Founded with a singular focus on soil intelligence, Ekosight is building field ready solutions to address one of Indian agriculture’s most persistent blind spots, soil health. Through its flagship device, the Soil Doctor, the company is enabling rapid, on-ground soil testing and creating a spatial data layer that helps farmers, FPOs, and institutions move from guesswork to evidence based decision making. At the core of Ekosight’s approach is the belief that sustainable farming outcomes depend on making soil data timely, accessible, and actionable at scale.
In this conversation with Agrotech Space, Dhiraj Choudhary, Founder of Ekosight, reflects on his journey from building hardware and software startups to working closely with farmers and soil ecosystems. He speaks about how personal experiences shaped his return to agriculture, the limitations of conventional soil testing, and why soil intelligence must be treated as a system rather than a standalone technology. He also shares insights on scaling soil diagnostics, data responsibility, and the long term role of soil health in climate resilient and economically viable farming.
Agrotech Space: What made you move into agritech, and how did your business design experience help you focus on soil intelligence for India’s farmers?
Dhiraj Choudhary: My relationship with agriculture goes back to childhood. My grandfather and great grandfather migrated from Churu in Rajasthan to a village in Jharkhand, where farming became central to our lives. I spent time in paddy fields, carrying rice straw after harvest and even living in homes built from that straw. Those memories shaped my respect for soil long before I understood its science.
Professionally, I’ve always been a builder. I studied engineering, led robotics initiatives, built prosthetic limbs, and later founded software and SaaS companies. But during COVID, I spent nearly a month in the ICU. What stayed with me during that time was a deep sense of unfinished responsibility, if I survived, I wanted to build something grounded, meaningful, and connected to real lives.
That moment pulled me away from abstract software success back to hardware, grassroots work, and agriculture. My business design experience helped me see soil not as a single technical problem, but as a system, where science, economics, behaviour, trust, and technology must work together. That’s how soil intelligence became the core of Ekosight.
Agrotech Space: What issues did you see in traditional soil testing that pushed you to create a fast testing device like the Soil Doctor?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Traditional soil testing in India is slow, fragmented, and disconnected from farm decisions. Reports arrive after weeks, often when the crop stage has already passed. Farmers struggle to interpret them, and in the absence of timely data, they depend heavily on dealers or guesswork.
If Soil Doctor did not exist, farmers would still be overusing fertilisers, repeating the same mistakes every season, and paying the cost in both money and soil health. We built Soil Doctor to bring testing directly to the field, so farmers can see results immediately and act with confidence.
Agrotech Space: What key lessons from the field influenced how you designed and deployed the Soil Doctor for real world farmer use?
Dhiraj Choudhary: The field teaches you quickly that sophistication does not equal usability. Farmers adopt tools that are reliable, simple, and repairable, not those that look impressive in presentations.
We learned that too much automation increases failure points. So we consciously kept humans in the loop. Soil Doctor requires some manual steps, but once trained, it becomes intuitive and robust. Reliability matters more than novelty. Adoption happens when technology respects the farmer’s time, context, and constraints.
Agrotech Space: When you talk about building a “Google Map for soil,” what kind of data layers are essential to make it truly useful for farmers and institutions?
Dhiraj Choudhary: A meaningful soil map must be layered and dynamic. We combine geo tagged soil parameters, cropping patterns, fertiliser usage, yield behaviour, and organic carbon trends over time.
For farmers, this supports better seasonal decisions. For FPOs, it enables cluster-level planning. For advisors and institutions, it reveals patterns that were invisible earlier, nutrient imbalance, soil degradation, or recovery across regions. Soil data becomes powerful only when tracked spatially and temporally.
Agrotech Space: With growing focus on soil carbon and climate resilience, how does Ekosight’s approach to soil data address these goals in a practical way?
Dhiraj Choudhary: There is significant hype around soil carbon today, but the reality is complex. Carbon programmes demand repeatable measurement, documentation, and verification, none of which are easy or cheap.
Ekosight focuses on building consistent ground truth data through repeat soil testing. This improves nutrient management, strengthens climate resilience, and lays a credible foundation for future carbon accounting. We believe in a visionary but realistic approach, without exaggerating near term outcomes.
Agrotech Space: How does getting instant soil results change the way farmers use fertilisers, manage costs, and plan crops?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Speed fundamentally changes behaviour. When farmers see soil data immediately, they are willing to skip unnecessary fertilizers, especially inputs like DAP or excess urea. This directly reduces input costs.
Rapid results also help farmers assess crop suitability for the next season and correct imbalances immediately instead of repeating mistakes year after year. Decision making shifts from habit based to evidence based.
Agrotech Space: What kind of people, partnerships, and support systems are needed to build and sustain a network of 10,000 Soil Doctors?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Scale will come from people, not devices. A good Soil Doctor is someone genuinely curious about soil, closely connected to farming, and committed to solving problems locally.
We work with NGOs, CSR programmes, universities, and FPOs to build training, trust, and financial sustainability around Soil Doctor Clinics. These clinics create livelihoods while delivering real value to farmers, making the model both scalable and resilient.
Agrotech Space: What were the most difficult design decisions in balancing speed, accuracy, and affordability for field use?
Dhiraj Choudhary: The hardest choices were about what not to build. We deliberately avoided fully automated systems that would make the device bulky, expensive, and failure prone.
We accepted that in the field, repeatable and timely accuracy matters more than lab-level perfection. If used correctly, Soil Doctor achieves over 95% accuracy compared to reliable, well calibrated NABL labs, which is more than sufficient for practical farm decisions.
Agrotech Space: As soil data becomes more important, how does Ekosight approach data ownership, privacy, and responsible use?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Data has value only when used responsibly. Soil data should ultimately benefit farmers. Individual level data must remain protected, while aggregated and anonymised data can support better advisory systems, research, and policy planning. The goal is not ownership, it is meaningful, ethical use that strengthens the ecosystem.
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Agrotech Space: What key lessons from your earlier startups shaped the way you built soil intelligence tools for agriculture?
Dhiraj Choudhary: The biggest lesson is that adoption matters more than elegance. In agriculture, you must design for weak connectivity, limited infrastructure, and high risk aversion. Hardware teaches humility in a way software often doesn’t. If a system fails in the field, no explanation matters. That discipline shaped how we built Soil Doctor.
Agrotech Space: How does your work in AgriTech connect with the D2C food brand you are building?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Poor soil leads to nutritionally weak crops and higher chemical dependency. This directly affects human health. Our food initiative closes the loop, rewarding good soil practices and giving consumers confidence in what they eat. When consumers buy from us, we want them to feel trust and health confidence. That trust begins in the soil.
Agrotech Space: What patterns in farmer and FPO behaviour have guided how you design and evolve Ekosight’s products?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Farmers respond to evidence, not advice. Once they see results on their own fields, behaviour changes. FPOs, on the other hand, think in clusters rather than individuals. We also learned that continuity matters more than one time interventions. That’s why we focus on repeat testing, seasonal comparison, and long-term soil tracking.
Agrotech Space: What core principles should new agritech innovators follow when building for agriculture?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Don’t build agriculture solutions from air-conditioned rooms. Spend time in the field, design for failure conditions, and respect farmer knowledge. Agriculture is a long game. If you optimise only for short term wins, you won’t survive.
Agrotech Space: How do you see the role of soil intelligence evolving in Indian agriculture over the next decade?
Dhiraj Choudhary: Soil intelligence will become as fundamental as weather data. It will guide fertiliser policy, reduce costs, improve yields, support climate resilience, and enable transparent market linkages. Farms that understand their soil will adapt better to climate uncertainty and economic volatility than those that don’t.
Agrotech Space: What do you want Ekosight and the Soil Doctor to be known for 20 years from now?
Dhiraj Choudhary: When people think about soil health, soil nutrition, and trust in agriculture, I want one name to come to mind, Soil Doctor. A name farmers trust blindly and consumers feel proud to be connected with. That is the ecosystem we are building.