Adapting to the smaller farms of the future

“Small is beautiful, but big is necessary”

This is my favourite quotation so far from the World Economic Forum event here in Tianjin. It was said in reference to agricultural solutions in The Future of the Rural Economy session. Throughout the day it came to my mind in other sessions and my various discussions.

I think it embodies the concept of combining diverse elements that work on a variety of scales. It seems to me that most opportunities contain some element of this dichotomy. When I tell people about my company, Driptech, they usually grasp the potential impact that drip irrigation can have on improving the livelihood of individual smallholder farmers. After all, drip irrigation is a technology that has been around for more than 50 years and is proven to save water and labour, and increase yield for many crops.

Why, then, is so little of the world’s irrigated land under efficient drip irrigation? It has taken decades to convert just a few per cent from wasteful flood irrigation. This is, in part, because the majority of farms are small, with more than 500 million smallholder farms of fewer than five acres suffering from water scarcity. And with a growing population, these farms in many countries are only getting smaller. Products and technologies need to be redesigned to fit the needs of this huge untapped market.

With almost half of the world’s farmers in India and China, we have to think small if we’re going to get big. This means exploring new models for flexible, distributed manufacturing. It means getting smaller with our packaging and distribution to leverage existing channels. And it means designing small products to be appropriate and affordable for farmers who earn in many cases US$ 1,000 or less a year. Even financing needs to be resized in order to scale. These are the challenges that Driptech faces.

I was delighted to see engagement on these issues in a variety of sessions. This level of discourse reveals the capacity of the Forum and its Members to balance the potential conflict between big and small, and to work constructively towards solutions that scale from one single farmer to millions. Ultimately, the most beautiful thing about a small solution is when it can be replicated on a huge scale.

Author: Peter Frykman is the Founder and CEO of Driptech, a 2012 Technology Pioneer. 

Picture: REUTERS/Mike Blake.