Arti Dhar '10 & Krutika Ravishankar '10 - India
- MH Global Alum Alliance
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
We are delighted to share our latest Global Alum Alliance feature interview, as we celebrate the lives and achievements of alums around the world. This In the Spotlight interview focuses on Arti Dahr '10 and Krutika Ravishankar '10, social entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector in central India.
Please get in touch if you feel your story would be of interest, or would like to recommend a fellow alum!
Spotlight on…
Names: Arti Dahr & Krutika Ravishankar
Class Year: 2010
Country: India
Major: International Relations (Arti)/Economics (Krutika)
Profession: Co-founders and Directors of Farmer for Forests
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"The challenge from the beginning was how we could succeed in not just paying farmers to not destroy but to actively build something that makes their land more valuable alive than stripped. That reframe, from conservation-as-sacrifice to conservation-as-economic-opportunity, is really the intellectual seed of what became Farmers for Forests."
Arti and Kartika's mission is to work with smallholder farming communities across India to transition degraded farmland into biodiverse, productive agroforestry - farms that are simultaneously more profitable for farmers, better for biodiversity, and meaningful for climate. Read on to discover more about their fascinating journey from Blanchard to the fields of India.
1) Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves--what you do and what your company does?
Arti: I am the co-founder of Farmers for Forests, which I started with Krutika Ravishankar in December 2019. Farmers for Forests works with smallholder farming communities across India to transition degraded farmland into biodiverse, productive agroforestry - farms that are simultaneously more profitable for farmers, better for biodiversity, and meaningful for climate.
At Farmers for Forests (F4F), my role defies a clean job description, which I've made peace with. On any given week I might be working on organizational strategy, building out internal systems, fundraising, communications, or sitting with research that informs how we think about impact. The thread running through all of it is to basically ensure the organization we're building on the outside matches the rigor and values we hold on the inside.
Krutika - I’m originally from Bombay but grew up in Pune. I’ve spent the last decade or so working in rural India in food security, agriculture and public health - and for a brief while in rural Ghana as well. I’m deeply passionate about wildlife, forests, growing food, rural livelihoods, and financial markets. At F4F, I do a whole bunch of things, from overall management to leading finance and working with Arti on fundraising.
2) How did you meet and decide to cooperate in this ambitious innovative project?
We met at Mount Holyoke College in 2006, where we were, as far as we can recall, the only two students from India that year - Class of 2010. That's a particular kind of instant bond: you find each other quickly when you're both figuring out New England winters, American dining hall food, and being thousands of miles away from family. We studied different things [Arti majored in International Relations and Krutika in Economics] - but we were drawn to the same questions about equity, environment, and what development actually looks like on the ground.
We stayed close through the years that followed, watching each other navigate coincidentally similar careers (at one point we were working for sister organizations; Arti worked for Evidence for Policy Design at Harvard and Krutika worked for J-PAL at MIT), and when the idea for Farmers for Forests (F4F) began taking shape, it felt completely natural that we'd build it together. Some collaborations you have to convince yourself into. This one wasn't like that.
3) Is there a particular event or person that motivated you to launch Farmers for Forests?
The honest answer is it was less a single moment and more an accumulating weight. When we started F4F in December 2019, the world felt like it was on fire - quite literally. Australia's bushfires, the Amazon ablaze, India's floods and heatwaves arriving earlier and harder each year. But what crystallized it wasn't the macro headlines; it was intimately experiencing rural life through our jobs before F4F. Sitting with farmers who already knew something was wrong with the land - soil getting thinner, yields getting less reliable, input costs climbing - and who had no real path forward that didn't involve just doing more of the same.
On the research side, Krutika had come across Seema Jayachandran's work on payments for ecosystem services - specifically a randomized controlled trial in western Uganda that paid forest-owning households to conserve their trees and found it cut deforestation in half at remarkably low cost. As students of Economic Development (both of us fondly remember Prof. Shahrukh Khan’s courses at MHC), that paper was something of a revelation: rigorous evidence that you could design financial incentives to make conservation rational for the individual farmer, not just the planet. The question it opened was whether you could flip the model - not just pay farmers to not destroy but actively build something that made their land more valuable alive than stripped. That reframe, from conservation-as-sacrifice to conservation-as-economic-opportunity, is really the intellectual seed of what became F4F.
4) What have been some of the most challenging and more rewarding moments in your entrepreneurial life?
The hardest stretch was the early years - because we had no proof it worked. We planted trees, watched some (one year most) die, figured out why, and tried again. We built monitoring tools from scratch because nothing existed at a price point that made sense for smallholder farms. That eventually became TreeLens - our AI platform that uses drone and satellite imagery to track every tree on every farm and accurately measure carbon sequestration. But in those early years, we were just trying to figure out why trees were dying and what to do about it.
We also wrestled constantly with the gestation gap: fruit trees take 3-5 years to be profitable, and most farmers simply cannot wait that long when they're living season to season. Asking someone to trust you with their land on a multi-year bet, when you're a small new organization with no track record - that requires a kind of faith from farmers that we took very seriously and didn't take for granted.
The most rewarding? When the question changed. After years of being asked "does this work?", funders started asking "how fast can you scale this?" That shift - from proof-of-concept to proof-of-scale - felt like something genuinely moved. At the same time, some of the biggest challenges I have faced involved helping students who struggle with their mental health during their exchanges. While academic exchange can be an amazing and life-changing experience, it is not easy to leave behind your family and friends and begin anew in an unfamiliar environment. I have seen students struggle with the adjustment and with physical and mental health challenges that have even required hospitalization or repatriation. Supporting them through those difficult periods has been challenging but deeply important.
5) What is your perspective on the role and relevance of small-scale agricultural projects to improve climate and biodiversity these days?
There's a tendency in climate conversations to jump to the largest levers - energy transition, policy, carbon markets - and those matter enormously. But India's 20-30 million smallholder farming households sit on 40 million hectares of degraded land. That's not a footnote; it's one of the biggest opportunities in the entire climate picture.
The challenge is that smallholder landscapes are complex, fragmented, and have historically been expensive to monitor and verify at scale - which has made them hard to finance. We discovered that when you combine genuine community trust, scientific rigor, and technology that actually works in the field, you can make these landscapes financeable. And once they're financeable, you can move fast. Biodiversity, carbon, farmer income, water security - these are not competing goals. On a well-designed agroforestry farm, they have the same goal.
6) Can you elaborate on the relationships and cooperation with the farmers that have crossed your path since you launched Farmers for Forests? How hard was it to get them motivated and involved?
The honest answer is: harder than we expected, and for reasons that make complete sense once you understand them. Farmers have seen many NGOs, many projects, and many promises. They've been asked to change their practices, adopt new seeds, try new methods - and not every story ended well. So, the first thing you have to do is earn trust, which takes time and presence, not just a good pitch. Our field teams live in or near the communities they work with.
That proximity matters. What moved farmers wasn't our enthusiasm for free or highly
subsidized trees - it was the economic case. When we could show neighboring farmers who'd made the transition that their incomes were 3-4x higher, their input costs 70-80% lower, and their soil visibly healthier - that's when the conversation changed. Demonstration plots were everything. The farmers who took a chance on us early became our best advocates. We are deeply grateful to them; they took the real risk.
7) Your organization has been active in India for almost 7 years. How do you think your experiences could help small farming communities in other parts of the world?
The core challenges we've navigated - the gestation gap, the trust deficit, the monitoring and verification problem, the financing gap for horticulture - are not unique to India. We open-sourced our AI models and ground truth data precisely because we want other organizations working in other geographies to be able to use them. We don't think the answer to global reforestation and restoration is one organization doing everything - it's building open infrastructure that lets many organizations work faster and with more credibility.
8) With the rapid development of AI, how do you think that these technological developments can enhance your work and, more in general, help small farmers to thrive?
We've thought about this a lot, and our honest answer is: carefully.
The promise is real. For us, AI has primarily meant that smallholder agroforestry, which was previously invisible to climate finance because it was too fragmented and expensive to monitor, can now be verified at a cost that actually works. That's what TreeLens does. It uses drone imagery and machine learning to map and measure every tree on every farm, with quantified uncertainty built into the carbon estimates. That rigor is what makes funders confident enough to deploy serious capital. In that narrow but important sense, AI has made something financeable that wasn't before.
But the lesson we keep learning is that technology is never the hard part. We spent months building our own dataset from scratch - field staff with measuring tapes in the heat, manually documenting thousands of trees - because the models trained on other landscapes simply didn't work on ours. You cannot parachute Western AI into the Global South and expect it to work. The communities generating the foundational data rarely see the financial benefit of it. That's an extractive model, and we want no part of it, which is why we open-sourced everything in 2025.
The bigger opportunity, the one we're still working toward, is AI as an agronomic partner for farmers who have never had access to expert guidance tailored to their specific land. That's what our WhatsApp-based tool ChutkiAI is the early version of. Not a chatbot, but eventually something closer to a knowledgeable, always-available advisor in a farmer's own language. We're early. But that's the direction.
9) What advice would you give to young graduates today who want to become entrepreneurs in the social environmental sector?
Go where the problem is, not where it's comfortable to think about it. There's a version of this work that happens at conferences and fellowships. But if you want to build something real, you must spend time with the people you're trying to work with, long enough that they stop performing for you and start telling you what they actually think.
And here's something nobody talks about enough: be ready for success. The transition from a scrappy founder-led operation to a proper organization - with systems, hierarchy, people management, institutional accountability - is genuinely hard and draining in ways that are different from the hardship of early-stage struggle. A lot of people are prepared for the grind of building something from nothing. Fewer are prepared for the moment when things start working and suddenly, you're running something much larger than yourself, with all the complexity that brings. That transition - from founder energy to institutional sustainability - is one of the most demanding things we've navigated (still are), and we wish someone had told us to expect it.
10) How did your MHC experience contribute to your professional interests and life aspirations?
In ways we're still discovering. The intellectual thread is obvious in retrospect. Studying at MHC meant you couldn't stay comfortable inside one discipline. That habit of thinking across silos is very much how F4F works. Agroforestry is simultaneously an ecological intervention, an economic proposition, a community trust exercise, and a technology problem. MHC gave us the instinct to hold all of that at once rather than reduce it to any single frame.
The other thing MHC gave us - and this is harder to articulate - is a particular kind of expectation. Not pressure, exactly. More like a quiet assumption baked into every interaction that you had something worth saying, and that it was your job to figure out what that was. That assumption was genuinely transformative. It didn't ask us to become confident. It just proceeded as though we already were, until we caught up.
And the connection didn't end at graduation.
In the early F4F years, when we had no institutional funders and were essentially running on belief, MHC alums were among our most important connectors and champions - people who understood what we were trying to do and put us in front of the right people at the right moments. We received the Mary Woolley Fellowship in 2021 - $7,500 that was, at that stage, a genuinely big deal for us. It was validation at a moment when validation was in short supply, and it came from our own community. That meant something.
11) What is your most fond memory of your time back at MHC?
Arti: It's impossible to pick one. But if I close my eyes and go back, I keep landing in Blanchard. True story: there was one day where our core group of friends sat down for breakfast, kept talking, kept eating, simply never left. We were there through lunch, through the afternoon, through dinner. The spicy fries from Blanchard were a constant throughout, with our friend Jigyasa who would endlessly produce a mayonnaise and garlic powder concoction that had absolutely no right to be as good as it was. That day somehow captures everything: the quality of the friendships, the conversations that refused to end, and the particular gift of being in a place where nobody was in a hurry to be anywhere else.
Then there were M&Cs - where we would debate political theory and history coursework. One of the years, our friend Mehwash managed Abbey Hall's M&Cs, who would quietly keep it going a little longer than she was supposed to just so we could eat and talk. Fifteen years later, I sincerely hope this does not catch up with her.
But what I carry most from MHC isn't any single memory - it's what the place did to me as a person. I was chronically shy growing up. Genuinely, nearly mute in a room full of people. MHC’s 3-hour seminar classes that were designed for you to show up with something to say, the professors who treated your ideas as worth taking seriously before you believed that yourself - gave me the confidence I simply didn't have before. I arrived not quite knowing my own voice. I left knowing it.
Krutika: One of my fondest memories of MHC is all the time I spent just walking around campus and daydreaming. I spent a lot of time just wandering around - going for runs around the Upper Lake path, exploring the area around the golf course and of course all the small lanes of South Hadley. MHC has such a drop-dead gorgeous campus, I think being there helped me truly appreciate the peace and wonder that comes from being surrounded by nature - cornfields, mountains, lakes and rivers.
I also remember on cold winter nights, drinking hot chocolate and just being able to see all the stars in the sky (I took an Astronomy class one J-Term) or when the first snow fell and everything was converted in a blanket of soft-white mush - just how magical the campus felt. I think Mountain Day also has got to be one of my other favorite memories. I remember hoping in so many Septembers that Mountain Day would be that week - especially if there was a quiz due or if I had a homework assignment to submit that day, but I hadn’t quite finished doing it. I remember the excitement in the morning of hearing the bells ringing and knowing that class is cancelled and then spending the whole day eating ice cream, hiking up the mountain and chatting with friends instead of studying!
Interview conducted Spring 2026 by Vijaya Pastala '89 and Silvia Maulini '80
