Stories
Stories
John Batcha: Sowing the Seeds to Fight Hunger
Smiles all around: Guatemalan schoolchildren enjoy the fruits of their labor. photo courtesy John Batcha |
Batcha in his Charlotte, North Carolina, garden with his grandchildren, Nicole and David Spencer. photo by Roger Ball |
When he retired as executive director of the Asgrow Seed Company in 1990, John Batcha (MBA '54) was ready to grow his own organization. With a $50,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation, he teamed with Partners of the Americas, the largest private volunteer organization in the Western Hemisphere, to develop a program to distribute vegetable seed and planting expertise to needy families, children, and community groups in Latin America and the Caribbean. Eight years later, Batcha established the nonprofit Seed Programs, Inc. (SPI), to continue this vital work after foundation funding had lapsed.
The seed industry has dramatically increased man's ability to produce food, notes the low-key Batcha, who was raised on a farm in rural New Jersey and majored in horticulture at Rutgers before coming to HBS. I believe hunger and famine would be much more widespread today without the changes the seed industry helped bring about. Thanks to developments in seed genetics, fertilizers, and insecticides, Batcha explains, the average crop yield of corn has increased nearly fivefold in the years between his youth and his retirement from Asgrow, where he worked for 28 years.
Batcha took a leap of faith in launching his first seed distribution program, not knowing if his idea — to provide quality, low-cost seed and planting expertise to needy communities worldwide — was even viable. He need not have worried. Today SPI supports dozens of organizations in more than forty countries where poverty is a major cause of hunger. These groups are the conduits for SPI's quality vegetable and flower seed, which Batcha sources, packages, and labels in a dozen languages, working out of his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the past four years, SPI has shipped nearly six million packets of seed abroad.
Batcha sells the seed at nominal cost instead of giving it away in order to cover SPI's operating expenses. He notes that the program gives people the means to create an independent, renewable food supply, which builds esteem and has the added benefit of being more cost-effective than continuously shipping food supplies. Numerous reports from the field include testimonials from countries as far-flung as Belarus and Zimbabwe that attest to the success of SPI's self-help approach.
Three years ago, Batcha took a trip to Africa, an experience that opened his eyes to a new area of focus: schoolchildren and orphans whose basic nutritional needs are not being met. Visiting Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Tanzania, he was struck by a Tanzanian school official's comment that the food children receive at school is sometimes the only real meal they eat in a day. The Christian Council only had enough money for four months of the school's nutrition program, Batcha recalls. At that moment, he discovered a new passion. I came back and put together an SPI program tailored to children and orphans, which now works with Rotary Clubs, the Peace Corps, and church groups around the world. Batcha plans to focus more energy on this new effort next year, when he begins the transition process of passing responsibilities for SPI's primary operations to vice president and general manager Dean Urmston, a veteran of the seed industry who is based in Bakersfield, California.
What motivates this compassionate man? Pausing to reflect, Batcha responds, Just helping feed hungry people in the world.
— Nancy O. Perry