TIME Trailblazer Kaushik Kappagantulu’s ‘Greenhouse In A Box’ Helps India’s Farmers

India-West News Desk

HYDERABAD – Kaushik Kappagantulu spent years helping young people from disadvantaged backgrounds find work before turning his attention to the farming families many of them came from. His work has since led to a low-cost agricultural technology aimed at helping India’s small farmers cope with a changing climate.

Kappagantulu was named to TIME’s inaugural ‘Trailblazers: Designing and Making the Future’ list, which recognizes leaders working to shape the future.

His interest in agriculture grew from six years of working with school dropouts, helping them find jobs through vocational training. Kappagantulu noticed that many of those young people came from farming families where agriculture was failing to provide a reliable livelihood.

That experience prompted him to turn his attention to the larger problem.

In 2015, he launched Kheyti, an agri-tech company whose name means farming in Hindi. Its focus is on smallholder farmers, who produce much of India’s staple food and face growing challenges from extreme heat, unseasonable rain and declining groundwater.

The problem can be especially severe during the March-to-June summer growing season. During a heatwave in April, sensors installed by Kheyti recorded ground temperatures reaching 125 degrees Fahrenheit on several farms.

Kappagantulu says climate change is wiping out the hard work of farmers, many of whom earn about $1,000 a year.

Kheyti’s answer is a compact structure called a “greenhouse-in-a-box.” Designed for farmers working on about an acre, the net houses use shade cloth to lower temperatures inside by about 9 degrees Fahrenheit and include drip irrigation.

Each greenhouse is also paired with an AI-powered tool that helps farmers choose crops and manage pests.

According to Kheyti, farmers using the system have reduced crop losses by 58%, while using 67% less water and 70% less fertilizer. Their net income has also risen to three times that of non-Kheyti farmers working on the same amount of land.

The structures cost between $200 and $300. Partnerships with local governments, along with subsidies and low-cost loans, help make them affordable for small farmers.

The greenhouse concept won the Earthshot Prize in 2022. Kheyti now works with roughly 7,000 farmers across eight Indian states, and Kappagantulu aims to double that number over the next year with support from the Indian government, which has recommended that states partner with the company.

Kappagantulu grew up in Hyderabad with the influence of his grandmother, who raised eight children and 20 grandchildren, including him, largely on her own. She taught him that hard work would lead to success. But after graduating from engineering college and volunteering to teach homeless children, he came to see that hard work does not always translate into success when people lack access to opportunities and resources.

He hopes to take Kheyti’s greenhouse model to other countries within the next three years. The company is also developing other products, including flexible solar panels that can be installed on top of the structures.

Kappagantulu’s longer-term goal is to help one million farmers build secure, climate-smart livelihoods by 2033. He says reaching that goal will require collaboration, because lasting change in agriculture and climate resilience cannot come from one solution or organization alone.