Perhaps the term "failure" is relative (in fact it must be as failure
can only be determined relative to success). In some peoples estimation
I may be a failure as a university lecturer because I wear casual
clothes, my children go to state run schools, I drive an old car, live
in a small house in a "working class" area and I do not have a PhD or a
big research team - but I an quite happy with all this as I do not see
any of it relevant to my teaching and interests (except the research
effort, which I am working on).

I was a bit disappointed recently when I went around our campus farm and
saw that it was a bit run down as far as fences and weeds (all that my
engineering background could really assess) but it still produces an
income. There is a desire to lift the status of our campus farm to best
practice, which should remedy the above deficiencies.

I expect Prof. F. Sonaiya's "very bad state due to lack of funds and bad
management." may be a bit worse than ours but the farm is still
producing, so it is not a complete failure (it could give better
lessons/examples to the students though if it was in better condition -
but as Jacky said even failures can give valuable lessons).

Paul Harris