Growing Carrots with the Stick
Srinivasa Sajja graduated from BITS Pilani and stayed on for 4 years as a teaching assistant. He then joined IIM Calcutta for his fellow program. He had got married by them. Did not realise that his better half was also staying on the campus during the time we were there. Sajja quit the FPM program in 1996. Life was tough. His educational loan was not yet paid, he had just been married, and in general finance was in a big mess. He joined a Chennai based company in 1998, which sent him to the US as an ERP consultant. Sajja had no training. Most of the company’s clients were in manufacturing. Sajja had not seen the inside of a factory. But our friend is a quick learner. He went on to finish a project management certificate program in 45 days. The normal American takes about 7 years to finish this program. He was co-opted into the academic committee of this certification program.
Sajja started off on his own in 2005 with https://srisys.com/. He had become an Oracle specialist by then. In those days, unlike SAP, Oracle allowed each module to be implemented independently. Most ERP implementations fail because of the cut-paste solutions that they employ. The IT consultant does what he thinks is right for the client. Sajja, in contrast, would do a 5 hour call with a client to understand how the company works. He would explore even details like the way salespeople are incentivized. These deep dives paid off. Very soon, the Oracle sales team was recommending Sajja’s company whenever the client faced problems with the implementation partners.
Sajja was wearing two hats. A salesman during the day and a programmer at night, working with the India team to get the code right. For 30 years he managed these double roles and was consistently working 18 hour plus days. He would take 5 minute power naps and would manage with just about 3 hours of sleep. During a particularly tough phase from 2012 to 2014, he went for weeks together with no sleep.
The company did well. His wife took care of the front end based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Sajja managed the backend at Hyderabad. The team peaked at 150. But all this wealth came at a huge cost. In 2017, at the relatively young age of 51, Sajja’s health took a turn for the worse. One by one, his organs started acting up: the liver, the kidneys – the worst was when the sleep became zero. For a change, Sajja decided to listen to his body and cut down on work. He reduced his client interaction to the bare minimum.
Both his sons have finished college by now. The elder one went to Carnegie Mellon and has worked for Google since then. The younger one studied at University of Illinois at Urbana champagne and works with Meta. Doesn’t look like either is interested in inheriting the company. Ironically, Sajja’s better half is an agricultural scientist who is now working in IT and the IT specialist is now working in agriculture. The family has investments in lands all across Andhra and Telangana, running into hundreds of acres.
Sajja with his best friend Leo, the guy who is not holding the stick
Sajja has moved from India to Bharat, His new home is an 8 acre farm. A major part of the plot is horticulture: teak and Moringa. Teak is harvested in year 8 or year 12. The standard requirement by the industry is in multiples of 12 feet, that being the size used for door frames. Hence trees are usually grown to a height of either 12 feet or 25 feet. Usually at harvest time, the girth at the trunk bottom is about 8 to 10 inches and the girth at the top is about 4 to 6 inches. The trees are pruned so that branches are minimized. There is knotting where the branch joins the trunk. This knot reduces the value of the wood. The current rate of teak is rupees 7500 per cubic feet. I am not sure if volume is based on cylinder sections or cuboids. For Moringa, the trimming is more drastic. Every 3 years, the tree is chopped off at the 5 feet height. According to Sajja, this keeps the tree young and the drumsticks tender. The leaves and wood are mulched and spread below the trees. This reduces weed growth and keeps the ground moist.
There is a small kitchen garden around his sports arena where he grows lauki, brinjal, etc. One vegetable that he grows in quantity is tomato. The entire farm is on drip irrigation. The water is put into the drip system for about 3 hours a day. Each tree has two tomato plants as neighbours, which get water from the same drip. Sajja’s logic in tomato growing is that he will hit a price bonus about once a year, when the supply shrinks and the demand remains the same.
The farm uses no pesticides and Sajja uses a significant amount of labour to de-weed and remove pests. The fertiliser comes from his dairy. He has purchased a pygmy breed of cows, which yield about 3 l a day of milk. This is comparable to what the larger desi cows yield. The big difference is that the smaller cow requires only 8 to 10 kg of fees per day, compared to 25 + for its bigger friends.
The black Punganur bull on the right is a fully grown 2 year old.
His neighbour, the white bull is just 6 months old.
There is no artificial insemination, so Sajja’s stables now have 4 to 5 bulls. Note, a bullock is a castrated bull. I asked Sajja about the economics of the upkeep of the males and the non lactating cows. His family has a tradition of Gau seva. And Sajja plans to continue that. All his cattle will be taken care of till the end. By the way, beef is still a popular food in Hyderabad. So there is a thriving market for bulls and non lactating cows. An average dairy cow has 5 to 6 pregnancies in its 12 year life; Sajja’s herd averages 3-4.
Two families stay at Sajja’s farm.
Both families have roots in Nanded, Maharashtra.
On the whole, Sajja’s guess is it costs him 2 Rupees to sell 1 rupees worth of produce. The increase in costs could be because the plot is still being developed. I discussed the One Straw revolution and the concept of ‘do nothing’ farming. Very unlikely that our workaholic friend Will ‘do nothing.’
Physical labour has been good for Sajja, he now sleeps 6 to 7 hours a day and his organs are slowly returning back to normal. Have an invitation to spend a few days at his farm in May. Both his sons and the wife will be visiting Hyderabad at that time. And the mangoes in his other 40 acre farm will be in the harvest stage. Sajja’s condition being that he wants the entire family to visit. That is going to be a major challenge.
