We Plan To Transform Urban Agriculture By Turning Rooftops Into Farms: Khetify

Customers do not need to worry about finding high-quality seeds, ensuring your potting mixture has enough nutrients, knowing the seasonality of crops or the best ways to manage pests. Khetify takes care of all of that.

What benefits does Khetify have for the consumer?
Khetify’s customers get access to affordable, fresh and chemical free vegetables and thus improve their nutrition, reduce their carbon footprint and save on grocery bills.

Around 30 per cent of vegetables brought from vegetable markets have some residual pesticides on them including those that are carcinogenic. Perishable items like vegetables, fruits, herbs and leafy greens reach cities after lingering around for a long time in the supply chain. Studies estimate that the energy required to transport a cauliflower from farm to table is 36 times its calorific value and an onion travels an average of 1,500km around the country before reaching our table; definitely not sustainable.

Urban Indians have disconnected from farming and agriculture. Due to this, we’ve stopped caring about the quality, environmental impact and nutritional significance of our food. By growing our own produce, we hope to reconnect city dwellers with their nature and nutrition while also building empathy for farmers.

What are the main impediments to your business?
Hiring high-quality talent from the domains of agriculture, botany and ecology has been a challenge. Our back-end operations interface with the informal economy such as daily wage labour, logistics and transport along with dealers of compost, cow dung, etc., and bringing standardisation to these has been a challenge. Lastly, as a company we have to play a balancing act in being in sync with both the agricultural cycle and the financial cycle.

How does Khetify contribute towards a sustainable future?
Khetify is contributing towards a sustainable future by decentralising energy production because it is the foundation of sustainability. Decentralised production of energy materialise when energy is produced where it is consumed. Just like electricity is an energy for the machinery of the economy, food is energy for its citizens. And we believe that bottom-up solutions (agriculture by citizens in underutilized spaces) of decentralised food production will contribute significantly to the sustainability of a city.

Our vision aligns with this idea of creating smart urban citizens who can wean themselves off food markets by growing their own food in their homes. By using our smart urban farming solutions, cities will be able to grow their own organic fruits and vegetables on their roof-tops and in community parks. Smart citizens will realise the nutritional value in growing their own vegetables, which further adds to the resilience of the city.

What drove you into this business?
Khare: Post our education at IIT-Kharagpur, we both landed up in Delhi. Parekh was working as a sustainability researcher for TERI while I joined the Young India Fellowship. Post his fellowship, I was selected as an IIC fellow by the University of Chicago to work as an urban designer where he was working on the design of greenfield smart cities under the central government’s Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor project. While researching on sustainability at TERI and designing sustainable cities, both Parekh and I felt that unless cities take control of their food systems, sustainability could not be achieved.

What are your next steps and how does the future hold towards such a business?
We are looking to grow our customer base in Delhi NCR along with our crop portfolio and explore new market segments such as schools, housing societies, universities, etc.