Andhra man quits pharmaceutical industry after 25 years to grow Moringa. Turns leaves into a Rs 1,000/Kg product, earns Rs 15 lakh per acre

After spending 25 years working at Dr Reddy’s Laboratories in Hyderabad, Annapureddy Prakash Reddy made an unusual career switch. He left the corporate world, returned to his native Guntur in Andhra Pradesh and went back to farming. But instead of simply continuing his family's traditional crops, Reddy built a high-density moringa farm where the real money, he says, isn't in drumsticks it is in the leaves. Today, he estimates his chemical-free, value-added model has the potential to generate around Rs 15 lakh per acre annually.

Why did he leave Dr Reddy’s after 25 years?

Reddy's family owns around 10 acres, traditionally used to cultivate paddy, turmeric and banana. After graduation, however, he moved to Hyderabad and joined Dr Reddy's Laboratories, eventually becoming a manager handling special assignments. In 2018, after 25 years with the company, he quit. “I always had a passion for farming,” Reddy told 30 Stades. He spent the following years learning techniques including Korean Natural Farming, biodynamic farming and other natural cultivation methods. The transition away from chemical farming took about five years.

Why did moringa become his big bet?

Reddy initially experimented with organic bananas but wanted a crop offering greater scope for value addition and exports. His research eventually led him to moringa. In 2024, he planted the PKM-1 variety across four acres. Unlike conventional drumstick cultivation, however, his farm focuses almost entirely on leaves rather than pods. Plants are grown densely and regularly pruned to encourage vegetative growth.


There is agricultural research supporting the value of denser moringa cultivation, although returns vary substantially by production system. An ICAR-linked study published in the Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences found that closer 2m×2m planting delivered almost three times the per-area yield of its widest spacing and produced the highest net returns among the configurations studied.

From just leaves to earning Rs 1,000/kg product

According to Reddy, one acre produces around 3,000 kg of fresh leaves per harvest, with at least four harvests possible annually. Once shade-dried, the leaves retain roughly 20–25 per cent of their fresh weight. Rather than selling the highly perishable leaves directly, he dries and pulverises them into moringa powder, which he currently sells for around Rs 1,000 per kg. He estimates farm inputs at roughly Rs 20,000 per acre, although harvesting, drying and processing add significant labour costs.

The wider market is also finding buyers. The Times of India reported in June 2026 that farmers in Tamil Nadu's Dharmapuri district were supplying moringa leaves for export to Singapore and Dubai. One farmer told the publication he was earning about Rs 70,000 per acre per month on average from his model.

Why is moringa attracting attention?

Moringa's appeal goes beyond its commercial potential. ICAR describes it as a crop containing valuable bioactive compounds with applications extending from nutrition to industries such as bio-water clarification. Reddy is now pursuing organic certification and hopes to enter export markets. His experience also carries an important lesson for anyone attracted by the headline numbers: the Rs 15 lakh figure isn't simply the result of planting moringa. His model relies on high-density cultivation, low-cost farm-made inputs, repeated harvesting, processing leaves into powder and selling a higher-value finished product. For a man who spent a quarter-century in a pharmaceutical office, the second act of his career has taken him somewhere very different back to the soil, but with farming treated as a business rather than simply a crop.