“One purpose, many hands, endless possibilities”
As you read this column, consider this: Until 1910, Jewish farmers in the Promised Land struggled in isolation, each striving individually to survive. Like smallholders today, their missions were personal, their goals unaligned, and the outcomes were predictable—cycles of failure, hardship, and poverty.
Then, in 1910, a small group of visionary farmers broke this cycle by pooling their resources and uniting around shared mission-driven goals. They established the first Kibbutz, a revolutionary model of community and collaboration. The results were transformative: collective success replaced individual struggle, and everyone on the Kibbutz thrived. This success extended beyond their community, inspiring others to embrace the principles of Togetherness and shared purpose, ultimately laying the foundation for the thriving Kibbutzim movement that followed.
Everyone’s Mission in Life
Do you have a purpose in life? Do you know what it is? I believe each person is born with a mission—though some discover it, others may not. Our missions are most powerful when aligned with the collective when we work together for a greater purpose. I consider myself fortunate to have a clear and well-defined mission: to help the least fortunate, particularly smallholder farmers in developing economies, transition from the alley of poverty to the highway of prosperity.
Achieving such a mission requires more than vision—it demands a well-crafted, actionable plan. Drawing from my upbringing as a farmer on a Kibbutz and over four decades of experience in agrotech and business development, I have developed and refined strategies that accelerate farmers’ professional growth, significantly boost incomes, strengthen self-belief, and support a sector’s long-term vision rooted in dignity, collaboration, and trust.
However, fulfilling this mission and achieving its goal requires more than concepts or ideas. It demanded a practical, field-tested model capable of delivering meaningful results and scaling across diverse communities and cultures. To create such a model, I had to address a fundamental question: Why are smallholders poor?
From Confusion to Clarity: The Prosperity Formula
When I sought expert insights into the root causes of poverty, I encountered a wave of conflicting opinions. This lack of consensus revealed a critical truth: there is no single, universally agreed-upon, scientifically proven, and field-tested explanation for why farmers experience poverty—or prosperity. I realized that to fulfill my mission, I would need to embark on my own journey to uncover the underlying causes of both poverty and prosperity.
To achieve my goal, I first needed to define what “Prosperity” truly means and how it can be attained. Years of research and fieldwork culminated in the development of the Prosperity Formula:
Prosperity = f (External Integration + Social Integration) / Internal Disintegration
Or, in shorthand:
Prosperity = f (E + Si) / I
I have thoroughly discussed this formula in previous columns, but to recap: it explains why some communities thrive while others remain trapped in poverty. Prosperity arises when external opportunities—such as access to markets, technology, and services—and internal cohesion outweigh inefficiencies, fragmentation, and conflict.
While the formula provides clarity, its abstract nature often makes it challenging to fully grasp, interpret, and apply. This inspired me to distill the concept into a more intuitive, actionable framework: The Togetherness-Prosperity Principle.
Visualizing Prosperity
The Togetherness-Prosperity Principle distills prosperity into two primary drivers:
Togetherness: The ability of people to collaborate voluntarily, both within and beyond their organization or community.
Mission-Oriented Goals: A shared commitment to pursuing meaningful, purpose-driven objectives freely and willingly.
The relationship between these factors and prosperity is visualized in the graph below:
Organizations thrive when Togetherness (Unity) and Mission-Driven Goals (Purpose) work together, leading to increased prosperity. Isolation, in contrast, tends to hinder growth.
The Togetherness-Prosperity Principle graph captures the interplay between Togetherness, mission-driven goals, and prosperity:
* Low Togetherness and Mission-Driven Goals = Poverty: Those are seen in ecosystems characterized by isolated smallholders, dictatorships, or forced collectivization, such as the Soviet Kolkhoz.
* High Togetherness and Mission-Driven Goals = Prosperity: This is exemplified by the Kibbutz concept, Gandhi’s and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s unifying movements, and transformative initiatives like the Apollo Project, which successfully landed a man on the moon.
* Togetherness and Mission-Driven Goals are Interdependent: Prosperity peaks when these two factors amplify each other, creating a virtuous cycle.
Bottomline: To achieve prosperity, fostering Togetherness around a shared, mission-driven goal is essential.
Characteristics of Togetherness and Mission-Driven Goals
Togetherness is a multidimensional concept encompassing social, economic, cultural, emotional, and even environmental layers. It reflects the depth and breadth of human collaboration, bridging divides and fostering a sense of belonging across diverse aspects of life. Emotional Togetherness is pivotal in promoting trust, empathy, mutual understanding, and sustained motivation to act and support one another, serving as the essential glue that binds all other layers. These dimensions often overlap, creating a rich tapestry of interconnected relationships that strengthen a community or organization.
In contrast, Mission-Driven Goals are sharply focused, defining a clear and singular aim that unites efforts toward a specific outcome. While Togetherness provides the foundation and resilience needed to sustain long-term collaboration, Mission-Driven Goals serve as the guiding star, ensuring all energy is channeled in the right direction. Togetherness generates the energy, strength, and adaptability needed to overcome challenges, while Mission-Driven Goals provide clear purpose and direction, ensuring alignment in the pursuit of prosperity. Prosperity flourishes when the broad inclusivity of Togetherness is combined with the precision and clarity of a shared mission.
Three Steps to Prosperity in the Agro Sector
Smallholder farmers in emerging economies face systemic challenges that hinder Togetherness and mission-driven activity. These barriers to prosperity include inadequate education, poor infrastructure, corruption, and limited access to knowledge, technologies, and markets.
The Togetherness-Prosperity Principle offers a practical framework for addressing these challenges. By fostering Togetherness and aligning efforts around mission-driven goals, we can break down these barriers and establish the foundations for sustainable, continuous economic growth—paving the way for a transformative shift of rural communities from poverty to prosperity.
To achieve this, we must:
Foster internal Togetherness by creating cooperatives with transparent governance, empowering farmers to collaborate, pool resources, and share knowledge.
Cultivate external Togetherness by integrating farmers and local agro sectors into global value chains, giving them access to markets, technologies, and services that drive innovation and efficiency.
Align free-will mission-driven goals by uniting farmers, the agro sector, and national strategies around shared, long-term objectives that prioritize sustainability and prosperity.
This approach transforms isolated smallholders into thriving, interconnected communities by prioritizing Togetherness and shared missions. It unlocks the agro-sector’s potential to drive economic development and social progress.
The Danger of Toxic Togetherness
I still recall the haunting words spoken during a private meeting with the Minister of Agriculture from a developing country. Referring to smallholders, he remarked, "They got used to living in poverty", drawing a clear line between himself and his circle on one side and the smallholders on the other. This statement reflects a mindset of division—a fundamental characteristic of Toxic Togetherness.
While my focus is on fostering Positive Togetherness in agriculture, the principles of Togetherness—both its power to unite and its potential to harm—transcend any single domain. In many developing countries, 50% to 80% of the population relies on farming for their livelihood. This means that Togetherness within the agro sector has far-reaching implications, influencing not just rural communities but the entire nation and its economy, for better or worse. Toxic Togetherness, in particular, reveals universal exclusion and division patterns, appearing across different sectors and contexts throughout history. By examining its broader manifestations, we can better understand its dynamics and avoid its destructive traps in agriculture.
Toxic Togetherness thrives on division, often beginning with creating "camps" within society. This process identifies one group as the enemy of "the people," seeking to protect the majority by marginalizing, eliminating, or exterminating the perceived threat. Though these examples come from varied contexts, they illustrate the universal dangers of manipulating Togetherness for harmful purposes and provide critical lessons for fostering inclusive, sustainable collaboration in rural communities.
Examples of Toxic Togetherness:
Note: These examples are not intended to offend but to demonstrate how the principle applies broadly, from societal to individual relationships.
Rwanda (Before the 1994 Genocide): Propaganda narratives divided society into "us" versus "them," culminating in one million deaths within 100 days during the genocide.
Nazi Germany (1933–1945): Weaponized Togetherness unified the majority under a mission-driven goal of racial superiority. This ideology fueled the Holocaust, resulting in the systematic murder of six million Jews, and contributed to World War II, which caused over 70 million deaths worldwide.
North Korea (1948–present): Enforced Togetherness sustains unity through fear, oppression, and propaganda, stifling individuality, creativity, and progress. These dynamics perpetuate ongoing poverty and the stagnation of the entire nation.
Soviet Kolkhoz (1929–1991): Forced collectivization aimed at economic unity destroyed trust, eroded productivity and caused widespread poverty, famine, and suffering.
McCarthyism, USA (late 1940s–1950s): Fear of communism fostered a toxic sense of unity based on exclusion and suspicion. During this period, thousands of Americans were accused of being communist sympathizers, often without evidence. The resulting fear and persecution led to widespread mistrust, stifled creativity and free speech, and deeply divided American society.
China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962): Forced collectivization and state-controlled agricultural policies sought to unify efforts under national production targets. Instead, they led to widespread inefficiency, loss of individual initiative, and one of the deadliest famines in history, causing tens of millions of deaths.
Marriage vs. Rape: A marriage represents Positive Togetherness, where two people voluntarily unite for a shared purpose, fostering mutual prosperity. In contrast, rape epitomizes Toxic Togetherness, driven by force and coercion, leading to harm and destruction.
These examples underscore how Togetherness, when exploited for division or coercion, leads to systemic breakdowns that harm both individuals and communities. In agriculture, we must recognize and avoid similar pitfalls by ensuring Togetherness is rooted in inclusion, trust, and shared mission-oriented goals. Drawing these lessons from history allows us to apply them thoughtfully to the context of rural development, ensuring that efforts to organize farmers avoid the mistakes of forced collectivization or exclusionary practices.
Positive Togetherness
Positive Togetherness builds bridges, breaks down walls, and fosters inclusion and collaboration. It inspires courage to face challenges collectively, creating and sharing the resulting prosperity. This form of unity is holistic, welcoming, and inclusive, extending across the entire value chain while avoiding divisive blame. It thrives on free will and shared values rather than fear or coercion.
Examples include:
Pre-State Kibbutzim: Farmers in pre-Israel exemplified Positive Togetherness by voluntarily uniting around mission-driven goals. They established egalitarian communities, known as Kibbutzim, and reclaimed the land, laying the foundation for a thriving agricultural society.
Rwanda (Post-Genocide): Post-genocide efforts banned tribal discrimination and fostered a unified national identity, transforming "you versus me" into "us".
Leaders like Gandhi, Mandela, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: These visionary leaders harnessed the power of Togetherness to unite people across race, status, and nationality barriers. By aligning communities around mission-driven goals, they fostered social progress, inspired transformative change, and created lasting legacies of inclusion and justice.
Togetherness as a Catalyst for Prosperity
The Togetherness-Prosperity Principle provides a transformative framework for achieving prosperity by leveraging the power of collaboration and shared purpose. True prosperity transcends economics, reflecting inclusivity, cohesion, and alignment around mission-driven goals.
Communities, organizations, and nations that foster Positive Togetherness can rebuild trust, overcome systemic barriers, and achieve sustainable progress. Conversely, isolation and division—exemplified by smallholders or Toxic Togetherness—act as barriers to development.
The journey from poverty to prosperity begins by building bridges, not walls. Togetherness empowers societies to unlock their potential, foster innovation, and ensure sustainable growth for future generations.
Own That Principle
Did you notice that the number of examples I gave for Toxic Togetherness was double that for Positive Togetherness? Why did I do that? Because the Togetherness-Prosperity Principle is powerful, and when misused, it can lead organizations, companies, communities, and even nations into disasters that serve only the egos of those driving the destructive process. You know what I mean, don't you? Yet, just as we learn from these negative examples, we can also draw inspiration from the grand leaders I mentioned above and find hope in the power of Positive Togetherness.
Looking back, can you identify positive and negative processes that have affected you or your family and that align with the Togetherness-Prosperity Principle? If so, I invite you to share your story. Together, we can better understand how to foster prosperity and avoid the traps of toxic unity. I also encourage you to reflect on how you can use this principle to positively impact the lives you touch today and how that impact can grow even more.
Takeaway Messages
» Togetherness: Prosperity thrives on voluntary and equitable collaboration.
» Shared Goals: Clear, shared goals pave the way for transformative, positive change.
» Adaptable Goals: Evolving goals ensure cohesion and support long-term success.
» Transparent Structures: Models like cooperatives amplify both individual and collective impact.
» While collaboration fosters shared prosperity, isolated individual efforts (e.g., smallholders) perpetuate poverty.
Here are ways we can work together to help your agro sector and rural communities step forward and shift from poverty into ongoing prosperity:
* Nova Kibbutz and consultancy on rural communities' models.
* Local & National programs related to agro-produce export models - Dream Valley global vertical value and supply chain business model and concept connects (a) input suppliers with farmers in developing economies and (b) those farmers with consumers in premium markets.
* Crop protection: Biofeed, an eco-friendly zero-spray control technology and protocol.
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"Mental and Economic Freedom Are Interconnected."
See you soon,
Nimrod
Dr. Nimrod Israely is the CEO and Founder of Dream Valley and Biofeed companies and the Chairman and Co-founder of the IBMA conference. +972-54-2523425 (WhatsApp), or email nisraely@biofeed.co.il
P.S.
If you missed it, here is a link to last week's blog, “Why Is Ongoing Expert Support Mandatory for a Prosperous Agro Sector?".
P.P.S.
Dream Valley is a field-proven disruptive business model based on the successful Israeli Model.
*This article addresses general phenomena. The mention of a country/continent is used for illustration purposes only.
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