous.
It's like you walking in a field where everything is to your hip level, and you
simply don't even have to bend to pick, or weed out, or do anything of that sort.
So even senior citizens can be deployed,
even the physically challenged can be engaged in such farms.
It is completely clean.
It protects people from three main threats.
One is pesticide toxicity, the other one is biotoxicity,
the third one is heavy metal contamination.
The input costs are really low.
The farmer just needs to have a barren land.
We will help him set up the poly house.
We set up the entire acutement, and then we help him sow the seed,
grow the crop, harvest, package, and sell to market.
The main reason why we do this, and this is very close to me.
Because in India, the standard of food is very, very low,
because there are no mechanisms to check where the food comes from.
And it can be very, very contaminated.
In fact, there is a report that states that leafy green is four times more loaded
with pesticides, when compared to anything that is available in the developed world.
There are alternatives.
People can choose organic food, but they're paying like three times more.
What it actually means is only people who can afford to pay three times more
can actually have access to clean food.
And to me, that just feels wrong, because I think clean food is not a privilege.
If anything, it should be a fundamental right.
We're extremely proud of our journey, and I think it's just the beginning.
In India, this market is supposed to be $1 trillion US in the next four years.
So it's a great time to be here.
I think a lot is happening in India right now.
And we are developing at a pace that we can't imagine, so
I'm just a tiny dot in this whole thing.
And we're definitely going to become a superpower in the future, I'm pretty sure.
But I want us to be a superpower for the right reasons.
If we continue with the current practice of agriculture,
we're soon going to not have food for a whole lot of people.
So we have to have technology in place, which are labor efficient,
resource efficient, and much more cleaner and productive.
I want to grow a company that is global, and that creates a lot of good.
And if our technology works in India, I'm pretty sure it will work in all the other
parts of the world, where people are still struggling for clean food.
[MUSIC]