The Missing Step: How to Start a Business in Food and Farming - Softcover

Singh, Anshuman

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798163978861

Verlag: Independently published, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A tomato grower in India keeps about ₹33 of every ₹100 the shopper pays. A dairy farmer in a cooperative keeps about ₹70.

This book is for first-time founders of small food and farm businesses in India, and for the incubators, bankers and programme officers who fund and coach them. By the last page you will be able to pick one business, name the customer who pays you in the first season, and write a stop rule: the measurement that must hold before you spend on a second site.

Both figures are all-India estimates from Reserve Bank of India papers of October 2024, not Bihar figures. Where the grower's share is low, a physical step is usually missing: a public scale, a grade, a cold hour, a machine for a day, a payment the same day. This book is about owning one such step.

The Missing Step is an arithmetic-first manual. It works through eleven businesses, one per chapter, tests each against the constraints of rural Bihar, where the average holding is 0.39 hectare, and then sets it beside the rest of India:

• Chapter 2: Build a shared processing shed (makhana, paddy)
• Chapter 3: Open a collection center that pays the same day
• Chapter 4: Rent cold storage by the crate
• Chapter 5: Rent the machine by the acre
• Chapter 6: Operate the drone someone else already bought
• Chapter 7: Sell a sensor that prevents one total loss
• Chapter 8: Sell counted seed, nearer feed, and the first hour of ice
• Chapter 9: Multiply seed for a buyer who must buy it
• Chapter 10: Digitize the milk chain that already pays the farmer
• Chapter 11: Keep the small animal alive, then sell it
• Chapter 12: Sell a changed practice, and the file someone else pays for

Inside, you will find:

• The five-price ladder: what the producer, the trader, the city wholesaler, the graded form and the consumer pay, with a rung left blank wherever you have no slip.
• Three kinds of money: capital for the asset, the float that sits in lots and unpaid invoices, and the bridge that pays wages while a subsidy file moves (Chapter 14).
• One sheet, filled in: a makhana shed run in toll mode and in trading mode, every formula shown and every unmeasured cell left blank (Chapter 17).
• A first-site checklist and a funder's gate block at the end of every business chapter, and for incubators a cohort chapter with one-day exercises, a scoring rubric and 18 printable sheets (Chapter 24).

How the numbers are labelled. Every figure carries one of six tags: sourced, planning estimate, derived with the sum shown, derived from estimates, researched and dated, or unverified. Planning estimates come from the author's unpublished Bihar operating notes and are marked wherever they appear. The founders in the worked cases are composites created for the book; the institutions, scheme rules and constraints they meet are drawn from published Indian studies and the author's unpublished Bihar field briefs. Figures were last checked on 19 October 2026.

The companion volume, The Missing Step Directory, prints 286 entries on schemes, lenders, funds and institutions, drawn from 379 checked items in a sortable CSV, each with its standing and the date it was checked.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Independently published
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798163978861
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 315
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar