At 7 AM one morning in December, I was standing in an open field, giving water to my crop.
There was nothing special about that morning.
I hadn't eaten anything. I was just doing what needed to be done.
At around 9 AM, the water pump stopped working.
I looked at the pump.
Then I looked at the crop.
The crop couldn't wait.
So I took the pump to the market, got it repaired, brought it back, connected everything again, and finally started the water.
It was around 1 PM when everything was working again.
Four hours.
Four hours just to fix one machine so that water could reach the crop.
I was tired and hungry.
But while standing there, I started thinking about something that had nothing to do with the pump.
Why is the person doing something so fundamental still so uncertain about whether farming can actually give him a good life?
That question stayed with me.
And the more I thought about it, the bigger it became.
Before we had farmers, we had to find food
For most of human history, humans didn't grow their own food.
They hunted.
They fished.
They gathered fruits, roots, seeds, leaves and whatever else nature provided.
Food was something humans had to find.
Then, thousands of years ago, humans began doing something very different.
They started growing plants.
They began domesticating animals.
Instead of only finding food in nature, humans started producing food themselves.
It sounds simple when we describe it in one sentence.
But I don't think it was a small change.
Once humans could produce food more predictably, they could stay in one place.
Settlements grew.
People could specialize.
Someone could farm.
Someone could make tools.
Someone could trade.
Someone could build.
Someone could govern.
Eventually, cities and civilizations emerged.
In a way, agriculture didn't just create food.
It created the possibility of doing other things.
Think about my own work.
I can sit in front of a laptop for hours and write code because I don't have to spend those hours finding food.
A doctor can spend years learning medicine because someone is producing food.
A teacher can teach because someone is producing food.
A factory worker can work in a factory because someone is producing food.
A company founder can spend years building a business because someone, somewhere, is still working the land.
We often look at professions separately.
But they aren't separate.
There is an invisible chain underneath almost everything we do.
And somewhere near the beginning of that chain is food.
And then comes the strange part
If food is so fundamental, why does the person producing it often have so little control over what it is worth?
A farmer can own the land.
He can buy the seeds.
He can prepare the soil.
He can arrange irrigation.
He can spend months taking care of the crop.
He can worry about rain.
He can worry about pests.
He can worry about disease.
He can worry about fertilizer prices.
He can worry about electricity.
He can worry about whether the harvest will be good.
And after all of that, another question is waiting.
At what price will I sell it?
That question bothers me.
Because imagine doing this with any other business.
Imagine building a product for six months.
You spend your own money.
You take the risk.
You do the work.
And when the product is finally ready, someone else tells you what it is worth.
Maybe there is a reason for that.
Maybe the market has its own logic.
Maybe demand is low.
Maybe supply is high.
Maybe transportation and storage cost money.
I understand all of that.
But still, something feels strange.
The farmer takes the risk first.
The price comes later.
The farmer doesn't control the weather either
There is another thing that makes farming different.
Most businesses can change their strategy when conditions change.
A restaurant can change its menu.
A software company can change its product.
A shop can stop selling one product and start selling another.
A farmer can't simply wake up one morning and say:
"This year's market looks bad. I'll stop producing wheat."
The crop is already in the ground.
The money has already been spent.
The months have already passed.
The weather has already done whatever it wanted to do.
The farmer has to wait.
Sometimes the crop fails.
Sometimes the crop is excellent.
And sometimes something even more frustrating happens.
The farmer produces a good crop...
but the price isn't good.
That is when I realized that farming isn't simply a problem of production.
It is also a problem of power.
Producing more doesn't always mean earning more
This sounds strange at first.
If I make more of something, shouldn't I earn more?
Not necessarily.
If thousands of farmers produce the same crop at the same time, supply can increase.
Demand may not increase at the same speed.
Prices can fall.
And the farmer cannot always wait.
Maybe the crop is perishable.
Maybe there is no proper storage.
Maybe the farmer needs money immediately.
Maybe there is a loan to repay.
Maybe the next crop has to be financed.
So eventually, the crop has to leave the farmer's hands.
And this is where the market becomes more powerful than the field.
Then there is the middleman
This is where I think conversations about farming often become too simple.
We like stories with a hero and a villain.
So it is easy to say:
Farmer = good.
Middleman = bad.
But I don't think that tells the whole story.
Someone has to collect produce from many farmers.
Someone has to transport it.
Someone has to sort it.
Someone has to find buyers.
Someone has to connect a farmer with a market that may be hundreds of kilometers away.
Someone also has to take risks.
So middlemen aren't automatically useless or evil.
They perform functions.
The more interesting question is different:
How much value does everyone in the chain capture, and how much bargaining power does everyone have?
That question is much harder.
And I think it is much more important.
The person who can wait has power
This is probably the biggest thing I started thinking about.
Imagine I have harvested my crop today.
I need money today.
I don't have enough storage.
I don't know what the price will be next week.
I don't have many buyers.
Now imagine someone else has storage, money, information, transportation and access to multiple markets.
Who has more bargaining power?
Probably the person who can wait.
That made me realize something:
Bargaining power isn't always about who owns the product.
Sometimes it's about who can afford to wait.
The crop hasn't changed.
The farmer hasn't suddenly become less hardworking.
The only thing that changed is the amount of freedom each person has.
And freedom in a market matters.
We have made farming more technological. But have we made farmers more powerful?
This is another question I can't stop thinking about.
Today we have tractors.
Better irrigation.
Weather forecasting.
Drones.
Satellite imagery.
Soil testing.
Better seeds.
Mobile phones.
Digital marketplaces.
Artificial intelligence.
Technology that would have looked like science fiction to farmers a few generations ago.
And technology can absolutely help farmers produce more efficiently.
But productivity and bargaining power are not the same thing.
A farmer can produce more and still struggle to get a good price.
A farmer can have a smartphone and still lack reliable market information.
A farmer can have a good harvest and still lack storage.
A farmer can use better technology and still be forced to sell at the wrong time.
So maybe we shouldn't only ask:
"How can we help farmers produce more?"
Maybe we should also ask:
"How can we help farmers have more control after they produce?"
That feels like a very different question.
I keep coming back to that broken pump
The pump breaking was actually the easiest problem that day.
It stopped.
I took it to the market.
Someone repaired it.
I brought it back.
It started again.
Problem solved.
But farming has many problems that don't work like that.
What happens when the crop is ready?
Who buys it?
At what price?
Who knows the market better?
Who has storage?
Who can wait?
Who has access to more buyers?
Who bears the risk?
Who gets the larger part of the final value?
And most importantly:
How much control does the farmer actually have?
I don't have a perfect answer.
And I don't want to pretend that I do.
But perhaps asking the right question is a better beginning than giving an easy answer.
We are getting further away from farming
There is something interesting about modern life.
The farther we move away from agriculture, the easier it becomes to forget agriculture.
I can spend an entire day thinking about software.
I can think about artificial intelligence.
I can build applications.
I can talk about databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure and distributed systems.
And I love doing those things.
But tomorrow morning, I will still need food.
So will the person running a billion-dollar company.
So will the person building the next AI model.
So will the doctor.
So will the politician.
So will the engineer.
So will everyone reading this.
Our technology keeps becoming more complicated.
Our basic needs don't.
And someone still has to produce the food.
But I don't want to romanticize farmers either
There is another mistake we make.
We sometimes turn farmers into symbols.
"Farmers are the backbone of the nation."
"Farmers feed the country."
"Respect farmers."
These statements aren't necessarily wrong.
But I sometimes wonder:
What does respect actually mean?
Is respect just saying nice things about farmers?
Or should respect mean making farming a profession from which someone can confidently build a good life?
I think the second one matters more.
We tell young people:
Learn technology.
Become an engineer.
Become a doctor.
Start a company.
Get a government job.
But how often do we tell a young person:
Become a farmer.
And if we rarely say that, maybe we should ask ourselves why.
Is farming economically attractive enough?
Can someone enter farming today and realistically build wealth?
Can a young person look at agriculture as a career and think:
"Yes, I want to do this."
I don't know.
But I think that uncertainty itself tells us something.
Farmers don't need our pity
There is a difference between sympathy and respect.
Sympathy says:
"Poor farmer. He works so hard."
Respect asks:
"Why does someone doing such important work have so little control over the economics of that work?"
The first makes us emotional for a moment.
The second makes us uncomfortable.
I prefer the second.
Because farmers shouldn't be treated as people who need our pity.
They are professionals.
They create value.
They take risks.
They make decisions.
They deserve information.
They deserve access to markets.
They deserve opportunities to negotiate.
And they should be able to build a good life through their profession.
Maybe this is the real paradox
Thousands of years ago, humans changed their lives when they learned how to produce food.
That change helped create settlements.
Then trade.
Then specialization.
Then cities.
Then civilizations.
Thousands of years later, we have built incredibly complicated systems on top of that foundation.
Financial markets.
Global supply chains.
Cloud computing.
Artificial intelligence.
Companies worth billions.
Machines that can travel into space.
And underneath all of that complexity is still the same basic requirement:
We need to eat.
Yet the person producing that food can still wake up in the morning wondering:
"What price will I get for what I produce?"
That contrast is difficult for me to ignore.
I started this article with a broken pump
Maybe that's where I should end it.
At 7 AM, I was simply giving water to my crop.
At 9 AM, the pump broke.
At around 1 PM, I finally got the water running again.
At the time, I thought I was just fixing a machine.
Now I think that day made me notice something much bigger.
Farming isn't just putting a seed into the ground and waiting for a crop.
It is a profession built on risk, patience, uncertainty and dependence on a market that the farmer doesn't completely control.
And perhaps that's why I have started looking at farmers differently.
Not as people we should feel sorry for.
Not as some romantic symbol of rural India.
But as professionals doing one of the most fundamental jobs in society.
A job on which every other profession ultimately depends.
And that leaves me with a question I still don't have a complete answer to:
If the person who produces something we cannot live without cannot confidently decide what his work is worth, then what does that say about the way we have built our economy?
I don't know the complete answer yet.
But I think it is a question worth asking.