Presentation short abstract

Who truly benefits when an organic agriculture digital marketplace grows? How do they attempt to scale without producing “violent sustainability,” while simultaneously competing with other venture capital-funded start-ups?

Presentation long abstract

Agriculture has gained increasing prominence in global climate negotiations due to its potential to reduce emissions through carbon storage and sequestration. Over the past decade, hundreds of agriculture technology start-ups have emerged, promising to design and scale “climate-smart” solutions. My research argues that rapidly scaled sustainability should be understood as “violent sustainability” (Agrawal, 2025) and demonstrates how such projects persist even when they fail on their own terms. This paper extends that discussion by ethnographically examining a digital organic marketplace start-up and its efforts to leverage “capitalism creatively” to promote organic agriculture, while navigating structural constraints imposed by capitalism’s growth imperatives. Rather than treating the capitalist firm as driven solely by self-interested entrepreneurs seeking to maximize profit, the paper emphasizes the contingencies that shape the social life of this company as it attempts to scale from its base near Mumbai, Maharashtra. Through a situated institutional ethnography, I investigate how the start-up operates and expands while striving to cultivate a moral economy around naturally grown products and its brand. In doing so, the paper addresses several key questions: Who truly benefits when an organic agriculture digital marketplace grows? How do they attempt to scale without producing “violent sustainability,” while simultaneously competing with other venture capital-funded start-ups? Can the founders’ claim that they are “using capitalism creatively” be substantiated? I explore these questions through ethnographic insights into multiple aspects of the start-up’s operations–including farmer and worker relationships, strategies for social media engagement and fundraising, and internal discussions on growth and sustainability.