Agricultural Sustainability, Problem Solving, The Power of Music with Dr. Soham Adla

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Dr. Soham Adla, a Product Manager and researcher specializing in impact-oriented agricultural sustainability about Agricultural Sustainability, Problem Solving, and The Power of Music.  Read his full bio below.

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Showtimes: 
1:24  Nic & Sam discuss dealing with challenging work
9:37  Interview with Dr. Soham Adla starts
9:52  Agricultural Sustainability
21:25  Problem Solving
29:16  Field Notes
43:36  The Power of Music

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Soham Adla at https://www.linkedin.com/in/soham-adla/

Guest Bio:
Soham Adla is a researcher and product manager who has worked in impact-oriented agricultural sustainability for about nine years. He is a civil engineer specializing in water management, and his work includes farm-level performance and low-cost agricultural technologies. Currently, he focuses on water-efficient agriculture in a drought prone region in India, managing a digital agri-advisory product and studying the factors driving agricultural technology adoption. Soham enjoys stakeholder engagement and and science communication, with practical experience from collaborations with industry and NGOs, offering insights into human-water systems in agriculture. He is energized by music, talking to farmers, and stories.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Nic  
Hello and welcome to EPR to favorite environmental enthusiast, Nick and Laura. On today's episode, we discuss dealing with challenging work. We talked to Soham Adla about agricultural sustainability, real world problem solving, and the power of music. And finally, here are some fun facts about peacocks. They exhibit sexual dimorphism only the males are bright blue with giant feathers. That usually takes about three years to fully develop, but they can also be born pure white. Unlike albinism, though, which typically includes loss of pigmentation, this is leucism or genetic condition that results in only in the loss of pigment from feathers. So that's how you get white pea files very very rare in nature about of course we figured that out and now selectively breed for that. How about that? Is that music?

The annual nav conference and training symposium will occur from Sunday May 5 to Wednesday, May 8 at the Renaissance Minneapolis hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's always a great time and we'll feature all your favorite planning sessions with some regional flair thrown in there for fun, please register@www.sap.org I hope to see you there. Let's get to our segment.

Sam Bartleson  
But yeah, just how how do you stay motivated to do stuff that you don't like to? This has been my problem for a past couple of weeks. Like I'm having to force myself to do it is really hard, really hard to force yourself to do something?

Nic  
Yes, it is. That's a great, gosh, that's a great question. Loaded question. Well, I mean, you know, there's lots of things like every job no matter what is going to have stuff you're going to do. There is not a job on this planet, that there's going to be every single thing that you want, right so no matter what you've got to deal with some things that aren't fun. The best way to not to do those things is to find someone else who likes to do that. And have them do it instead. Right? That is the simplest way to do it. For me, personally, I don't love the counting type stuff I don't love. It's like a detail oriented thing. I'm such a big picture person. I love flying this guy. You know strategy. How do we plan out our entire year? How do you next five years? How do we get to where we want to be I'm I love doing that. And then if I'm managing a project and then like okay, well that's great, but so your finances are XYZ and you have this much money left before the end of the year and you need to get your invoices in and all you're off by a penny and it's like a you know, for me, it's just my least favorite thing. It's just my least favorite thing. I'm like, this is it's we're talking about a painting and I have to spend an hour talking about painting, you know, like it's just kills me. Right? And so, one of the things that as especially as you go along in your career, you know, like, I always tell people to find what your boss doesn't like to do and do that and it's the fastest way to build your relationship with that person. And I have some people that have taken that to heart. I have somebody that helps me do that. I mean, I still have to review the invoices. I still have to you know, and there's actually a couple of people doing I still have to have some amount of say in it, but the tedious part that I don't like, but there is a benefit there a tangible benefit. So that's one way to do it is to try to use your influence to help get people to help you. Because if it's mind numbing, if it's really wearing you out, then you weren't going to enjoy doing it no matter what doesn't mean you always get someone else to help you and like I say, I still have to do it. I still have to be involved, but I don't have to do every single part of it. And it gets more challenging. You know if it's something that no one can help you with but

Sam Bartleson  
that was like questions like, well, what if your candidate not necessarily the bottom of the rung, but you're the only one who can kind of do it. And so how do you?

Nic  
Well, there's different ways I think every company can handle things differently, right? So if it's a if it's a GIS thing, for example, right? So just using that as an example as you if your company has GIS people, some of them can help do some of that jazz tasking if they're all busy. And this is true of almost any task doesn't have to be dead, it can be anything. Then sometimes you get you can get us up to supplement some of the work that you're doing. You can get a group of people to come help do those kinds of projects and or that kind of task. If it's a small level thing, is it leveraging relationships, it's building, you're building a network you're building a work together with you know, either a new sub that can help you get more work in the future, or you know, an existing setup and strengthening the relationship that you already have. Right? So there's lots of different ways you can do that. It's not just using you know, getting other people to help you it's sometimes it's literally taking that big picture approach and finding a solution to your problem is broader than just the small tasks that you're or the tasks that you're you're trying to get done. There's ways to do that. And you know, sometimes, you know, you've got to grin and bear some of the work especially earlier in your career. I remember a few things I remember I think I've told this story, but I'm not sure like I was early in my career where we have an EIS Environmental Impact Statement. We're mailing out 150 FedEx boxes, but it is like December 21. Right? Is the holidays is the weekend before the holiday. And so maybe it's the 22nd whatever it is like we aren't coming back until Tuesday. And we're there till like 6pm 7pm Trying to get this thing out to FedEx, right. Just trying to get these things out to FedEx. And the amount of people that said, Oh, are you wrapping Christmas presents as they were walking out the door to go home to their families. By the fifth one I'm like if another person says this, I'm going to be on the newsletter right you know, it's like, it was terrible. It was really tough. And you get through it and you kind of live to see another day. But yeah, there's all kinds of stuff like that in the beginning of your career. Some of that will slow down, some of it will change. And if it's stuff that you can find solutions to, you know, with support other support that's a great way to do it. Understanding that even you know, menial tasks don't last forever and they're never going to be the only thing you're doing or not the most. You'll be able to adjust your career as you go to things you really do want to do and do care about and the longer you're in it, the easier that becomes, in a way. I know it's not a smoking gun answer, per se. But yeah, there's a couple of ways that you could do that.

Sam Bartleson  
Right now wife solution is to blast music and just use the Nike slogan and just be like, just do what Sam

Nic  
right? Yeah, and that'll work you know, here and there. If that's like, your whole job is gonna kill you. And you know, we've got to find other things for you to do and the Nike swoosh just do it does help sometimes. I mean, like, I remember cash there was a similar thing, right? We were doing the same kind of mailing. I've heard the rudeness all the time. And it's okay to make sure everything's listed correctly to check all these addresses. So much of that is tedious. So much of it is like oh, well actually, this says you know, 22012 and it's up to two Oh, no. And you know, it's like, you know, for the zip code and stuff like that, and you're just like killing yourself. And so, we're all laboring through this thing and like, you know, what, a big time and I just like, put on like an 80s Pop station wasn't even Spotify at the time, because that's how I'm dating myself but like, whatever the heck it was. And then it was just like, a miracle. Right? Immediately. Everybody starts feeling better. And it's almost like I had to bring fun into what I was doing. And make it fun for me. I used to do things like I remember I had to do a project where I had 500 different types of ammunition and they all had to be a recipe I was adding columns to make sure I had the amount of ammunition used at this firing range. So that when I was discussing the project and writing the data for this new project, I was actually had the right numbers, right, because someone was gonna check that someone's going to add these up and make sure that they were and it's it seems like a simple thing, but it was a huge spreadsheet. There's lots of different parts to it. And so it wasn't just like, you know, copying and pasting, I had to literally make sure that I was doing it correctly. So I just made a game. And I ended up like, using, like, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna do this one, and, you know, 10 seconds and I'm gonna do this one in 17 seconds. I'm gonna do this one in three seconds, or whatever it is. I'm trying to beat my own time. As to how fast I can do that. Check the data for each row and column that I had to do. It was silly, but it ended up making my experience less or less ridiculous. Yeah, it was almost like I had to trick my brain into like, making it more challenging or making it more complicated like I had to create a puzzle. And once I did that, I was able to, like, get through it, and that was, you know, a full week's worth of work that I was doing. And so, it was like, you know, because you can do tedious things for like an hour or a day, and it's not the end of the world but when it's like every day, it's really hard. And so, that ended up being what I was doing, and I would just like create games for myself, right? It's important for me, it's important. That's the kind of thing I had to do. Find the font, so to speak. Find

Sam Bartleson  
the fun. I like that.

Nic  
Cool. All right. Well, there you go. That's our segment. For today. And let's go ahead and get started. Hello, and welcome back to EPR. Today we have Dr. Simon Adler, a product manager and researcher specializing in impact oriented agricultural sustainability. Welcome some. Hi, Nick. Thank you so much for being here. First. of all, okay, tell me what impact oriented agricultural sustainability means. What is that?

Dr. Soham Adla  
I think it sounds so then it's supposed to be basically, I'm a city boy. And I happened to go to a university which was surrounded by farms all over. And I like biking. So I was biking around and I happened to be curious. I went off the road a few times, started talking to farmers. And then I tried to talk to farmers about their problems and in that that generally comes up because they see this person probably wearing jeans or something coming to them. And this is very weird for farmers in India, to have people coming to them on bikes and talking to them about their problems. And this was very strange. Convert the lead lead lead to very strange conversations. But what I took back was a lot of learning, which led to me questioning what I was being taught at university, for example. So the problem statements that were being taught to me in university for which we had these engineering solutions, they sort of didn't really exist in the same form, in reality, are well in my reality when I interacted with these farmers. So what I mean by impact oriented agricultural sustainability is identifying the right problems. Together with the people facing these problems, and then trying to address them, which leads to real impact. And then yeah, sustainability is a way to look at problems beyond their limited scope in that sense. So looking at it from the perspective of a sustaining beyond intervention, that's it right after solution. Right

Nic  
has got so many different directions to go. But we have to take go back to the beginning of that. So you just randomly started talking to farmers just on a whim like you were curious, and you decided to go talk to them? Is it was there anything that sparked that curiosity? More

Dr. Soham Adla  
or less because why would talk to the farmers would be there will be multiple reasons. So farmers would look at me as an alien or because I looked so different from what they were wearing. For example, just a shirt versus a shirt makes a lot of difference. In let's say, really rural. Areas in India. So I also am not great with navigation, so I will lose my way. Yeah, yeah. All right.

I really, really need to ask people to you know, show me

show me the way to some someplace which is in a roadblock somewhere or something. Some farm, some road leading into a farm, which I don't there's no way to go forward and Right, right.

Nic  
It's like the journey important

Dr. Soham Adla  
Yeah, I agree. So sorry. I was just saying that sometimes it was a need to talk to the farmers. And then the more I did, the more natural it became. Right. Then it became and then I had some friends also from these villages, and then it became more natural. I started meeting people and you know, sharing stories, and farmers have really interesting stories, for lack of a better word. They can be very extreme in terms of what they what they reveal and what I've had as experiences. Very, very different than what I've seen as a city boy, like I said, and yeah and that taught me a lot. So yeah, then I went for this interesting exchange that I look forward to every time.

Nic  
Yeah, and it's, I love it because you were curious, and you're willing to admit that you didn't know what you're going. I love that. So you've had these conversations and I'm, you know, being genuinely interested in people is a great way to hear them as they are right they will tell you a lot more about themselves if you are genuine. So what are those like those solutions that you talk about it you said that you had some reality based issues and problems? So what is an example of that like, you know, where you didn't see in university, but you did see the problem in the real world, quote, unquote.

Dr. Soham Adla  
So one example I can give is that I used to go with Mobifone with a digital survey once I was already, you know, formalizing my work and try to understand some sorts of barriers to sustainability on the farm. I would go with a digital app survey, which I thought was very fancy, I took it to the farmers. I'd ask them, hey, what's stopping you from being more sustainable on your farm or improved let's say what's stopping you from improving your performance in terms of yields that you get for your crops? And I would have a lot of options and there would be a lot of choices. Generally something like not having enough water to irrigate the crops or there being some sort of pest attack which they weren't able to manage or something like that. You know, less fertilizer, for example. And when farmers would reply to me saying that there's a group of wild boar, which family of wild boar which attacks my farm every time it's sort of very, or a group of, I don't know what it's called, but a group of peacocks, for example, because fishing is coming and destroying most of the crop in one night or something like that. I have no place to really put it in my digital survey. It had to be a huge others list became this animal attack and I don't know, attacked by birds and things like that. And this is what I didn't expect to happen. And I didn't see a lot of scarecrows, which I do see in let's say, person movies. I didn't see a lot of scarecrows, and in fact, I didn't imagine that this will be a problem but it is sometimes and for some crops with some animals. And this is something which was an eye opener for me. Yeah.

Nic  
And that's really great. So that kind of you get that feedback, which is really great that you're getting good, honest feedback, because that's the best way you can start addressing some of the problems. So how do you start doing that? How do you start addressing improving sustainability on these farms?

Dr. Soham Adla  
So perhaps taking it a step back? I think it's really important to identify the right problems that are actually faced by the people who, who face the problems. So what I would do is that instead of doing these one on one interviews with Sam as well, I just got to know about my own shortcomings in terms of my knowledge. I'd rather go in and join them in, let's say, near a tea stall or under a tree where the playing cards or something like that, and then I would join them and then try to talk to them. And for the first few minutes, few, maybe even half an hour an hour. Of course I can't come with my agenda and that feels very, it feels a little artificial if I go with my agenda and start speaking. So I'd rather listen to them and sort of meld with them to some extent. And then after an hour pass where I was not, I mean, I was losing all my car games. Because I'm in this chapter, talk to them about my stuff as well. They will stop talking and they would ask me where I'm from and what I do and while I'm there, and that sort of gave me permission to ask my questions in that sense. So now I know that they had some sort of patients for me and they had some space to talk to me and once I started talking about my issues, they already removed a lot of the clutter that came with my university educated questions, let's say that sort of a narrative let's say and then they would remove a lot of that clutter and a lot of the assumptions passion a lot of the assumptions that I was coming with, and then it became a conversation which eventually and hopefully would lead to a co creation of these problem statements which were actually important and sent by them.

Nic  
So we've got we know that those are the bore, and peacocks are a challenge that they're facing. There's

Dr. Soham Adla  
another sorry, here's another animal. Neil kinetically. And I mean, from the word itself, Neil die is a blue owl, but it's a sort of a deer. It's a huge deer. Some of them have antlers. I suppose. So he's ever also there are a lot in this region where it is in the Ganga plane in the North of India, in Cambodia, so yeah, these are all different kinds of animals one has to do with

Nic  
Yeah, That's too funny. So Well, I mean, before we dive into some more of the research type work, you are in the Netherlands right now, and your work is in India. So how does that work? I know we're kind of in a global space, but you know, there's a lot of farming is outdoors. It's in that area. So how does your work? How are you able to do that work from a distance

Dr. Soham Adla  
Yeah, so right now I'm in a development cooperation project. So it's a public private partnership project, and the public funding is coming from an organization in the Netherlands and that's why I'm in the Netherlands. And also because the academic part of the academic let's say partner is the University where I look at working with b2c you dealt with, I think, they use it the other way around. So there's that University of Technology, or the T u. Yeah, that's where I'm working. But we also have partners in India and non governmental partners in India as well as a cotton producer company, which brings the private part of the funding and the current producer company wants some solutions about improving water centric sustainability of their producing farmers. And that's how the whole project works. So the implementing partner, which has their feet on the ground, or the NGO and the cotton producer company, because they actually deal with these issues. And I guess we are the knowledge partners who try to do something on their laptops or something with data. Luckily, the good thing is that I end up visiting India often enough, and I see how the data is generated. Some of it is primary data directly from farmers. And that is I try to at least have some say in that. So I lead these data, collecting campaigns. Let's say we have a lot of help from the partners, but I'm on top of it most of the times. That's how this project was born.

Nic  
That's very, very cool. How far away is that? Is that an ordeal every time?

Dr. Soham Adla  
Well, I'm also going home so I also look forward to the holidays at the end of this works off. Yeah, so I Yeah, so it's an ordeal. i It's not that long, actually. Maybe 10 hours and 1015 hours depending on how on how many stops you have. Yeah, yeah, but it's not like a journey from the US to the US to

Nic  
India is much different. Yeah, it's one of my friends does that every now and then I'm like, I don't know how you do it. But no anyway, so. So what is your day to day like? Are you talking to people are you problem solving? What do you do on a day to day basis?

Dr. Soham Adla  
Honestly, even if it's, if my funding comes from research based funding at another university, it's relatively more consulting like than a typical research project. So what I mean by that is, whatever imagine a research project is like that, you get some data, and then you work on it for a long time. And then you sort of iterate your hypothesis and then do some experiments with the data, get some results, learn from them go back into this loop. And that's what I would imagine. A lot of. That's a more desk based research looks like Yeah, so what I'm doing is I'm trying to basically scrum between a lot of people. So what that means is that I'm struggling between the NGO and the cotton producer company, and the research part of our team as well. So I have some partners or some people also working with me in the university. And at the same time, I'm also trying to develop this app. There's an app called mother so it spells out Makara which is in the name, which comes from the festival harvest festival. So that's why it's called mocha. And yeah, so what we tried to do through this app is to tell farmers or let's say, give farmers a tool which they can use to actualize their risk related to yield or income and therefore profit. And I can explain this more later but what I'm trying to say that my day is full of keeping things on track for this project. So that's my scrubbing role, let's say and also working on this app development between different partners. That becomes a product management role more or less and then I'm also trying to do my research. So getting data working on it. And all of these, let's say, learnings that we get from the research, also go back into the development of this app, and therefore the health of the project in that sense.

Nic  
Okay. Yeah. So so how does the app work then? What is the end goal for the end

Dr. Soham Adla  
goal has changed over time, because we've seen that the app didn't or wasn't as well received earlier as it is now. So yeah, the current end goal is that it's fun calculator. So I'm using double quotes and I don't know if people can see that. But so it's a farm calculator, and let's say a best practice recommendation app. So what it does is that and there's a funny story about it. We thought, having the table with different inputs at the farm level for a farmer is very simple. You know, it's a very small thing to just have, let's say a table with different crops as columns and different inputs that farmers have from leptin. So it's going to harvest as the different rows and then you enter how much you pay for your farm for this crop and so on. This was a very simple very simplistic sort of a tool. And then this will just one of the features that we had in the app. And then when we went to the farmers with this feature, and within the overall app, this is what attracted their eyes most. And we saw people gasping and stuff like that, and that sort of is a sad realization. Of how, let's say how simple tools can have helped farmers or Yeah, and how much farmers maybe, let's say approximating or pumping through the decision making. I'm not saying that they don't know what they're doing. Nobody knows better about farmer what farmers should do than farmers themselves, for sure. But such tools, if they can help them, then this is the least we can do as people who are used to the spreadsheet narrative and paradigm of things, right, so, so this now has become one of the more primary, let's say USBs of the product of this app. So it becomes a calculator. And then it also becomes a way to for farmers to journal what they're doing during the season or planting season. So there's a calendar view where they can journal stuff. And with that journal comes a list of best practices, which can come to you know, through notification and things like that. And you can have a, let's say, a record of what you've done and what is suggested by the government or to our back end model. And that can be a nice way to keep track of things happening on the farm and through this you get this risk assessment of how much you can expect them from the view. So the probability of getting some sort of a range of views and so on. So what initially was the prop just justice risk communication, now becomes a calculator and recommend

Nic  
something like that. Yeah. And then ends up

Dr. Soham Adla  
and this is what is more useful, or let's say attractive to farmers, right? Yeah,

Nic  
exactly. And it ends up like compounding over time. So like, the more you use it, the better it gets, and the more data you have to support the management practices.

Dr. Soham Adla  
Yep, yep, exactly. Yeah. Very cool. So,

Nic  
you know, it's, it's funny, we're talking it's kind of like a little bit of what you do is almost like translating grass roots issues right into solutions. So it's taking that that piece from farmers that they latch on to and then expanding on it, and providing them some valuable research and valuable information. That's really hard to do without bios. You know, we talked about how you did that. But do you have advice for anyone else who's trying to do something similar? Getting that collaboration has got to be challenging, you must have had some challenges along the way, getting some people in there, so how did you come here? What were those challenges and how did you kind of overcome?

Dr. Soham Adla  
Yeah, that's a good question. To be honest, it's a very difficult because I don't have the elaborate answer for it or a very, let's say a clear answer to it. It really depends on context. So I'd say like farmers who are used to technology will technologically literate are completely different kinds of stakeholders compared to farmers who are not used to this kind of stuff. So what I need to say is that we've tried feedback sessions with farmers over zoom calls or Whatsapp group video calls or things like that. We could see that farmers also lose interest after a while because it's anywhere in app. So it becomes very difficult to sort of imagine what it could mean for their lives. And then if you want to make this app, you want to discuss this abstract thing like an app or over a video call, then it becomes even more, let's say, far away from reality a step away farther from reality, because then it becomes more like you're looking at a screen with an app you're looking at another screen with this video call going on. So it becomes a little abstract. And you have a record work for farmers who are used to a lot of technology in their farming decisions or their lives. But I think as a bottom line, I'd like to say that it's very important to keep discussing with the end user of whatever solution you want to propose. Because I think a lot of funding comes for solutions to be proposed not problems to be found. So maybe we live in that reality. So it will be really strange if we don't accept that. But if we keep talking to the people who we want to help, in that sense then I think that's the thing which has worked for me at least.

Nic  
I think that's great. That's wonderful advice. And like I say, I love asking challenging questions because you get good answers, you know, but you've also got to have a bunch of stories of being out in the field we love on this show to ask our guests about their stories in the field. And so we always encourage encourage folks to share those stories with us as well. So you have a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering, you've got a doctorate and all that. Those are all it's all great. What from all that Do you have any fun stories to share with us? Oh,

Dr. Soham Adla  
I have a few. And sometimes they don't. They don't sort of support. Have a doctorate in something make me feel a little stupid, but
___________________________
Nic  
Do you have any fun stories to share with us?

Dr. Soham Adla  
Oh, I have a few. And sometimes they don't. They don't sort of support. I have a doctorate in some it makes me feel a little stupid but oh yeah. And coupled with the usual impostor syndrome that academics usually face so. Well, yeah, but it's always a learning experience. But this story is, let's say 10 years old, so I was relatively younger, definitely not a doctorate and definitely not aware of my limitations as much as I am right now. So I was interning with a grassroots organization in very dry region in the center of India. So it's a very drought prone region. So the lack of water is is actually an impediment for getting a lot of, you know, to get the yield that farmers expect and I went to this grassroots NGO and they seem that I'm from some reputed Institute, where I was coming from, they sort of gave me a little bit of freedom in how I designed my internship. And they told me yeah, go with the participatory groundwater management team into the field into our field and promotes saving measures in general. So we were supposed to first make a prop water balance, which is basically what it means is that you have sort of an accounting of how much water comes in to the groundwater aquifer, and then how much water is used for the four different crops and then you will do the accounting you will see that there might be a small surplus or a deficit and then you try to reduce that deficit or increase the surplus by let's say, reducing the area and water intensive crops or changing the varieties of crops which are water intensive, so to say less water intensive crops. So and all of this would work in the paradigm of the season where there would be some irrigation so it's not the rainy monsoon season. It's the latter the drier season, right. And what is grown in the dry season in that region is mostly different varieties of wheat. So this is one of the things that has grown. So we were team acne as the professional person who understood and talked in English and struggled in the local language. And then there are a lot of village experts so very grounded experts who can come from the community who were basically guiding me wherever I have to go, and then translating things for me as well. And they were much more knowledgeable about the local realities than I was and when I did all this calculation about the proper budget, I found out what was let's say, the deficit being caused by and then there was a list of water saving varieties of wheat that I was supposed to, you know, promote to these farmers and a person from a university I have a group of farmers from the NGO and we are going into villages talking to people promoting water saving varieties of wheat. And then we will do that every day we would come back they will have long days and then we would talk to different stakeholders, different farmers, and then we will come back we would get different kinds of responses. Some would say yes, just for the sake of saying it. Got to get rid of us basically. Sure. We'll

Nic  
definitely do that. Yeah.

Dr. Soham Adla  
Sounds great. Yeah. Yeah. And some would be actually interested in then we would have nice conversations. And so that it seemed like My internship was going well. Yes. Until one time when we were sitting under a tree, perhaps the hot day, middle of the day, we were having lunch and then I, for the first time I turned around to the farmers who were in my team and asked them what kind of varieties of when they were growing. And none of them were growing the water saving ones. And this This was really, really crazy for me, because I thought, Hey, wait. You have been told by an NGO to say something and you're saying it with such conviction that I'm full, I know that you are really promoting it, and then you're not doing I mean yourself. And this is really big. I mean, this is hypocrisy, and I'm part of it. And I didn't understand what this meant. Yeah. So I really got I mean, it was hard. So my, I mean, I wasn't the most levitation in the way I expressed. So I wasn't really patient I've made I was also young. I mean, I'm still young, but I was younger. Yeah, and I wasn't really good with my words. When I said this. And then the farmer who I really spoke to, he made me sit down. And then he said, the following to me, he said, Okay, I understand where you're coming from. I know you're here for a few months. I know you know, I know that your intentions are good. No problem with that. But if I in my own home, use this auto saving variety of wheat. I only have a limited patch of land. And I get all the yield back home. I process it myself at local, let's say processors, and it's my family that has to eat the bread, the royalties that are made by this week. And they're not soft enough if I use any of these varieties, and then it doesn't really Yeah, it doesn't really help me to subside over the year because they were subsistence farmers. They wouldn't have a lot of their crop yield produce going into the market, but mostly come back home. And if it's not edible for the family, or if it's not, you know, comfortable for the family to eat, then why would they even grow it? So it makes sense that they would probably not be able to get as much yield from the same area. But at least they don't have to go to the market to buy their wheat flour or something like that. Rather, they would have something from their own farm, which they knew what they put in. So it would be let's say organic in that sense. They will know how much they input and then yeah, it would be nice bread to eat everything.

Nic  
That's incredible.

Dr. Soham Adla  
I mean, that's really important to what you put into the farm.

Nic  
Yeah, it's almost Yeah, it's like sometimes we get tunnel vision right where we are. Our eyes are focused here with the limited scope and then someone opens the window. And you could say oh, there's a world outside. That's kind of what you're describing right there. That's a really great story.

Dr. Soham Adla  
Totally. I mean, I think that is a reason why I went from something called plant water movement or eco hydrology to something called social metrology, which works in between human water interactions in whatever context it's applied to. Yeah, I do mostly social hydrology, in agricultural contexts. And it's so much so so important to understand why people make the decisions they do in that context.

Nic  
Yeah, that's a great, great example of a formative experience that's kind of influenced the way you've done the rest of your work. And you know, it's it's great. We love talking about that kind of stuff on the show. And I know you have a story for us too, about your trials and tribulations through the academic process, even with your research, so why don't you share that story with us as

Dr. Soham Adla  
well? Yeah, I'm happy I can say this. Now. Because it's in the past and I trusted her. Yeah, when when you're going through, let's say all academics notice and PhD students while they're doing their PhD, it seems like yeah, it seems like a hill they don't they're not able to cross it. It's like a Sisyphus problem when they're always taking this folder or that PSD or there's some sort of manuscript up the journal Hill, it tumbles down because every day or two are because of, I don't know because of something missing in the data or because that's small things that it seems so trivial in the larger scheme of things. So here's a here's a very motivated researcher because I don't know people who are working for that less money in other fields outside academia for the same amount of work. They do the data work back home in most cases, and they're always thinking about the problems. And here are these researchers who are trying to put in their best and facing rejection after rejection after rejection, when they don't know how else they could do it because they have a limited amount of time. They have a limited amount of, let's say, resources at hand and they're supposed to, you know, make a lot of tangible outcomes in most good universities and then the things which stopped them seem to be out of their control. So it's a very hopeless sort of situation. But turning it around because I've because I like to do that. because it really helps. If I were in that situation and somebody told me what I'm. Really and so, I have this one paper, which I've been working on since 2008. Teen betas are even earlier than that, because the experiment that happened in the paper is in 2018. So it's based on some experiments done in 2018. We started writing the paper, perhaps in 2019 or 20. And then, yeah, it took some time to get all the results together, write it up, and so on. And it's been let's say, we got submitted with full enthusiasm to know the best one that we thought we could identify for. And then it would get rejected, or it could get through a very little learning process through a good review, which is also great. So you will have good reviewers and then they will give us great comments. We will incorporate the comments and it took some time and all these, you know, this all of this sort of adds up to your expectations from this paper because now it's better because this reviewer said that this should be improved. We proved it we sent it back and it was rejected again. And then we this would go in so many loops, so I think it fits seven rejections. One and a half years. So, yeah, through different journals and things like that. So my PhD got over with this paper being in review, and luckily my university gave me the opportunity to finish my PhD with one paper under review. So this was the paper which was under review, which, by the way, but at the same time Now it came out in February 2023. I finished my PhD in sorry, February 2024 A few few weeks ago, and when I finished my PhD it was in October 2022. So it's been one and a half years since then more or less. So this paper has seen a lot of ups and downs itself. It's changed a lot. I really like how it looks right now. But yeah, I think I've aids a little because a little faster than just, you know my age, right. So yeah, but I would really Yeah, perseverance really really helps. So if I had lost hope earlier than this may not have seen the light of day or it may have gone to a journal which is not as reputed and so on. But I think it really helps to keep going and yeah, you never know what combination of factors would really help to streamline your papers process. So it really helps to go that one step. And when you think you're not, you know, you want to give up. It really helps if, let's say you force yourself not to give up for whatever reason,

Nic  
right? And when you got accepted the relief you must have felt

Dr. Soham Adla  
so my partner who's with me right now, she's seen me get my PhD. She's seen me through a few more ups and downs. And I and it's really clear to her that I was happier because of this one paper that I was with my whole PhD degree which gives me a doctorate in my Name, which I can use. I wasn't that happy with that. degree as much as I was with this one. One thing. One link on a web page. Yeah.

Nic  
That's great. I love to hear that. And it's so true. We always have those moments in our lives. We're like, Yeah, this is far more important to me than then even I realized, you know, oh, well,

Dr. Soham Adla  
I have. So, I had this email from this journal, in my email inbox, and I got it on a Friday or something. I was so scared to open it because I thought that it was another rejection or another round of reviews. I didn't see it till Sunday night because I didn't want to destroy my weekend. Right. And I saw it on a Sunday evening or something like that. And then I was I was a little child again, having seen this acceptance and then yeah, yeah, and my partner was telling me that if I knew this would happen one way or the other, you don't have to, you know, not see an email which comes a few days earlier. Just a little wider a little, you know, yeah.

Nic  
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So worried about having a bad weekend that you didn't realize you could have a good one. It Well, we're getting close to the end of our time. And we love to ask our guests about their hobbies too, because we want people to feel approachable in lots of different ways. We have many different things that we love beyond the work that we do. So what is your favorite hobby? What do you like to do for fun?

Dr. Soham Adla  
Yeah, this is this is quite easy to answer for me. So for me, I think music is a really beautiful language of communication. So one that can go beyond just words and what they mean and so on. So I think I've never seen so in my experience, I haven't seen any other mode of communication, which makes me feel things even if I don't understand what the person was. The person is saying, or playing. Yeah, so music is something that I really, really engage with. I really feel myself in while I'm doing it. So it feels very natural. And at the same time, I've seen the power of music even helping me in my work. So at one point of time, I was backpacking, also through Indian villages and something like that. And I always used to have this acoustic guitar with me. And it would be the such a conversation starter because they wouldn't see this some guy who looks like he's not from here, walking around here and they're taking local buses. And they would see this, you know, dusty guitar case, and then they would ask me to open it very often to take selfies with the guitar, but Oh, wow. Yeah, often enough. It was just about exchange of stories. And, yeah, it led to conversations. It led to, you know, simple things like singing songs would lead to conversations which gave me much more of an of a deeper experience with interacting with people.

Nic  
And it's a you know, in case you need directions, it's it's a nice icebreaker.

Dr. Soham Adla  
It's a great icebreaker.

Nic  
Yeah, that's really wonderful. And yeah, thank you.

Dr. Soham Adla  
Do we have time for a story about I think we have time for one sorry, I

Nic  
was just about to ask. I think we got time for one. Give me one more story with music, please.

Dr. Soham Adla  
Oh, man. So picture this. It's a huge festival in India. Diwali, if you know, is a huge Hindu festival. Of course. It's not only a Hindu festival. It's celebrated all across India. It's the Christmas of India, let's say yeah. And yeah, I'm trying to go back from my internship back to a friend's place and I'm travelling in a local bus. If the bus has a capacity of 100 people there are at least 300 there somehow packed like sardines, but it's not only people it's also let's say the animals in the in the aisle. We have goats and we have produce and we have a lot of stuff. So in this in this pack bus, I miss messed up obviously. I didn't realize that this was these were all new places for me. So I went to the I sort of made my way to the front of the bus I call off but then when I realized when I got off, I really didn't know where it was, and it was in the middle of nowhere. So it's like a toll booth place where you collect tolls for highways and something but it was completely empty had no people were there people's buses were just going past and I couldn't stop them. I didn't even know if I how far back I had to go and something like that. In this situation. I'm looking around and then I see a group of motorcyclists obviously locals coming to me obviously, but what I sort of what gets clearer when they come closer in the dust is that they each motorcycle has at least one person brandishing a gun or a rifle with them and think they will just you know, I don't know. group of men trying to be boys. I don't know what they were having a free day. And they were just moving around and they stopped seeing my guitar case. And this is amazing because I really didn't want this kind of being in this kind of attention. And they came to me and they stop. I don't know why they stop. And then they started looking around. They saw me and the only person that and they asked me hey, what's that? And then, of course they know and I tell them it's a guitar and then they tell me to Hey, so play a song. And I have to play a song right? In this situation. I have no way out. I have my heart. My heart is racing. And I have no idea what to play because, of course I can't play English songs for them. I have to play something which they associate with and I can play as well. And I don't know if my ability impact how they respond to me. So I really needed to get my act. After I play something nice and I started playing. What happened next was really, really unexpected for me. People started singing with me, and people started singing with me. Then one thing led to the other. Other people started asking me for songs requesting me for songs and then they would sing and I would just play along and this was such a beautiful experience for me. Because then all of the everybody became a child. They weren't gun holding men anymore. They were just children. Having fun with music. Yeah, and this was such a nice jam session, if you could call it that. In the middle of nowhere, at the end of which they took photos of us and then after that they really asked me what I was doing there and then told my story and then then what they did is that they made a bus stop for me. But there wasn't a stop. I mean if if a group of gun holding people when I'm sure would stop so they made a bad start for me and then they Yeah, they put me on the bus. I came back home very safely. And this is such a beautiful story. Yeah, coming out of something that could have gone horribly wrong. In my opinion. In my previous experience, yeah. But music really binds people you know across classes and you know the your your opinions as well, I suppose.

Nic  
Yeah, yeah. What a beautiful way to end our conversation today. That's fantastic. Thank you so so much for sharing that. So before we let you go, is there anything else we didn't ask you about that you'd like to say? I don't

Dr. Soham Adla  
know. I think it's nice to have conversations with people. So if people are with what they've heard, if people want to talk to me, I'm happy to talk to them as well. And yeah, my LinkedIn is open and people can reach out the goal here. All

Nic  
right, thank you so much for being here. We had a great, great time. The

Dr. Soham Adla  
same and thank you for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity as well. Yeah. Awesome.

Speaker 1  
That's our show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. See everybody bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai