2026 Winner: Kheyti
Kheyti enables smallholder farmers in India to build climate-resilient livelihoods through affordable agricultural innovation. Their Greenhouse-in-a-Box protects crops from pests, heat, and erratic rainfall while dramatically increasing yields and conserving water. Combined with training, financing access, and market linkages, Kheyti helps farmers move from subsistence survival to stable, dignified income.
What does Kheyti do?
What social challenge are they addressing?
India is home to over 100 million smallholder farmers who own less than five acres of land and make up 85% of the farming population. While they produce the majority of India’s food, many earn little to nothing from agriculture with incomes that are highly seasonal and unpredictable. They live in deeply rural areas with limited access to resources.
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Climate change has intensified vulnerability: rising heat, unseasonal rain, and pest attacks that cause crop failures. Over 65% of India’s farmland is rain-fed and lacks irrigation. 75% of farmers report wanting to leave agriculture entirely due to adverse farming conditions. The crisis is structural and environmental, driven by climate volatility, fragmented landholdings, limited irrigation, and exclusion from formal financing and agricultural systems.
What is their solution?
Kheyti provides smallholder farmers with a complete solution to grow more with less risk. They design and distribute their hallmark Greenhouse-in-a-Box, a low-cost, modular greenhouse that protects crops from weather and pests while improving productivity. This technology is coupled with end-to-end support services including agronomy training, a dedicated field officer to provide ongoing and timely guidance, and market insights and linkages that help farmers generate stable income throughout the farming cycle.
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Kheyti’s model is delivered through a decentralized team of field officers, agronomists, and regional managers who are supported by a central operations team and technology platform that enable tracking, communication, and monitoring performance. They partner with financial institutions, government bodies, agricultural university and local nonprofits to scale and improve delivery.
“We asked, ‘what are the top farmers in the world doing’? By starting there and stubbornly redesigning for affordability and real-world reality, we’ve made high tech agriculture work for smallholder farmers.”
-Kaushik Kappagantulu, CEO
What is their impact?
Kheyti has grown from 1,317 cumulative greenhouse installations in FY23 to 5,854 in FY25. Median additional income per farmer increased from $144 to $292 annually, with average income rising to $420. By FY25, 58 percent of farmers earned over $250 per year from greenhouse cultivation.
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Independent evaluation across 1,698 farmers showed greenhouse users earned over three times more net income per unit area than non-users, reduced crop loss by over 50%, and improved water-use efficiency nearly 200%.
Cumulative water savings rose from 1.2 billion liters in FY23 to nearly 6 billion liters in FY25. Greenhouse costs declined from $756 to $665, improving affordability while sustaining economic returns.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
How is Kheyti aligned with the Lipman Family Prize’s four key criteria?
Leadership
Kheyti is the only social enterprise offering a full-service greenhouse solution specifically for smallholder farmers, equipping them with tools, services and confidence to succeed in the face of climate and economic uncertainty. They’re setting an example for how combining protective farming technology with personalized, practical support can help smallholder farmers improve their livelihoods.
Impact
Kheyti demonstrates clear proof of concept: fivefold growth in installations over three years, rising median incomes, and billions of liters of water saved. Independent quasi-experimental evaluation confirms income tripling, 50% crop loss reduction, and significant efficiency gains, validating both economic and climate resilience outcomes.
Innovation
Kheyti reengineered proven traditional greenhouse technology to be modular and affordable, reducing costs by 90% through iterative design, to make climate-resilient farming accessible to smallholders. Their innovation lies not only in infrastructure, but in bundling advisory, input supply, financing access, and market intelligence into a farmer-centric, behavior-informed service model.
Transferability
Validated across multiple Indian states and diverse agro-ecological zones, Kheyti’s model demonstrates adaptability within climate-vulnerable farming systems. Its affordability-driven design, hybrid human-digital advisory structure, and government partnership integration provide a replicable framework for advancing smallholder resilience in other low-resource agricultural contexts.
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