I owe my Dad an email- and I can probably pass it off as a Blog post. He wanted to know a little bit about what I've been doing recently with GreenOil. That would encompass basically the time from when I left the composting paradise of Samode to the sweltering office blocks of Delhi. (wow, now over 2 months ago!)

Now again I don't what this to become a Monthly Performance Report for LGT (and god dammit, I also have to do one of those for August, perhaps this is good enough :-?, so I'll try and make it as light as possible.

Firstly, let me say that these two months haven't lessened my interest in the work that GreenOil's been doing. It's been different, completely different, and dealing with strategy (the direction that the company wants to go in the long term) and tactical (operational challenges that affect the daily or weekly tasks) isn't as immediate as making compost, especially in such a small company. You can often wonder if the analysis and problem solving you go through will actually be read and acted on. And often things beyond your control means that that analysis becomes completely meaningless.

But thinking about these things, thinking about the possibilities, means that you keep a lot of the ideas, a lot of the inspiration behind the company alive- which again is important in a start-up when the challenges or pure amount of daily tasks can weigh you down. You sometimes need those reminders of what you are (going to, always going to...) achieve.

The first challenge that came up back in early July was one that could only be described as pretty serious. Several farmers that bought our Karishma fertilizer had reported instances of "black rot", a fungal disease that attacks the roots and main stem of young peanut seedlings, killing them or reducing their growth so dramatically that they produce no seeds. Our Karishma is augmented with a fungal ingredient (Trichoderma sp.) that is one of the most effective at fighting other plant pathogens, and has been particularly successful in trials against black rot in peanut crops. However, it turned out that part of the sales pitch when selling our fertilizer was to guarantee that if a farmer used the fertilizer, then their crop would be completely black-rot disease free. So when these reports started coming in, those farmers were not only pissed off, but of course were also in the situation where they might lose 10-20% of their potential income. For a new product trying to get a foothold in a local market, it had all the hallmarks of a PR disaster.

Trichoderma: Why don't you work?!

So it needed a response, and a quick one. One that would:

• address the needs of the farmers- in this situation, not only do we have a responsibility to the farmers as customers, but of course the potential loss of their product is much greater than the investment in ours. They are also our biggest source of publicity, so keeping them happy, with a quick and proper response, is crucial.
• address issues with our existing products- we had already shipped thousands of bags of products which were now of questionable quality. Something had to be done to ensure that those products could be brought up to a suitable quality, that this problem wouldn't be encountered by any more farmers.
• address issues with future products- even though we shouldn't guarantee that there are no occurances of disease in crops where our product is applied, there certainly should have been reduced instances of disease, something that we were not seeing. Therefore, a strategy had to be put in place where we were monitoring the quality of the product that we were selling.

That was the problem that we tackled at the beginning of July. I was mainly involved in the issues with Production- of products to treat the existing problem, to fill the quality gap between shipped product and what our standards demanded, and improvements to future production.

Karishma: Just another misunderstood good guy

The other main challenge in July was looking to move forward in the design challenges of the proposed Power Plant. Thinking about the Power Plant design means grappling with multiple problems, including civil, mechanical, technical and logistical.
It's one thing to have a working prototype and quite another to scale up that prototype 20 times. There are a whole nother set of problems that you could potentially face, and any design has to try and cater for those. Plus, you're looking at how that design rolls out, simple things such as what needs to get constructed at the site first. The project management challenges are what I am involved with in that department.
The other exciting part about these discussions and design is that we are completely unlimited (except by cash) by how we construct the plant. That means that we can construct an office block on the property that has a view, that's ergonomic, or that's water and energy-saving (it makes sense for a compost and energy producer!). And that means fairly innovative thinking- after all who said a power plant needs to look ugly? Who said that you can't make concrete tanks aesthetically pleasing? Those are the kind of challenges that- well, possibly an architect might solve in the end- but that we are at least thinking in broad strokes about. And what we want from all these little parts needs to be documented and put in a timeline. That's part of my job at the moment.

Apart from that is the revamp of the website- it's been out of date for a while now- showcasing GreenOil's jatropha plantations rather than our current focus on power plants and compost- and more and more people are looking at it. So it needs to at least reflect in its content what we are currently doing, and it could also benefit from the main message of that content being revamped and targeted at our intended audience. So that's my third project. Again, something that needs to be carefully structured, but also has an allowance for creativity. A nice balance, which I find in most of my work at the moment.

--tom.