We founded Sanesa in 2017. We are often asked about meaning of Sanesa as most business names do have relatively simpler meanings. But Sanesa isn’t that type of word. You can google all the while but no meaning would show up. Reality is that it is just a word coined by combining initials of our mother’s names. Sanesa reflects the purest love of our life and everyday while doing very small mundane things, we still get reminded of that love. The name used to be Sanesa Natural Farms till sometime ago and then we changed it to Sanesa Yourganic. Yourganic signifies our commitment to deliver the kind of organic you relate to as quite a few organic things can be fairly different from what your understand by organic. We love the name as written in Hindi where our logo shows the infinity as the starting point of Sanesa. It symbolizes the infinity that nature is when compared to our ability to comprehend. For example, we are still struggling to crack “photo-synthesis” that every leaf is so simply able to do. When you really get down to growing food, you realise there are many more such magical things that routinely take place and create food and oxygen for us to live but we are far from knowing how.
We were bankers for a few years and our jobs involved staring at very fast changing computer screens for a lot of time during the day. Gradually, we got bored of tracking oil and gold prices, global stock markets and interest rate swaps etc etc and reading too many emails everyday 😊. So we decided to quit our jobs and started exploring something more interesting and more meaningful to do. Our initial ideas revolved around agriculture finance. We knew how banks crave for agriculture related loans with good potential to be repaid so we were exploring bankable ideas related to agriculture and arrange finance. Amongst the ideas we explored was the modern farming that goes by names of Polyhouse Farming, protected cultivation etc etc. If you google about farming, chances are you will see magical videos of farmers making crores from very small pieces of land. Well, we saw almost all of them 😊. All of these promised that just build a polyhouse and next thing one will be doing it to just count the money!! It seemed like a magical open secret.
Predictable production and riches on YouTube videos feel so exciting when you compare those to dull screens that stare at you at your office. Start a polyhouse, hydroponics and earn lazy income, is a dream that many buy into. Our skepticism and mindset for seeing things for ourselves, saved us. We met farmers who had set up polyhouses, met a company that constructed polyhouses, met a banker who financed polyhouses and then decided to attend a proper 3 day training at an Institute specifically created for training farmers for polyhouse farming. We had our doubts already, and just one day at the institute sufficed for raising those doubts to red flags status and we spent remaining 2 days confirming our red flags and decided to stay away. It is not our view that polyhouse farming can’t succeed but we do believe that it is tougher than usual farming. Facts are that Polyhouses need to earn more value of their produce, farmers are not trained enough to operate and bouquet of products that can help achieve viability is small and hence competitive. All these factors increase financial risk for a section of society that is most risk averse.