Case 1: Building ApiCare, and why a bigger harvest paid farmers less

In short

• In the Sikkim hills, a beekeeper who harvests more honey gets a lower price per kilogram, because the extra honey has to be sold in bulk to a middleman.
• My first plan, one big demonstration farm, failed because I copied a model built for a different bee.
• We moved to small village clusters and trained 125+ people under a government programme. The training worked, but most farmers still couldn’t grow, because they had no money to invest and no record a bank could lend against.
• So the real gap was the missing record of what farmers sell. That is why I’m building FarmLedger.

1. The problem: a good harvest that pays less

It is November in Jitlang, a village in Pakyong district, East Sikkim. Tek Bahadur Rai has forty kilograms of honey. It is festival season, he wants to buy things for his family, and he has more honey than most of his neighbours.

A beekeeper with fifteen kilograms has no trouble selling it. He sells to relatives, neighbours and families who knew his father, slowly over a few months, in reused rum and beer bottles. He gets close to its real value, around ₹1,500 a kilogram, because the buyers know exactly where it came from.

Forty kilograms can’t be sold that way, and Tek Bahadur can’t wait months for the money. So the extra honey goes to a bulk buyer: a farmer producer organisation (FPO), a cooperative or an aggregator. They offer around ₹350 a kilogram and call it the wholesale rate.

He is paid in cash, or sometimes by UPI for small lots. Nobody writes anything down: no receipt, no grade, no moisture reading, no record of where the honey came from or who kept the bees. Once the sale is done there is no proof it happened. He can’t use it in his next negotiation or show it to a bank, and the buyer can’t pass it on to the people who eventually eat the honey.

So producing more doesn’t earn him more per kilogram. It earns him less.

Exhibit 1 · What a kilogram of honey fetches, by channel

A farmer moves from the first row to the second by having a better year.

2. Why it happens: the hills and the calendar

Sikkim is a small mountain state in northeast India, bordered by Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet. The mountains decide how things get bought and sold.

Small, scattered land. A household farms a fraction of a hectare, often on terraces at different heights, and grows cardamom, fruit, vegetables and some livestock. Money comes in bursts as each crop is ready. Beekeeping is extra income, never the main one. It’s popular because it costs almost nothing: you don’t feed the bees.

Long distances. The nearest town is usually half an hour away. The nearest real market, Gangtok, is two to seven hours by road. Forty kilograms of honey isn’t worth a lost working day and a hired vehicle, so somebody has to collect honey from many farmers. That collector is the only person who sees both ends: the farmer knows what he was offered, and the buyer knows what the honey sells for in Gangtok, Siliguri or Kolkata. Nothing makes that price information travel back up the hill.

Bad timing. Honey is harvested twice a year, in June and July and again in November and December. The second harvest falls in festival season, when every household in the district needs cash at the same moment. Supply is at its highest just when farmers are most desperate to sell, so a farmer with forty kilograms just before Diwali has to take whatever price he’s offered.

Two more facts matter. Many older beekeepers don’t own a phone, and money is discussed in Nepali or, in some areas, a tribal language. And although the UN FAO recognised Sikkim as the world’s first fully organic state, nobody in the honey trade has turned that into a higher price.

Put together, it becomes a loop:

1. Steep land means small, scattered farms.
2. Small farms produce too little to take to market.
3. So farmers sell through a middleman, who is the only one who knows the full price chain.
4. The farmer ends up with no price information and no record of the sale.
5. Without a record he can’t negotiate and can’t borrow.
6. Without a loan he can’t buy more hives, so his volume stays too small. Back to step 2.

3. What I tried first, and why it failed

I founded ApiCare in 2021 with a simple plan: build one excellent farm and let others copy it. It would be a single apiary of 200 to 300 hives. At about six kilograms per hive that meant 1,200 to 1,800 kilograms of honey a year, enough to matter commercially and enough for neighbours to see it working.

I took the design from European and American research. That research is about Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, which copes with hives packed close together, forages well over flat farmland, and has been bred for a century for commercial beekeeping.

The bees in Sikkim are Apis cerana, the eastern honey bee. Our colonies absconded, meaning they left their hives. Looking back, there were three reasons:

1. Food. The research assumed flat land with large crop fields nearby. In the Himalaya the flowers are thin and scattered across different heights, and there are no big farms.
2. Crowding. Cerana colonies placed close together fight each other. The tight layout that suits mellifera made our apiary hostile to its own bees.
3. Climate. The past few years have been warmer, with different rainfall and repeated floods. A model based on older conditions no longer fit.

So we flipped the design. Instead of one big farm we set up many small clusters: up to 20 hives to begin with and up to 50 once established, spread over about 0.7 hectares, with hives three feet apart and at least 500 metres between clusters. That layout suits cerana.

A network of clusters needs local people to run it. Everything we had learned the hard way had to be taught to villagers who had never kept bees like this. That is how a honey company became a training organisation, and the training is what brought the state government in.

4. Training worked, but farmers still couldn’t grow

Between May 2025 and January 2026, ApiCare ran four honey-processing programmes under the MSME RAMP scheme in four districts, training 104 people at Jitlang, Mangbrue, Kewzing and Beng. Farmers moved from log hives to movable-frame Newton hives. They had been taught that squeezing honey by hand was the organic method, and they learned to use manual centrifugal extractors and moisture testing instead. Reused liquor bottles gave way to food-grade glass. At Beng, all twenty participants registered their businesses on Udyam, the government’s enterprise register, within seven days.

Then, in most villages, progress stopped.

Farmers had the knowledge and wanted to grow. What they lacked was money. Going from ten hives to twenty costs money that these households don’t have. They live week to week, and income from one crop is spent before the next is ready. They also can’t afford to take risks: if an expansion fails, it isn’t a bad quarter, it’s a bad year for a family with no savings.

Banks do lend to farmers, but against collateral, and the only collateral a smallholder has is the land the family lives off. Most farmers, sensibly, won’t risk it on bees.

So we had diagnosed a production problem, solved it, and proven it across four districts with government funding and clean audits. The farmers could now produce clean, market-grade honey at several times their old volume. They still had no way to pay for more hives and nothing to show a lender.

The problem had never been in the bee yard. It was the missing record. That missing record is also why a bulk buyer can offer ₹350 for honey worth four times as much: in both cases the farmer has nothing but his word.

5. The real problem, in four parts

Once you see the record as the gap, the problem splits into four parts. Each one can fail on its own, and no single fix solves all of them.

ApiCare buys at ₹1,000 to ₹1,100 a kilogram, in cash, on collection, and takes on the spoilage, adulteration risk, transport and payment delays. That margin currently goes back into building the supply chain, compliance and operations.

6. What we did, in order

The order mattered as much as the steps.

Step 1: pay well and pay at once. Farmers get ₹1,000 to ₹1,100 a kilogram in cash when we collect, roughly three times the bulk rate. For a family living week to week, being paid quickly matters as much as the price. A good price that arrives in ninety days doesn’t help them.

Step 2: brand the honey by village. Each jar carries the name of the village and cluster it came from. If a buyer in Delhi or Dubai pays more for honey from a named village in an organic state, then the record proving the village is worth keeping, and the farmer who keeps it gets part of that extra price. A traceability system only makes sense if someone pays for the proof.

Step 3: add the record (FarmLedger). The key design choice is that the buyer confirms each sale, not the farmer. A farmer can log his honey, but the sale only counts once the buyer who paid enters it. Farmers can’t inflate their own numbers, and the record is anchored in the one moment both sides want to get right. Over time the farmer builds a history of what he sold and what he was paid, which is exactly what a lender needs.

The record also works in the other direction, up the supply chain. Right now Sikkim’s organic status is a claim about the whole state. Batch records turn it into a claim about one jar, and that is how a regional reputation can earn a better price.

What this doesn’t solve:

• It doesn’t create money. A farmer with a record still needs a lender willing to use it, and none has yet.
• It doesn’t make government payments faster.
• It doesn’t reach beekeepers without phones, and many of the oldest and most skilled don’t have one.
• It asks families living week to week to keep records whose benefit comes months later. That is harder than it sounds (see section 8).

7. Working with the government

In 2025 the Government of India (Dept. of Commerce & Industries, Sikkim) selected ApiCare as a private-sector training partner under the MSME RAMP scheme, which the World Bank finances. The selection looked at what a delivery partner needs: equipment, past training experience and suitable facilities.

Exhibit 2 · Who does what under RAMP

What the government gave us that we couldn’t buy: access and trust. A private company turning up in a village to talk about bees is a stranger selling something. The same company arriving with the district administration, after meeting the Zilla Panchayat and the local agriculture officers first, gets a very different welcome. At Mangbrue, the agriculture inspector later brought more than fifty more farmers to further training. No amount of marketing would have done that.

What we gave the government that it couldn’t do itself: delivery. We moved equipment to every venue, hired trainers from Sikkim who taught in the local language, had a working apiary to demonstrate on, and paid the costs up front until we were reimbursed.

That last part is where it gets hard. Government payments arrive three to four months after delivery. In the meantime a small business that has already paid for halls, food, transport, equipment and trainers is funding the government’s programme from its own cash. Our farmers need cash on collection, so that delay slows everything: buying honey, growing and supporting clusters. The partnership works when both sides move at the same speed, and they don’t.

One practical point for anyone designing a partnership like this: the funder should have someone on the ground, and that person needs to be honest and not act like the job is theirs by right. In India there are also third-party middlemen around these programmes who need careful handling. If development money is managed entirely from a distance, the people standing closest to the villages end up controlling it.

8. What happened in four villages

Exhibit 3 · Four programmes, four outcomes

How long the training lasted made no difference. Jitlang ran for fifteen days and Beng for seven, and Beng registered every participant. What predicted success was what the village already had before we arrived, and who was still there after we left: a working farm next door, old skills waiting for a reason, or an official who cared about follow-up. Mangbrue got a free hive per person and a promise, and had the weakest result.

Kewzing taught us the most. People there had kept bees for generations, but they couldn’t sell the honey because of how it was handled and processed. The problem wasn’t the bees or the skill. Discouraged, many had stopped beekeeping altogether. After the training, 22 of the 28 participants were harvesting. One participant summed it up:

Unhygienic is not an organic; cleanliness plays vital role to product quality.

The hardest thing to change wasn’t a technique. It was dependency: after years of schemes that arrive, hand things out and leave, people expect help to be something done to a village. A hive handed out is a gift. A hive bought with money from honey sold at a fair price makes for a different kind of farmer.

Building trust here took actions more than words, and every part of it cost money: local trainers so the teaching happened in Nepali, meeting the Zilla Panchayat and agriculture officers before approaching any farmer, visits that continued after the certificates were handed out, and cash carried up the hill on collection day.

9. What is still unsolved

1. Does this need a fair buyer first? The record is worth keeping only because someone pays well and fast. ApiCare does that for its own clusters, but most villages have no such buyer. If so, the buyer is the real intervention, and the record is what lets a fair buyer grow.
2. Who keeps the record? Right now ApiCare is both the main buyer and the keeper of the record. Having the buyer confirm each sale stops farmers inflating their numbers, but a record a farmer could take to a bank or a rival buyer has to be trusted by people with no reason to trust ApiCare.
3. Who gets left behind? If success depends on what a village already has, training helps the poorest villages least. That’s the opposite of what development programmes aim for. The follow-up that seems to work, an officer or a nearby farm staying involved, is expensive, doesn’t scale like a training calendar, and nobody has worked out what it costs.

Foreign markets and distribution are still open too, but that’s by choice: we haven’t taken them on yet. The honey is good and the story is real, but we still have no route to buyers outside India.

From what I’ve seen, most people working on rural supply chains don’t know what these problems look like at village level. Programmes are designed for a farmer who can wait to be paid, read the form and answer the phone. That farmer exists, but he isn’t the typical beekeeper in these hills.

I’m now leading RAMP’s second round, across five locations, which ends in March 2027. If nothing replaces it, we’ll carry on. ApiCare is in a much stronger position than in 2021, with four clusters, 125+ trained participants and detailed data on what happened in each village and why.

One last example shows why the record matters. Kewzing’s income after training was reported as ₹58,000. That was an estimate, and the actual figure turned out different. Nobody lied. There was simply no way to measure the real number. Getting real numbers is what the record is for. It will have worked when someone asks what a village earned and the answer is no longer an estimate.

What you can take from this

1. Map the loop before choosing a fix. In a system of connected causes, fixing one link only helps if the next link doesn’t block it.
2. Check your research was done in conditions like yours. We lost our first farm by copying a design made for another bee.
3. Pay first, train second, ask for records last. People keep records once the system is already paying them.
4. Plan for slow money. In public partnerships, the partner with less cash ends up funding the delays.
5. Budget for follow-up. What stays in the village after you leave matters more than how long the training lasts.