Kishore Indukuri – Dutch Uncles

Farmer Inside, Engineer Outside!

Abhilash Bapanasha — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 08:25:51 +0000

Milk, a daily essential in every Indian household, has a unique pattern of production, processing and marketing. India is the world’s largest milk producer and consumer of dairy products and with a unique consumption pattern, the country consumes almost 100 percent of its own milk production.

Mr. Kishore Indukuri was our speaker in our recently held tete-a-tete talk show – ‘Innerview – Only the Paranoid Survive’. The 45-minute motivational and inspirational talk show which features interviews of industry experts who bring forth informative and life experiences and techniques to help shape and gear you up, to succeed. Mr. Indukuri spoke about his journey and the pinnacle of his achievements. This in-depth, casual interview is a deep dive to the stimulating aspirations during the pursuit of his entrepreneurial goals.

Mr. Kishore Indukuri, the Founder & CEO of Sid’s Farm – the Engineer Farmer who has disrupted Dairy Farming in India. His brainchild Sid’s Farm is a sustainable agriculture and dairy farming start-up. He is an IIT Kharagpur graduate with a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from University of Massachusetts. After quitting his job at Intel and having lived in the US for over a decade, he wanted to return to his roots and decided to head back home. While in his home town Hyderabad he started looking for sources of affordable natural and organic food for his family and found that the options were very limited and not easily accessible. This quest for the best initiated his venture, Sid’s Farm, named after his son.

‘‘

A lot more people are also coming (into dairy farming) because it is an essential item and it was not disrupted as much as some of the other fields were (during the pandemic) because still farmers and dairy producers were able to sell these essential services. There will be a lot of demand for good food produced in the country.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Today in 2021, how will you summarise the dairy farming industry? Where does it stand today?

If you look at the dairy farming itself, it is predominantly still unorganised but if you look at farming per se you know the one good thing about dairy farming is that it contributes at least four percent of the economy. This is one industry where at the current levels, at least greater than 50 percent of what the consumer pays actually goes to the farmer. If you look at any particular sector in agri-space, dairy is by far the largest commodity and there’s a lot of scope in dairy. In India, the demand for milk is continuously increasing and most of the milk produced in India is consumed in the country, so there’s a lot of scope for dairy to grow in India.

When we look around the situation right now, we are surviving amidst this global pandemic and we have seen a lot of focus being shifted to taking care of one’s health so how do you think the agriculture sector as a traditional sector is addressing the betterment of human health?

There is definitely a lot of focus on eating healthy food, so definitely the focus is back on having those great sources of food like milk etc. People are looking for high quality pesticide-free and contamination-free vegetables. Everywhere in the country and in the world, we are witnessing the demand which got spurred by the pandemic. A lot more people are also coming because it is an essential item and it was not disrupted as much as some of the other fields were because farmers and dairy producers were able to sell these essential services. There will be a lot of demand for good food produced in the country. Luckily there is food now in the country for most of the population, I think now the focus is on how do we make the good, better.

Contamination is again a serious issue that we are facing with the use of pesticides and chemicals being injected that is questioning the quality of food products. So as an entrepreneur, what solution do you suggest one can adopt to address this?

This is a question that we have also faced as a producer as to how do you evoke that trust in your consumer. We use testing and primarily showcasing that to the consumer as a big way to make sure the customers know that our milk is pure. So, we do a lot of testing at the farm and at consumers’ homes. During pre-COVID, we used to bring customers to the farm, show them how we milk a cow, how we grow our grass, how we do concentrated feed at our farmer facilities, how milk that comes from our facility is tested and all the series of testing that they go through. We test for them different kinds of preservatives and antibiotics that can be added and injected in a cow. Similarly, any food product that you take, if you can develop or there are already test techniques out there, if you can take those things, leverage them and show to the customer, that our food products or our milk goes through this and that, is why you can believe that our food is good. I think that is a great way to connect to a customer and bring that trust in your blood in our products.

In the presentation shared by Dr. Indukuri, he elucidated the story of Sid’s Farm. Some excerpts:

When we started, our initial business plan was to have an integrated farm that produces great milk and food without any hormones, antibiotics and pesticides. Our plan was that we will have three to four acres of land that will have sheds for animals, it will have processing equipment and any other land that we need we would take on lease. Each farm will have an in-house pasture facility for milk and milk products. We also wanted to see if along with milk and milk products we also should be growing other vegetables as well. With a little bit of information that we knew about, we put together this business plan in early 2012. So, the idea was we would buy 50 cows and for each animal in those days, it was about 45,000. Then we would know what is the investment in preparing feed for these animals. It is important to make sure that you grow your grass or feed before you buy your animals when you start a dairy farm. This is so as to know what is the cost for an acre of land, what is the cost of seeds, what is the cost of manure, what is the labour cost and number of acres.

In 365 days, cows have to be milked two times a day, every day no matter what. There are no breaks here, people who have been in this field know they can’t attend marriages, they can’t do all the things that you think are important. In 2013, when we started selling milk direct to our customers and we would a milk our cows started us 4 am in the morning we would manually packet our milk and then we would take that milk from our farm to the city which was about 40 kilometres away and by 6-6:30 in the morning we would have the milk reach our customers. As demand for our milk increased in an automatic packing machine, packing is not a problem now.

Fodder is the most important thing. You have to make sure the land that you choose the location of your dairy farm is also very important so you make sure that you have a good amount of water in the facility where you are starting your dairy farm because both for your cattle for drinking as well as for growing grass you need quite a bit of water so water source is important if you are closer to a river belt you can do it at a fairly low cost. You should also put up a low-cost protein source, like at our farm we have azolla ponds and along with it we are also growing a few tree fodders like suspenia, moringa (or moonaga as they call here).

‘‘

It is important to make sure that you grow your grass or feed before you buy your animals when you start a dairy farm.

Audience Asks

Any suggestions on what methods to use for testing on or analysing the business models regularly.

I am assuming that this is the dairy farming business model so one of my suggestions is you start with a basic exercise excel model. That is what we started with and continuously adding the new numbers. It will give you a fair estimate of where you are today compared to what your estimates were, if you keep plugging in. In a dairy farm, I think in the first six months there is a lot of valuable data – you have your first set of cows that are producing milk, once those animals start to dry off you know you have to bring in your next set of animals that keep your milk cycle going. That time frame is a good check. If you capture daily productivity data, your weight cost data, that will give you a decent amount of data to make sure whether your initial business model you started out with is working or not.

What are your thoughts in adopting environment friendly packaging options? What will be the effects on costing?

We do get a lot of questions about this as well, so we are looking for what are the great solutions out there that are environmentally friendly. If you take the example of packing your milk in a plastic pouch, one of the things that we get is why don’t we do glass bottles. There are technologies out there where you can do it in biodegradable packaging options, so we are continuously evaluating them. But you have to look at every aspect as you make this decision. It is about the entire supply chain. When I say, for example, when we look at the plastic pouch versus glass model it is not just the filling stage or what the consumer would see at the end, it also costs you to transport it. If you look at our delivery boy, he could probably carry a lot more milk. He would be able to deliver probably 80 to 100 litres of milk when it is delivered via plastic boxes but when you do via glass bottles you can only deliver maybe 40 litres of milk at the most. Again, what does it run and how much water are you using, if for example you use a glass bottle or a stainless-steel bottle then it has to be cleaned daily and then repackaged. How much water are you using, what are your costs of doing this entire thing has to be looked at and then arrived at a solution. Having said that, we are constantly pushing ourselves to see what is the best technology out there and are looking for good options to take up biodegradable packaging materials once they are out there tested and available.

Have you approached the state government previously for incentives and for expanding your business at an all-India level?

We have definitely applied for state government incentives. We have applied some of the incentives for the processing side of our business but not availed any incentives for the dairy farming side. Because when we started, we didn’t know enough about incentives and stuff, so we didn’t apply. There are a lot of Central Government schemes from the Ministry of Food Processing. We were part of an incubator, which was a central government institution where we applied for a grant there as well, so as many as you can get it’s great because it will help allocate money for the right things in the business.

In the words of Dr. Indukuri, “Dairy farming can be a successful venture but it needs a lot of personal attention at least in the initial few years.” From his experience as a successful dairy entrepreneur whose venture, Sid’s Farm now clocks Rs 40 Crore in revenue annually delivering milk to nearly 10,000 plus customers every day, he is hopeful of the dairy sector in the coming future.

The post Farmer Inside, Engineer Outside! appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

Sid’s Farm Cultivating Humanity: Kishore Kumar’s Tale of Success

DU Desk — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 10:35:04 +0000

Corporate life is a secure one, it has its benefits, financial security and consistent hours. This is generally the picture one gets looking in from the outside. For many of us, despite this fairly desirable prospect, there is a hesitancy attached to it, the daily drag, the monotonous routine and the robotic lifestyle tend to sort of suck the joy out of work or at the very least, leave something to be desired. Kishore Kumar, Founder of Sid’s Farm found himself at a similar crossroads in the year 2012.

The Man Behind Sid’s Farm: Early Years

Hailing from the West Godavari district, Kishore paints himself as a small-town farm boy who grew up in the city as a result of his father’s work. Having witnessed his father study and work as an Engineer, Kishore followed in those footsteps and went on to acquire a degree in B.S. Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur and after completing that, along with an integrated Master’s programme he earned a full scholarship to go and study at the University of Massachusetts in the United States.

Now, upon asking him why he chose engineering, he gives a very clear answer. A part of the reason he became an engineer was to follow in his father’s footsteps but the main reason was a drive in him that he felt was best met in the engineering field, a drive that makes him a problem solver. “I wanted to do research. That’s how far I really thought it through when I was aiming to do my masters and PhD…so, when you are studying or working in the corporate sector, it is essentially problem-solving. The problem could be technical or it could be something else.”

This perspective of solving problems led him to look inwards at his own life, where he found something was missing. This was the planting of the metaphorical seed that led Kishore to the realisation that there was something to be done back in India. “I was always attracted to agriculture. We had a farm in India, so one fine day, I just said ‘ok’ and moved back. I thought I would do something in agriculture.” With that, the journey of what would become the foundation stones of Sid’s Farm was laid.

‘‘

I like the idea of that kind of peaceful living, hopefully, that’s what I’ll do at some point and not keep running around. That’s how it all started, little did I know what I was in for.

New Beginnings, Old Roots: The Birth of Sid’s Farm

Kishore made it very clear when speaking to Dutch Uncles, that he had no semblance of a plan when he left the corporate sector to follow his agricultural endeavours. He went a step further and shared that more than an entrepreneur, he was seen as crazy for leaving a secure job to pursue agricultural entrepreneurship without a plan or any prior business background. It is quite a leap for anyone to go from a 9-to-5 corporate job to the uncertain world of being a business owner and a self-starter, but then again, that is the leap of faith that one needs to take when following one’s dreams. “My boss said I was crazy because I didn’t really come back with a plan. In my mind, I thought I would be able to pull it off so I came, but little did I know what awaited me. When I came here it was very different. I mean, it is what is expected, but I was a little naïve back then,” explains Kishore.

Though he came back guns blazing into the agriculture game, Sid’s Farm was still a far cry from being realised.

The Pain Points of the Entrepreneurial Life

He knew he had found the right path in agriculture, but things were not so clear as of yet. He still felt something was lacking. “I felt I was not adding enough value. I mean we were paying the farmers well but, this was early 2012 and I felt there was not enough room. When I started, the idea of dairy farming started coming because of the Kollegal area where I was working, in between Bangalore and Mysore.”

With this inspiration creeping in, he made yet another calculated decision to move to Hyderabad to initiate his very own dairy venture which would come to be known as Sid’s Farm. With that, the city boy once more, became a countryman by going back to the roots he knew and loved. However, this was not without its fair share of trials and tribulations. As Kishore tells Dutch Uncles, one thing that no one actively speaks about as one of the biggest challenges of being an entrepreneur is the money pit that it is. “I barely had Rs. 10,000 in my pocket with the family in tow…but then we slowly started pulling back as we started laying the foundation. We were always very careful with the money because we didn’t have any. In hindsight, dairy farming is a business where you can spend not just lakhs but crores of money.”

Another issue that the founder of Sid’s Farm faced was getting a structure into place. Given that he had no prior business background, all he had were his wits and his problem-solving drive to get the business through the day. The thing about the dairy industry and being a start-up is that you have limited manpower to meet the demand of a very large industry. On top of this, Sid’s Farm’s main aim, as a business, was to deliver to its customers, pure unadulterated milk and milk by-products. The combination of these limitations had Kishore and his team faced their hardest challenge yet, which was keeping up with demand.

“Initially when we first started, we would start at 4 a.m. by milking our animals, 5 to 5.30 a.m. we would packet the milk with a hand-packaging machine and we would sell it directly as in, take it directly to the customer’s house which is about 40 kilometres away from our farm.

So, as soon as we load our vehicle, within an hour the auto used to reach the place (customer’s house) and by 7 o’clock we used to be done with deliveries. As our volume increased, the slots were rescheduled to meet the demand. At one point we were even waking up at 1.30 in the morning. We did that for almost a year and a half. Then, I realised, if we go through this lifestyle then neither our people nor our animals would survive.”

‘‘

I didn’t know anything about running a business. My father was an engineer all his life so I never experienced the business world. I had to learn pretty much everything from scratch.

Overcoming the Odds

When Dutch Uncles asked Kishore the question of how he and Sid’s Farm as a business overcame the odds, the answer was a very surprising and endearing one, to say the least. “In the last five or six years, there were tremendous amounts of hardship but I just put my head down and kept moving ahead. If you ask me, I never quit. There were many instances where we could have given up, but we just kept going. We keep a target and our entire team executes it; we all work together. We take good care of each other. What I’m proud of is all the people that we are able to impact – our own employees and the farmers that we work with. We want to touch everybody and we want to make a difference in their lives. I think that is the biggest satisfaction of this all. We work hard, keep going and learn new things along the way.”

Sid’s Farm is a unique creature for this reason. Where most businesses are focused on the bottom line, Sid’s Farm and Kishore maintained a philosophy of treating the team as a family, and when you are with your family nothing can shake your foundations. Kishore stands out amongst the crowd as an entrepreneur because he cares about his people and their mental health just as much as he does about the business. This is definitely a factor which has influenced the growth that the business has seen and the way it was able to overcome so many challenges over the years.

Sid’s Farm: Facing the Business Front

At the end of the day, running a business means you have to consider the bottom line as well as all the factors and obstacles that might pop-up and interfere with that. When Dutch Uncles asked Kishore how he identifies these issues given that he had no prior entrepreneurial experience, he said, “If you’re focused and if you don’t run away from problems that come to you, you’ll figure it out.”

Again, showcasing his penchant for being a problem solver, he went on to give an example of how the pandemic had pulled down business and the ways in which they overcame that. “When Corona hit, it was really hard. Luckily, we could still sell milk. The government allowed us to sell milk but making sure all our delivery boys were able to deliver milk safely was the main concern. There was a lot of chaos and the curfew was imposed, but we did not miss a single delivery, we did not miss any day…there were a lot of issues but we helped our people the best we could.”

Kishore’s solution to this was to plant his foot down and drive deeper into taking care of his employees so they could do their jobs in a safe and secure manner. He reached out to his community, his customers and got his delivery personnel donations so that they would feel recognised for their efforts, and on top of that Sid’s Farm also gave them free vegetables so they don’t have to worry about standing in line at the grocery store after a long day of deliveries. “You know they’re doing a great job, risking their own health and lives,” adds Kishore.

He understands that a business is no more than the people who fill its ranks, so his move was to take care of the people, who in turn took care of the business.

Giving Back Value

In terms of creating value and standing in such a heavily saturated market amongst industry giants, Kishore reveals that he recognises their existence, but he does not necessarily see them as competition. Sid’s Farm is unique as it is one of the few brands in India that does not adulterate its milk, considering that, there are only a handful of brands that give it a direct competition. Since this is the case, he sees them as simply expanding the market. The more it grows, the more the demand for his kind of product increases. So in a way, they are helping him. Clearly, regardless of lacking a business background, Kishore was built for this entrepreneurial world.

“What I’m looking for is creating that one product right and making it work. That is what drives me; create one product that we can all relate to,” elaborates Kishore, as he stresses the need to not worry about the competition but to stay focused on what you are doing and doing it the best way possible.

His advice to young and aspiring entrepreneurs was something that followed his philosophy and practices, “I would say having a small ego always helps. In life and in business especially. I think working with everybody and making sure there is no friction with all the people you work with, I think that helps…work on solving the problem, keep making shifts and you’ll figure it out.” If one can take away anything from Kishore’s journey it is the understanding that people and business can never truly be separated. Treat them with equal importance.

For more inspiring stories, go read our Inspire Section.

The post Sid’s Farm Cultivating Humanity: Kishore Kumar’s Tale of Success appeared first on Dutch Uncles.