Harnessing Sustainable Innovation: A Talk with Bayer’s VK Kishore

Last month, Grow Further donor members, staff, and friends were treated to an informative hour-long discussion featuring a top expert on agricultural innovation and food security.

VK Kishore is the Global Head of Vegetable Seeds, Smallholders, and Sustainability at Bayer. He also serves on the boards of the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, Hunger Free America, and International Development Enterprises. Originally from India, Kishore holds several crop science patents and has published research papers in a variety of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

As a crop geneticist, Kishore shared his thoughts with the hundreds of people who tuned in online to hear him and Grow Further CEO Peter Kelly discuss the state of food security, how smallholders fit into the global food security picture, and the role that philanthropy and the private sector have to play in ensuring a sustainable future for agriculture in the face of climate change.

Their talk, titled “Harnessing Innovation: Empowering Smallholder Farming in Global Food Security,” occurred on January 22 and was the first in our 2025 Virtual Speaker Series. They covered a lot of ground, too much to include all here, but toward the end of their talk and Q&A with the audience, it became clear that the importance of the work at Grow Further is coming to be recognized by a wide range of actors, including major institutions like Bayer Crop Science. That’s because, as Kishore said early in the event, smallholder farmers in India, Africa, and beyond are “guardians of food security in this world.”

That’s especially true in the face of climate change, he said, which continues to ravage much of the world.

“We are already experiencing climate change in many ways,” he said. “So basically, the food system is under a lot of pressure.”

An urgent business to attend to

Expanding on the threat global warming poses to agriculture, VK Kishore warned the audience that time is of the essence. 

“[By] about 2050, we will have another close to 1.5 billion to 2 billion people that we would need to feed,” he said.

Kishore noted the recent news that more than 150 Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates signed an open letter “calling for transformative innovations, calling for moonshots in agriculture.”

“That could help improve these sustainable practices, right?” Kishore added. “So, I’m fully with that thought process and I’m fully buying into that.”

The key to a more food-secure future, Kishore said, is “for us to have climate smart-ready crops, climate smart-ready agricultural practices.”

Asked to elaborate on the role of innovative technologies in revolutionizing sustainable agriculture, Kishore pointed to India’s experience to illustrate the enormous potential of agricultural innovation, but also the need to move in a different, more sustainable direction.

“I come from the generation that benefited from the Green Revolution,” Kishore explained. “The Indian subcontinent was on the verge of famine, and if we didn’t increase food security in that part of the world billions would have died and I probably wouldn’t have been here.”

Thanks to the pioneering ag innovation work by Norman Borlaug and MS Swaminathan, India swung from near famine to becoming a major agricultural producer and exporter. However, Kishore argued that the Green Revolution in India was a little too successful—food production exploded but at the expense of water tables and soils.

Worried about the stress on India’s water resources and ongoing soil degradation in the face of inevitable climate change, Kishore says now is the time to introduce innovations that will help agriculture have a lighter touch on the landscape.

“The innovations that Norman Borlaug and Swaminathan brought into the Indian subcontinent in terms of better yielding varieties, use of fertilizers, use of mechanization, automation, helped improve really the food security a lot,” he said. “But I think it probably went a little too far, because now if you look at the situation, you know, in those same belts, you see a lot of water deficit.”

“We really need to bring that pendulum back into the middle, where we got to really figure out how can we grow more for less,” he added. “How can we make sure that the production increases, but the input that we are putting in is less? So, that means you really need technologies within the seed that help you deliver more production, more marketable yield.” He said he believes digitizing agricultural knowledge will be “extremely important” in this quest for better and more sustainable food security.

From seeds to genes

When asked how indigenous crops and greater biodiversity could contribute to ensuring more sustainable food production, Kishore said one key to achieving this balance will be crop gene diversity.

“Genetic diversity is going to be a very important aspect of the entire ecosystem that we’re talking about,” he said. “We can’t just keep having monocropping, we can’t have just the same sort of genetics all along.”

 

“We really need to bring that pendulum back into the middle, where we got to really figure out how can we grow more for less.”

 

That said, he clarified that not all genes are created equal. To benefit smallholder farmers, innovators will need to focus on propagating crops with genes that make them more resilient to diseases and pests, and genes that allow crops to withstand heat and droughts. The problem is these genetic innovations could lead to crops that yield less food per hectare. Kishore said it will be critical for smallholder agricultural innovation to balance the potential of new hybrid seeds with the time-tested qualities of indigenous crops.

“What you really need to have is a system that brings these two together,” he said. “We don’t just say that the indigenous seeds are the way to go, or we just say only the current hybrids are the only way to go, right? I think you need to really bring them together to make it work best for our planet.”

 

Building partnerships for smallholder farms

Toward the end of their session, Kishore and Peter fielded questions from the audience.

Participants asked whether this push for better smallholder agricultural innovations may end up repeating some of the same mistakes as seen in India with excess water use and soil degradation. The two were asked how Bayer and Grow Further might foster other ways for innovators and entrepreneurs to get involved in this space. One participant asked what might be done to create better connections between rural farmers and urban food consumers.

Many of the questions touched on the importance of alliances and partnerships. Kishore emphasized this point in remarks he made just before the audience Q&A portion of the talk. “There is a lot of funding,” he said. “There’s a lot of climate finance that needs to really come and support in this space to really bring innovations and basic innovations like what we’re talking about here.”

“We can’t do this alone in this space,” Kishore added. “You got to apply partnerships, and partnerships amongst the public sector, private sector, and then I would say philanthropy.”

Grow Further founder and CEO Peter Kelly strongly concurred. After all, partnership is what brought him and Kishore together to share their visions with everyone who tuned in.

“Partnerships are absolutely critical, both in terms of our reason for being as an organization in terms of filling in gaps in the system,” Peter said.

We’re fortunate to be working with top-level experts like VK Kishore, our grantees in sub-Saharan Africa, the allies and connections we’re fostering in India, and our numerous donors and donor members as we all work to build an entirely new field whereby individuals can contribute directly to developing smallholder farming innovations that will change the world. Stay tuned. 

 

— Grow Further

 

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