Creating climate resilient incomes for the ultra-poor farmers in India

Perspectives in International Development Seminar Series: Spring 2021

One hundred million smallholder farmers in India and 500M across the world face a number of challenges toward achieving food and income security, which are increasingly exacerbated by climate change. Unpredictable rains, increasing temperatures and drought make farming less profitable, eventually net-negative if not mitigated. Many interventions have been developed to alleviate smallholder poverty, but most offer only incremental income increases. Kheyti designs and deploys a bold solution that increases smallholder income at unprecedented, significant rates that ensures long term resilience rather than short-term income generation. Kheyti’s work is designed to create a path out of poverty by deploying high tech greenhouses (often taken for granted in developed countries), to India’s smallholder farmers. The greenhouses (with farm services) are a bold idea that brings sweeping change - they TRIPLE farming income with little effort while enabling farmers to learn new agriculture skills and mitigate climate change in the long term.  Kheyti’s dream is to restore dignity in the profession of farming for smallholders.

About the presenter

Sathya Raghu is the Co-founder and President of Kheyti and CosmosGreen, startups working to help small and marginal farmers rise out of poverty. He is a CA-turned-farmer and agri-entrepreneur. Sathya is a 2014 Acumen Fellow, a 2016 Aspen New Voices Fellow, and 2018 Rainer Arnhold Fellow. 

About the seminar series

The "Perspectives in International Development Seminar Series" is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development, the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the School of Integrative Plant Science as part of courses IARD 6960, NTRES 6960, PLSCS 6960 and AEM 6960. For additional questions, contact course teaching assistant Khusel Avirmed at ta346 [at] cornell.edu (ta346[at]cornell[dot]edu).