Khetify's IoT Powered Rooftop Farm Has Caught The City Dwellers Fancy

Khetify's IoT Powered Rooftop Farm Has Caught The City Dwellers Fancy

Founded by IIT Kharagpur graduates, Kaustubh Khare and Saahil Parekh, Khetify is a startup promoting food sustainability to city dwellers.Chhavi Tyagi  |  ECONOMICTIMES.COM  |  May 01, 2017, 15:46 IST

Imagine having your own little farm that provides you organic vegetables devoid of harmful pesticides and even more dangerous spray painted produce.

This may sound fanciful to city dwellers that do not have the land to grow their own vegetables and are also short on time, but a startup is busy changing the definition of farming.

Founded by IIT Kharagpur graduates, Kaustubh Khare and Saahil Parekh, Khetify is a startup promoting food sustainability to city dwellers. Claiming that 16,000 sq km of rooftop space is being wasted in urban cities, Khetify aims to promote use of this unutilized space to develop small rooftop farms.

"If as a country we can turn just 10% of this into farms, we can produce fresh nutritious vegetables for around 200 million people," estimates Khare, 26.

Explaining the startup's motto 'Desh Ka Culture, Agriculture' Khare said, "We believe that urban India has been disconnected with farms, farmers, and their agrarian roots. Unless cities take control of their food systems, true sustainability could not be achieved".

Khetify develops compost-based modular 'khets' (farms) on vacant rooftops and enables individual households to grow 700 kgs of organic vegetables every year in as small a space as 200 sq ft. Understanding that scarcity of time is as big a constraint on city dwellers as is lack of space, Khetify uses IoT (Internet of Things) enabled drip irrigation system which can be controlled remotely and also helps in conserving water.

In nine months of its operations, Khetify claims to have transformed over 7,000 sq ft of vacant roofs and balconies in Delhi-NCR into small urban farms which has produced over 2,200 kgs of vegetables of 55 different varieties.

Chosen as one of the finalists in the AIM Smart City Accelerator Program (developed jointly by Ashoka University, Microsoft Ventures, and DLabs at the Indian School of Business), Khetify found support from plenty of sponsors.

"They are bridging the gap between the produce in the rural country to the consumers in urban areas. There are just too many steps involved in this process which eventually results in price escalation and crazy margins which are not even percolated down to the farmers. The team is readily available and employ farmers as part of their network," says Holostik Group, group director, Ankit Gupta. Holostik Group is one of the principal corporate supporting the accelerator program.

A team of six, Khetify employs two farmers who execute the function of maintenance for the clients.

The startup is now looking to grow its customer base by approaching schools, housing societies, universities, among others as well as expand its crop portfolio. The target is to make 50 schools and 150 households achieve food security by the end of 2017. This would mean the startup needs to employ an additional 10-15 farmers. However, hiring high quality talent from the domains of agriculture, botany and ecology has been a challenge.

"First of all, there are a very low number of students who take botany as their subject and even those who do, do not want to work in the industry. As for farmers, they also prefer working in factories over choosing farming as a source of livelihood," shares Khare.

Another challenge has been the easy procurement of compost, cow dung and other materials essential to farming. "Chemicals and fertilisers have so pervaded the system that it is extremely difficult to source natural, chemical-free compost. We spoke to several farmers and had to give them detailed instructions to get the right quality. This is going to be a challenge as we scale up," says Khare.

The statup has tuned its back-end operations interface with the informal economy such as daily wage labour, logistics and transport along with dealers of compost, cow dung and bringing standardisation to these has been a challenge.

Khetify charges a one-time fee for the installation of the 'khets', depending on the size of the 'khets' and a maintenance charge for the supply of high quality seeds, saplings, organic fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides among others.

Claiming to have achieved a positive unit economics, the startup generates enough revenue to support its operations and has also received an undisclosed amount of seed funding as part of the AIM Smart City Accelerator Program.

"As part of the program, the startups are encouraged to solve problems with liberal arts perspective. The program advocates government's focus on developing smart cities and Khetify intends to make agriculture a vital part of smart cities," says Ashoka University, director, Priyank Narayan.

Disappointed that the narrative of sustainable cities is grabbed almost exclusively by renewable energy, Khare wants Indian cities to realise the importance of food security.

"If a city can produce as much as possible, as close to where it is consumed using as much renewable energy as possible, it is sustainable. This logic is applied selectively to electricity and fuel (solar, wind, biogas etc) which is the energy that powers a city. We want to apply the same logic to the energy that powers citizens, which is food. Khetify hopes to make cities more sustainable and give its citizens access to nutritious, organically grown food that citizens can trust and trace," says Khare.