Meet the Pune farmer brothers being funded by Akshay Kumar, Virendra Sehwag

TBOF was set up by Satyajit and his brother Ajinkya Hange in 2016, a few years after they quit their corporate jobs. Their core area is Indapur and Bhodani and they have trained more than 16,000 farmers and work with more than 800 farmers on more than 1,000 acres. The company practises an intense and time-consuming form of regenerative agriculture and food processing that is focused on healing the soil by working on traditional methods with communities of farmers.

The fresh influx of money from Sehwag and Kumar will be used to bring more product lines to the market, generate employment for rural workers, set up training centres and FDA-approved processing and storage facilities, and marketing outreach to customers who are conscious of what they are eating and can afford premium products. Their products range from different types of oils, rice, ghee, pulses, millets, sugar and jaggery to gulkand, chyawanprash and laddoo and thandai mix.

The Hanges belong to a small village called Bhodani and were sent to boarding at The Bishop’s School in Pune when they were children “because the elders believe that there was no future in the village”. Satyajit graduated in Economics from Fergusson College and Ajinkya in Computer Science and both of them finished their MBA like everybody wanted them to do. They began to work in multinational banks. “Somewhere, this question of whether we are doing what we love began to come into our heads. We used to spend our summer and Diwali holidays on the farm in the village, where we had a 100-year-old wada, and we loved the life,” he says.

One evening, with such thoughts inside them, Satyajit and Ajinkya decided to meet and talk over tea. The only place open was a tea stall at Pune Railway Station. They walked and discussed the direction of their lives and soon a decision driven by emotion, beyond logic, was arrived at. By 4 am, they had decided to quit their jobs and return to their village to farm. Both were married and Satyajit was already a dad.

It was once they got into farming that they realised that the nitty-gritty was far harder than it seemed. “Village life is not only about waking up to the sun, going to the field to see how food is grown and being among livestock,” says Satyajit. For one, the yield of sugarcane had reduced from 80 to 90 tonne three decades ago to about 35 tonne at the time due to chemical fertilisers. They took lessons in microbiology and the principles of regenerative agriculture.

“Our soil is worth its weight in gold. We wish to leave it in a better shape than when we received it. We want it to breathe, to live, to sustain life. The reason for our regenerative farming practices is to maintain a healthy and enriched soil,” says the mission statement on the company’s website. The company uses only cow dung manure. The soil is mulched, 10,000 Australian pine trees have been planted along the border as wind barriers and a food forest is being developed.

Yet, when they took their first harvest of papaya to the market, the brothers found that the Marketyard mandi would offer them only half the rate as compared to chemically-grown fruit. “We were told that our fruit was not appealing to the eye so no consumer will take our product. That experience literally jolted us,” says Satyajit. They did manage to sell the stock of papaya to a handcart seller.

Since then, TBOF has created channels that range from farmers’ markets in Mumbai, where their customers include film stars and industrials, to e-commerce portals such as their website. Today, they have more than 200,000 customers across the world and have generated Rs 17.30 crore in 2021–2022 and Rs 26 crore in 2022-23. They are targeting Rs 40 crore in the current fiscal. The company has gone beyond the papaya they had started with and offers, among other things, khapli wheat that used to be grown before the green revolution and makes ‘Full Moon Cultured Ghee’ according to Ayurvedic rituals on full moon nights.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned them in Mann ki Baat when their training had touched 9,000 farmers. “Now, farmers’ markets contribute less than 0.1 per cent of our overall revenue but, every Sunday, we drive 350 km from Pune to Mumbai, for the farmers’ market. We have realised that farmers’ markets are where real people come to talk to you. A community is built around what we are doing. We tell our stories about the impact of choices on global warming, water and our individual health,” says Satyajit.