Big Picture | A carrot story: How a former Armyman turned Sikandrabad into a hub for the crop

Workers grading the produce at Sunshine Vegetables’ Sikandrabad unit

The start: A carrot farm

Originally from a farming family in Bhadani village of Haryana’s Jhajjar district, Deswal’s plunge into agriculture took place some 150 km away — in Sikandrabad, where his elder brother, Ashok, ran an Indian Oil Corporation wholesale dealership. It was allotted after another brother, Lance Naik Rajbir Singh, was martyred in the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Deswal himself was in the Army, commissioned into the 12th Battalion of the Mechanised Infantry Regiment in 1984 and prematurely retiring as Lieutenant Colonel from the same unit in 2006.

While still in service and visiting his brother in Sikandrabad, Deswal met Lal Krishan Yadav. “He (Yadav) was a local pesticide dealer interested in farming and so was I. We took 250 bigha (50 acres) on lease in Sikandrabad Dehat and started growing potato, onion and wheat,” he says. That was in 1998. For the next four years, they ran into losses.

In 2002-03, the two experimented with carrots on two acres. The results were encouraging enough for them to expand that to 20 acres the following crop year. Also, instead of the long and slender desi Asiatic red carrots, they began cultivating the deep orange, cylindrical French Nantes variety that has blunt ends.

Very soon, Deswal discovered what it meant to be a small farmer. “We were farming carrots the old way, sowing seeds through broadcasting (scattering) by hand and cleaning the harvested produce in water tubs using our feet to rub the soil off. We did proper grading though, so that the carrots were of uniform quality. Also, we filled 82 kg in each bag to ensure it weighed 80 kg even after moisture loss,” he recalls.

But all this was of no use when it came to selling their carrots in Delhi’s Azadpur wholesale market. The arhatiyas there merely communicated the going market rate for the day by phone. Based on that rate, say, Rs 500 for an 80-kg bag, the farmer would harvest his crop the next morning, wash and grade it in the afternoon and dispatch it after filling the bags at about 8 pm for it to reach Azadpur before midnight, when the market opened.

Deswal (left) started his farming venture with Lal Krishan Yadav, a pesticide dealer in Sikandrabad. (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

The real game happened then. The farmer, who sent 50 bags expecting to realise Rs 500 per bag, found it to be only a theoretical price. “The arhatiya would send back a patti (pay slip) after a week, mentioning a per-bag rate of Rs 500 for 10 bags, Rs 450 for 20 and Rs 350 for the remaining 20. Further, he would deduct commission fees and other expenses, including on stationery, dak (postage) and daan (charity), before making the payment in cash,” says Deswal.

For him, the humiliation was too much to bear. “Under this system that prevails even now, the farmer could never negotiate a rate and had to accept whatever the arhatiya gave, just enough to keep him alive,” he says.

That sense of outrage triggered his determination to become “the biggest carrot grower and seller”.

Steady investments, returns

In 2004-05, Deswal and Yadav grew carrots on 100 acres, while also adopting modern cultivation practices. At the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi, N P S Sirohi, principal scientist in charge of an Indo-Israel project, showed them an Agricola Italiana pneumatic precision seed drill. It used compressed air pressure to sow vegetable seeds at predetermined uniform depths and spacing, between rows and from plant to plant. Deswal paid Rs 8.5 lakh to import the Italian machine, which boosted germination rates and reduced his seed requirement to 800 grams per acre, from more than 3 kg in traditional broadcasting.

In addition, the two farmers went in for laser levelling of their fields (to enable uniform distribution of water and fertiliser placement) and making raised beds with furrows. The carrot seeds were sown on the elevated ridges, allowing irrigation water to flow through the furrows in between and reach the crop’s root zone. The excess water was drained off into the furrows, preventing flooding of the crop and promoting soil aeration, unlike with regular flat-bed planting.

07: Deswal at his cold storage unit in Sikandrabad. (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

Deswal got the laser land-leveller machine, along with a narrow-wheel tractor that could move through the furrows, from Raj K Gupta, a soil scientist with CIMMYT’s (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) India Office in New Delhi. Gupta also connected Deswal with Aroor Singh of A S H Agriculture Works at Jandiala Guru in Punjab’s Amritsar district.

“The Agricola precision seeder was expensive. Aroor Singh designed a machine for us that both made raised beds and sowed carrot seeds. Although a mechanical and not pneumatic seed drill, the 50-horsepower tractor-drawn machine costs only

Rs 90,000 for making two beds and Rs 1.25 lakh for three beds. We started using it from 2008-09,” says Deswal.

It didn’t stop there. Deswal engaged a local welder to develop a blade that could be attached to the narrow-wheel tractor. This blade cut and loosened the soil under the carrots, making it possible for labourers to harvest them by simply picking and not pulling with great effort. Deswal also installed drum-washer machines for cleaning and soft peeling (removing the hard skin) of the freshly harvested root vegetables. “We stopped washing and cleaning carrots by feet from 2004-05 itself,” he says.

Workers grading the produce at Sunshine Vegetables’ Sikandrabad unit. (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

When yields doubled

The improved cultivation practices led to carrot yields more than doubling from 8-10 tonnes to 20 tonnes-plus per acre. In 2004-05, Deswal and Yadav made money for the first time – around Rs 75 lakh.

Yields further rose to 30-35 tonnes per acre with the planting of hybrid carrots, as against the open-pollinated Nantes varieties, from 2008-09. The seeds of the Zubera and Zane F1 Nantes hybrids were sourced from HM.Clause, a leading French vegetable seeds company that imported these through its wholly-owned Indian arm.

By now, Deswal was producing enough carrots, both in terms of quantity and quality, for the arhatiyas to come and negotiate rates on his terms. Yadav and he were growing carrots on 500 acres — 250 by themselves and another 250 through contract cultivation. They supplied the hybrid seeds, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides to the contract growers, made the raised beds and sowed and harvested for them using their machines. The growers were from villages in and around Sikandrabad: Sikandrabad Dehat, Prangarh, Dariyapur, Muradabad, Deota, Chiti, Astauli, Sanwali and Kanwara.

On October 13, 2009, Deswal and Yadav incorporated Sunshine Vegetables Private Limited, mainly to set up cold storage and processing facilities for their carrots. The carrots sown in October to mid-November were harvested from mid-February to mid-April. This produce, if stored at low temperatures to extend their shelf life, could be sold round the year and fetch better prices in the off-season when there was no supply glut.

“Initially, we used potato cold stores, where the temperature is brought down gradually, from about 28°C during harvesting to 8°C for the normal table (table potatoes) and to 2°C for seed tubers, over 20-25 days. But this didn’t work well for carrots, where you have to bring it down to 0°C in 24 hours and also maintain a relative humidity of 95%. Only then can you store the carrots for eight months and preserve their keeping quality,” explains Deswal.

The next step: a cold storage

Around 2011, the two farm entrepreneurs bought 11 acres of agricultural land on the Grand Trunk Road in Sikandrabad to establish a dedicated cold store for carrots.

Yields further rose to 30-35 tonnes per acre with the planting of hybrid carrots, as against the open-pollinated Nantes varieties, from 2008-09. (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

But they found out this land could not be used for the intended purpose, since it came under the Bulandshahr Development Authority whose rules categorised cold stores as “commercial” and any processing as “industrial” activity. Even if a farmer wanted to build a cold store on his own agricultural land located within a development authority’s jurisdiction, he could do it only on 10% of that area. Building anything bigger required applying for change of land use and paying a prabhaav kar (impact tax).

“I wanted the cold store and processing unit at a single place, close to our fields. The impact tax and other charges would have made it unviable,” points out Deswal, who even took his case before then UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav.

In November 2014, the UP government  raised the area cap for creating cold storage capacity on agriculture land to 35%. In February 2015, Akhilesh Yadav laid the foundation stone for Sunshine Vegetables’ 6,500-tonne cold store. It cost Rs 8 crore and was financed by a Rs 5-crore Punjab National Bank loan, on which there was a Rs 1.7 crore back-ended subsidy from the National Horticulture Board. Deswal and Yadav put in the remaining Rs 3 crore.

Setting the terms, price

The duo have since expanded their carrot-growing area to about 1,500 acres: 284 of their own and the remaining through 517 contract growers. This crop year, they will handle close to 45,000 tonnes of produce from both the routes.

Carrot farming is quite profitable. The cultivation expenses are about Rs 70,000 per acre, of which the Nantes hybrid seeds, which cost Rs 32,000/kg or Rs 25,600 for 800 grams per acre, account for a major chunk. At an average yield of 30 tonnes and Rs 6.5-7/kg realisation, farmers can earn Rs 1.25-1.4 lakh per acre.

Carrots being packed in poly bags at Sunshine Vegetables’ Sikandrabad unit. (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav)

The cold storage capacity of Deswal’s Sunshine Vegetables has increased in phases to 25,000 tonnes. In October 2024, UP Chief Secretary Manoj Kumar Singh inaugurated a Rs 40-crore integrated cold chain project for Sunshine Vegetables that was partly funded by a Rs 8.5-crore subsidy from the Union Ministry of Food Processing Industries under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana.

The integrated project included cold storage with a capacity of 6,000 tonnes at 0°C and 4,000 tonnes at -20°C (frozen); a

5 tonne/hour automatic vegetable processing unit (for washing, polishing, hydro-cooling, grading, weighing and bagging of fresh produce); a 3 tonne/hour Individual Quick Freezing line (to wash, slice and dice 8-inch carrots to 6-9 mm cubes); and ten 9-tonne refrigerated trucks.

Deswal and Yadav, who have an annual turnover of over Rs 50 crore, sell their carrots not only in Delhi-NCR, UP and Haryana, but also Rajasthan, Punjab, Jammu, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai and Coimbatore. Theirs is a story of enterprise: how they invested in farm productivity-boosting technologies and leveraged government schemes.

Above all, it is a story of farmers taking charge of their destiny by becoming capitalists themselves — as price setters, not price takers.