My Journey: From the Soil of Rural Pakistan to a New Kind of Farming

Started in the Dirt, Not the Desk

Hi

I am Saqib Ali Ateel.

It is my personal as well as professional story...

Before I ever crack open a policy paper or storm the halls of Harvard, I was in the fields. I mean actual fields. Rural Pakistan. Blazing sun, raw earth, and the kind of labor that makes your spine twitch just remembering it. That’s where the spark ignites.

Simple truth: if the soil’s wrecked, everything else unravels—our food, our health, our lives.

The old-school way of farming—your grandparents’ style—syncs with nature, not steamrolls it. Somewhere along the line, someone sells us the lie that “progress” comes in pesticide bottles and fertilizer bags, with hazard signs and price tags. So we go along, suffocating the soil, shackling farmers in debt, and leaving people suspicious about whether their food is actually, well, food.

I busted that myth...

That’s why I launched PrefOrganic. It’s not just an app or a glossy campaign. It emerges from a dirt-to-desk loop I've been circling for years. A method that vaults me out of PowerPoints and into action. A platform where people relearn how to thrive with the land, not trample it.

Fixing the soil?

It reboots more than just dinner.

Tool Time: Making Change That Sticks

Big feelings sound poetic, but they don’t dent broken systems. You need tools. Precision tools. Ones that don’t just clang—they carve.

So I hit the books. Hard. I sniff out the rot, craft policies that sprint, and translate science into something that sticks.

Earning a Master’s in Public Management from NUS and Harvard sharpens my ability to slice through bureaucratic sludge. Law sculpts real rules. Mass Comms punches my voice through—whether I’m talking to a maize grower in Vehari or a cabinet minister in Islamabad.

Now I dive into a PhD in Agriculture Business & Marketing. I chase down cold, hard proof that farmers rake in profit and protect the planet.

Spoiler: they do both.

 The degrees?

They don’t sit on shelves. They strap onto my tool belt.

The mission?

Build an agriculture system in Pakistan that cuts sharper, runs cleaner, and pays its own bills.

Field Test: Cotton, Chaos, and a Comeback

Now this is where the rubber meets the field: South Punjab’s cotton belt.

When I take over as Secretary of Agriculture, cotton hemorrhages. Yields plummet to 15.8 maunds per acre. Farmers drown in debt, drench crops in chemicals, and watch the pests laugh back.

Spirits fry.

Tempers flare.

The standard playbook?

Spray harder, spray louder.

I rip that up.

Instead, I partner with top agriculture universities in Punjab and flip the script—Integrated Pest Management.

Translation: let nature do the heavy lifting and ditch the chemical carpet-bombing.

Here’s what we roll out:

1. Hold the Sprays: No synthetic stuff for 60 days. Good bugs swarm in.

2. Plant-Powered Protection: Replace chemical cocktails with neem, kaur tumba, and aak extracts. Safer, smarter—and farmers save billions of rupees.

3. Precision Spraying: Chemicals don’t get banned. They get demoted—timed, and targeted to protect helpful insects.

What happens?

Boom—immediate results. Independent surveys back it. Fields bounce back. Farmers exhale. It doesn’t just rescue cotton. It rebuilds trust: in the system, the process, and themselves.

Beyond Cotton: Scaling Up the Movement

Cotton opens the door. Then we storm into mangoes and rice. Same playbook, same result—more food, less poison.

People take notice. WWF-Pak prints thousands of our IPM manuals. Not for shelf space—for farmers’ hands.

Then comes global chatter. FAO and CABI invites me to speak on organic farming and Antimicrobial resistance (AMR). That snowballs into editing a Springer book on Climate Change and Mango Production.

That’s how real this gets.

Bottom line: this isn’t lab luck.

This is field-tested grit.

PrefOrganic: Where It All Comes Together

Everything I do—from blistered palms in the fields to policy duels in city offices—funnels into this.

To forge a real organic food system in Pakistan. Certified. Enforced. Trusted.

IPM shows we can yank ourselves off the chemical I.V. Now comes the rest: lab results and real time stories that shield honest farmers and rebuild faith in the tomatoes on their plates.

That’s why PrefOrganic exists. It threads together every part of me:

As an activist, it's my bullhorn—to roar for living soil and real nourishment.

As a scholar, it’s my lab—to break down science into street-level wisdom.

As a policymaker, it’s my lever—to jam through laws that put people and planet first.

PrefOrganic doesn’t act like a startup. It mirrors the blueprint of my life.

And I hand you an invite—whether you grow the food, buy it, or just want to feed your kids something you recognize—to help rewire the link between our soil and our survival.

Let’s blaze this trail together.

For food that’s alive.

For land that breathes.

For a future we believe in right now.

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