“We took a chance and tried something different,” explains Rajan, a farmer from the small tribal village of Sadivayal in Tamil Nadu. “The result was selling a new crop for double the price of anything we had grown before. Not only had that but the seeds we planted given us a double yield.”
Towards the end of 2016, a group of marginal farmers from Sadivayal came together as a team and began to earn money from their crops after five years of failure. First, the lack of rainfall had affected growth. Next came the problem of wild boar and elephants destroying the fields. Most of the farmers were forced to become day labourers in the nearby forest just to get enough money to feed their families. Of course, to hear that the farmers overcame such difficulties is a great inspiration, but there is something even more interesting about this story. These farmers decided to grow organic rice. It was the first time anyone in their village had even tried for decades since such practices had been abandoned for the use of pesticides and fertilizers.
“Honestly, we didn’t have a clue about organic farming,” says Rangaswami, another local farmer. “We had no advice on how that system worked nor did we know about the damage pesticides and fertilizers are causing to the soil. We needed someone to tell us.”
So how did success finally come?
The first step had nothing to do with the agricultural practices themselves, and everything to do with how these farmers came together to save each other from complete poverty. The struggles in the livelihood of agriculture are a common story across India since 70% of our country’s poor—770 million people—live there. And most of our farmers, again 70% of them, are marginal and working with less than one hectare of land.
Meanwhile, the tragedy of farmer suicides continues to rise. Newly released data from the National Crime Record Bureau in January 2017 reported an increase of 42%. There were 5,650 suicides by farmers and cultivators in 2014. In 2015, 8,007 of them ended their lives.
On the other side of the coin, India’s food security depends on our farmers because, with our growing population, demand becomes higher and higher each day. Our farmers provide us with all the grains, fruits, vegetables and milk we need.
Finally, comes the most crucial problem—we are losing our farmable land. The chemical practices of the past decades in both agriculture and industry have wreaked havoc on the environment. The soil is losing its microbes and organic matter. Without a chance to rejuvenate, there is actually no source for the nutrients plants need.
“The bigger problem is that the soil is losing fertility due to pollution, global warming and the additional demands placed upon the earth due to the exploding population,” says Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, commonly known as Amma, the head of MA Math. “Nowadays, humans are trying to exploit nature. This is why there are floods, droughts and earthquakes, and everything is being destroyed.”
In short, if things don’t change, the day will arrive when nothing will grow. In India, the amount of wasteland is quickly rising. According to our ministry of environment, fertile land is losing water bodies, vegetation and wildlife. Seventy per cent is already dry and another 32% is on its way to becoming desert. The Modi government has decided to join the global movement of becoming land degradation neutral by 2030. A big task, indeed.
However, one of the key goals of Amrita SeRVe, the self-reliant village project with MA Math, is to work with India’s farmers by taking small steps. The vision is to blend traditional agricultural methods with new technologies that are eco-friendly.
“The Amrita SeRVe and Amrita University people came and held a meeting instructing us how to proceed with organic farming,” explains Rangaswami. “They suggested that we first form a farmers’ club and gather money from each member to open a bank account of Rs 9000. After that, the plan was to contribute Rs 2000 each to start the organic farm project.”
Another part of Amrita SeRVe’s work in Sadivayal was to use the convergence method to help the farmers gain access to government schemes and other support mechanisms. This means that Amrita SeRVe coordinated connections with all possibilities so that the farmers themselves would not have to take on the stress of application processes.
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